What are Humanities?

Last class the teachers asked us what does the term Humanities mean. Our class falls under the Humanities GER and I really pondered on what that meant. I think a humanities course studies topics like language, religion, history, and other disciplines and how people in earlier ages or created the world they lived in, and how the world they lived in made them the people they were. And while studying the many different subjects regarding the humanities, we inevitably end up learning about more than simply past or distant cultures. We end up learning how we create the world we live in now, and how the world we live in makes us the kind of people we are. We learned earlier in the semester about the origins of the word humanity. The word humanity comes to English from the Latin humanitas, which first shows up with the writer Cicero. He used it to describe good people, that is to say “civilized” human beings. I think that Cicero used the word humanity in the context that all humans are civilized enough to practice concepts such as justice and hospitality. Isn't this what debated on throughout the whole course? When we read text such as A Letter Concerning Toleration by John Locke, we are learning about how religious toleration was perceived in the late 1600s. What's interesting to note is that Locke influenced the writers of the Declaration of Independence. John Locke wanted everyone to have the "right to life, liberty, and property" which is used in the Declaration of Independence as the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." His ideas of the social contract, in which everyone in a society is accountable to one another, and the idea of governments deriving their power from the consent of the governed were both revolutionary concepts in 1776 that made their way into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is the heart of what a humanities course is supposed to teach, about applying past writings and incorporating them into society today.