He Wanted to Teach Western Civilization. So He Quit Harvard.

What It Covers

Harvard Renaissance historian James Hankins explains why he left Harvard to teach Western civilization at Hamilton School, arguing that abandoning this curriculum over the past 40 years has produced measurable cultural fragmentation. He traces democracy, rule of law, equality, and religious tolerance to specific historical origins, challenging both triumphalist and dismissive readings of the Western tradition.

Key Questions Answered

• •Why Western Civ Was Abandoned: Western civilization courses were eliminated from most American high schools and universities roughly 40 years ago, partly due to a Vietnam-era critique framing them as Cold War militarist propaganda. Hankins argues this claim is historically false but remains widely believed. Understanding this origin helps educators and advocates counter the dismissal more precisely rather than simply defending the curriculum on abstract cultural grounds.
• •Democracy's Actual Timeline: The founding fathers deliberately created a republic, not a democracy, drawing on detailed knowledge of how ancient republics collapsed. A review of the Federalist Papers reveals they cited historical works more frequently than political theory texts. Understanding this distinction — republic versus democracy — gives citizens a more accurate framework for evaluating modern governance debates and constitutional arguments about institutional design.
• •Equality's Religious Origins: Political egalitarianism did not originate with Rousseau or Marx. The Pentateuch mandated income redistribution at ten- and fifty-year intervals, premised on the idea that all property belongs to God. Seventeenth-century radical Christian movements, particularly Socinians, transferred spiritual equality into political theory. Recognizing this lineage clarifies why secular liberal values cannot be fully understood without engaging their Judeo-Christian intellectual foundations.
• •Christianity's Growth Mechanism: Christianity's rapid expansion in the late third century was driven by social service provision during systemic Roman collapse — currency failure, plague, and political instability averaging a new emperor every few years. Christians visibly cared for the sick during epidemics, attracting converts through demonstrated behavior rather than doctrine alone. Sociological research suggests minority groups exceeding roughly 5% of a population become effectively impossible for states to suppress or eliminate.
• •How Islam Spread: Early Islamic expansion was military, leveraging Arab forces trained as Roman and Persian mercenaries after those empires exhausted each other in prolonged seventh-century warfare. Mass conversion came later through structural coercion — higher taxes, legal disadvantages, and exclusion from office for non-Muslims — rather than direct force. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Islamic expansion shifted toward missionary-led conversion, mirroring the earlier Christian model of missionaries preceding state consolidation.
• •Video Games as Curriculum: The strategy game Civilization now reaches more Americans with Western history content than formal education does. A University of Chicago researcher found over 800,000 players engaged in a single online discussion about historical periodization. The game encodes a progressive modernization bias — players score by overcoming the past, treating pre-Enlightenment periods as obstacles. Educators designing Western civ curricula should treat this framing as a competing pedagogical force requiring direct engagement.