All students at CCA are required to complete Cultural History as a part of their Humanities & Sciences requirement. A menu of courses will be offered each year and students may choose from these courses to fulfill the Cultural History requirement. The courses offered to complete the requirement will be historical in nature, will have a substantial non-Western component, and will introduce students to an historical awareness of cultural diversity. Objectives include an introduction to historical and critical thinking, to research methods and uses of evidence and primary sources, and to provide historical context for contemporary citizenship.

Mainstream cultures often give rise to their counter: counter-culture. This course considers the flowering of such countercultures in a variety of civilizations from Abraham and Prometheus to the present day and reflects both on what they share in common and how they remain distinctive, in particular with regard to the proliferations of "Bohemias" within modern material civilization. The course is divided into three parts. The first part considers a body of countercultures across civilizations, including the Socratic tradition in Greece, Chinese Taoism, Zen and Tantric Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and the European tradition of troubadourial love. The second part carefully studies the dissident movements in early modern European history beginning with the Enlightenment and continuing through the transcendentalists in America and the creation of "Bohemia" as an artistic social reality in Paris. The third part follows the formation of the modern and postmodern counterculture through its ramifications from the Beats and Sixties' movements to its continuing presence in global digital reality today. Texts for the course include Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House (Ken Goffman and Dan Joy, 2004), and a reader containing primary texts from the Hebrew Bible to Timothy Leary.