The study of humanities is the study of the arts in the context of a specific culture and period. These classes are interdisciplinary in that they draw from multiple areas: history, visual arts, philosophy, music, literature, etc. Humanities courses examine the various art forms in the broader social and political context of their times, looking for connections across the different arts and understanding how the arts both shape and reflect the times from which they come. By taking a humanities class, students gain a perspective on their own times by seeing how life today is shaped by earlier cultures and how our arts today (like film, television, computer-generated music, etc) both build on and break with tradition.