During the past fifty years, most students at Rhodes College (formerly Southwestern at Memphis) have taken what has come to be known as the Search course: a two-year, twelve-hour interdisciplinary study of the ideas, beliefs, and historical developments that have shaped Western civilization over the past 5,000 years. The course grew out of developments in the humanities in the 1940s and has continued to address feminism, postmodernism, educational technology, and other new developments in that intellectually vibrant field ever since.