At Auburn University in the 1960s and 1970s, Professor O. Turner Ivey (19061988) pioneered an alternative approach to teaching history that made the subject not only much easier to understand, but also more dynamic and holistic so that students are intrigued with what happened in the past. Ivey's framework, known as "The Cultural Approach to History," helps students understand how the different spheres or "categories" of life and civilization merge into a more complete picture of the past than usually provided by other approaches. Beginning with the premise that the study of history begins by identifying a particular time in a particular geographic space, the overarching categories that Professor Ivey identified are: politics, religion, aesthetics, intellectual developments, social activities, and the economics of a society or civilization. Professor Ivey's approach also provides a powerful systematic way to understand how the categories often intersect and overlap.