Welcome to the History Department at Seattle Pacific University!
The faculty and students of the History Department are,
first and foremost, people who remember: We study the past to:
►Remember the people who have lived before us;
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
- Thomas Carlyle
►Understand the present - how we got here...
If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
- Aristotle
►...and what it means;
History, it turns out, is fueled not by matter but by spirit.
- Gertrude Himmelfarb
►Envision alternatives for the future;
It is the soothing thing about history that it does not repeat itself.
- Gertrude Stein
►Communicate what we learn;
It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
- Samuel Butler
►Grasp both the bleakness of human struggle and the brightness of Christian hope;
Justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.
- Seamus Heaney
►. . . just as we catch glimpses of God's grace in the past;
'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.
- John Newton