In this curriculum unit, students will learn about the origins of four major types of British surnames. They will consult lists to discover the meanings of specific names and later demonstrate their knowledge of surnames through various group activities. They will then compare the origins of British to certain types of non-British surnames. In a final activity, the students will research the origins and meanings of their own family names.

Set in the Dominican Republic during the rule of Rafael Trujillo, In the Time of the Butterflies fictionalizes historical figures in order to dramatize the Dominican people's heroic efforts to overthrow this dictator's brutal regime. In the following activities, students will examine the actions of the characters in the novel and discuss an all encompassing definition for courage.

This is a remixed version of World History: Culture, States, and Societies to 1500 by Berger, et al. It's a textbook suitable for the World History survey. I have reorganized the text in order to provide a more globally integrated narrative. Each chapter invites students to compare and contrast developments across regions during a period of time.

This version of the book retains the text of the original but with updated references to chapters. I verified and, if necessary, updated links to online resources. In cases where the exact illustration used in the original version was not available, I have substituted equivalent ones. I also created and edited segues and other “connective tissue” as well to (hopefully) ensure that this version of the book reads as smoothly as the original.

Additional changes include:

More concise lists of “key terms” in each chapter
Expanded coverage of the Persian Empire
Expanded coverage of the end of the Yuan Dynasty
Added brief overview of the early Ming Dynasty including the voyages of Zheng He
Work on this adaption was generously sponsored by a grant from Michigan Colleges Online, a project of the Michigan Community College Association.

This semester, we will read writing about travel and place from Columbus’s Diario through the present. Travel writing has some special features that will shape both the content and the work for this subject: reflecting the point of view, narrative choices, and style of individuals, it also responds to the pressures of a real world only marginally under their control. Whether the traveler is a curious tourist, the leader of a national expedition, or a starving, half-naked survivor, the encounter with place shapes what travel writing can be. Accordingly, we will pay attention not only to narrative texts but to maps, objects, archives, and facts of various kinds.
Our materials are organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, the Arctic and Antarctic. The historical scope of these readings will allow us to know something not only about the experiences and writing strategies of individual travelers, but about the progressive integration of these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Whether we are looking at the production of an Inuit film for global audiences, or the mapping of a route across the North American continent by water, these materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also participate in shaping the world and what it means to us.
Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Caryl Philips, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, William Least Heat Moon, Louise Erdrich, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
Expeditions will include those of Lewis and Clark (North America), Henry Morton Stanley (Africa), Ernest Shackleton and Robert F. Scott (Antarctica).