Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

1958

Abstract

Long the political and religious center of the Hebrew people and for a brief time the chief center of Christianity, the city of Jerusalem has been chosen to represent the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western Civilization. Jerusalem is older than Rome, possibly even older than Athens (as far as habitation by the Greeks is concerned), and it will be helpful to keep that fact in mind. Solomon lived perhaps before there was a city of Rome. The kingdom of Judah fell almost a century before the Persians attacked Greece. [excerpt]

Comments

This is a part of Section I: Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem: Background of Western Civilization. The Contemporary Civilization page lists all additional sections of Ideas and Institutions of Western Man, as well as the Table of Contents for both volumes.

More About Contemporary Civilization:

From 1947 through 1969, all first-year Gettysburg College students took a two-semester course called Contemporary Civilization. The course was developed at President Henry W.A. Hanson’s request with the goal of “introducing the student to the backgrounds of contemporary social problems through the major concepts, ideals, hopes and motivations of western culture since the Middle Ages.”

Gettysburg College professors from the history, philosophy, and religion departments developed a textbook for the course. The first edition, published in 1955, was called An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization and Its Problems. A second edition, retitled Ideas and Institutions of Western Man, was published in 1958 and 1960. It is this second edition that we include here. The copy we digitized is from the Gary T. Hawbaker ’66 Collection and the marginalia are his.

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