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.

This approach to history, through the specific topic of the family, represents a novel method which moves from the particular to the general. Families have lived in societies; therefore in order to understand the nature of the historical family it has to be examined within its cultural context. The family is always affected by, and often affects the political, economic, and ideological system in which it resides which means that both time and place lend themselves to comparison and contrast with each other.