Six Themes of History
1. Innovation Civilization and Cultural Diffusion: Humans share ideas and
inventions. We are continually touching and changing each others lives.
Once new ideas and innovations are let loose there is not getting them
back and there are often unexpected consequences that change people’s
daily lives. A good example is The Internet and the Guttenberg Press.
These have each, in one giant step, changed the balance of power by
making information available to the masses,
2. Human Environment Interaction: Much of how history happened and
why it happened as it did can be explained by looking at how humans
used the land for battles, settlements, etc. We also have to look at
how humans have tried to overcome nature and adapt to it.
3. Values, Beliefs Ideas Institution: Governments, laws, holidays, health
systems, education are all examples of how people show their
thoughts and ideas in their actions. They put beliefs into plans of
action. These often start as shared ideas and over time people
work them into whole systems. The constitution is our plan of action for
how we should rule ourselves- it shows what we believe.
4. Conflict and Cooperation: Humans tend to behave in patterns that
repeat. We can learn history by looking at how people have come
together to achieve a goal (cooperation) and how often the
cooperation can leads to conflicts. Also during times of conflict
humans band together to cooperate for their causes. These opposing
forces are links into ourselves. The cooperation of women working
building in tanks in WWII helped us to win the giant conflict.
5. Comparative History: We can learn a lot about history by looking at how
people and events are the same and different across time and space.
We can find connections to the past by seeing people and events side by
side with the here and now. We can look at youth in the roaring 1920’s,
the 1960’s and the 2000’s to get a clearer look into ourselves.
6. Patterns of Social Political Interaction: Ordinary people make a
difference in history and we cannot really understand the past
completely unless we look at the culture of everyday men and women by
viewing primary sources such as song, dance, journals, photo’s etc.
Grosse Pointe Social Studies Department of Curriculum & Instruction* J. Brousseau See also
www.michiganepic.org/historythemes