“This is not a course on the state of the contemporary world,” I tell my students on day one in Roots of Contemporary Issues (RCI), a 100-level, one-semester course required of all students entering Washington State University. The course topic may not be the contemporary world, but it pushes students to understand specific events and processes unfolding all around them by encouraging close examination of the historical origins of change and cultivating intellectual skills useful to a range of disciplines and career pursuits.

Read more of Clif Stratton’s blog post at Process: A Blog for American History, “Teaching The Past Through the Lens of the Present.”