This year I have been teaching Columbia's Contemporary Civilization (CC), which claims to be the oldest continuously offered general education course in the United States and is this year celebrating its centenary.

My students are doing a project abt the history of the course, using digitized docs from the University Archives that archivists & colleagues generously shared with us. I wanted to share pts that struck me as I was going over these docs for tmrw's class. (This thread is... long.)

As you may know, CC began life in 1919 as "War and Peace Issues," with the remit to "confront the insistent problems of the present." A historical overview of "western civilization" was always part of the course, but it also included geography, anthropology, economics, poli sci.

From 1921 to around 1965, CC was organized into two streams. At first they were required, but in 1959 they became part of a menu of gen ed courses from which students could choose, along with courses in non-western histories/cultures and modern philosophy.

CC A was a history of western civ, from the Middle Ages to WWII. It only incorporated antiquity as an *influence on* medieval thought. (Another course, Humanities (the ancestor of today's Lit Hum), instituted in the 1930s by Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, covered antiquity.

CC B was a human-sciences grab-bag.

In 1963, Columbia College hired sociologist Daniel Bell to produce a review of the Core Curriculum. His report, published in 1966, called for CC to focus more on texts than on a historical narrative, and to beef up the classical content.