The term humanities refers to the study of human intellectual and artistic creativity and the record of human experience as seen in the arts and letters. The Humanities major is, therefore, an interdisciplinary major drawing from literature, foreign languages, history, philosophy, visual art, and music, and a discipline in its own right with a methodology for the study of cultural and intellectual history and, to a lesser extent, aesthetics. The Humanities undergraduate curriculum, like single-discipline programs, emphasizes the development of skills in reasoning, critical thinking, language, writing, and library use. But the program's interdisciplinary curriculum serves students who seek more latitude than single-discipline programs offer in developing a broad and full program in the liberal arts that is not confined to one art form or national tradition. Primarily, but by no means exclusively, oriented to European, American, and Pan-American cultures, the program is founded on the assumption that an adequate understanding of the geographical West's intellectual and cultural developments, as well as its relationship with other World cultures, requires engagement with all forms of literary and artistic production. Moreover, the curriculum approaches questions of human values and expression important to all cultures—the nature of the beautiful, the meaning of human existence, the search for the divine, the nature of historical epochs, etc.—through comparative studies.