For this assignment, the student will select an historical issue from the first half of U.S. history (pre-history to 1877) to analyze in a paper using primary sources.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment
In this project, students will think about the meaning of history by describing and illustrating several events from their own life, finding a witness to provide another description of one of those events, and thinking about the similarities and differences between the two descriptions.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment
This presentation introduces practical considerations for new world history educators or for educators looking to incorporate world history methods into their classrooms. The presentation considers challenges educators may face such as choosing the chronology and pivot points of the course and choosing a textbook. It also offers strategies for student engagement and world history resources.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
This course provides a survey of World History through the lens of human interactions with the environment. From the evolution of Homo Sapiens through to the present we will examine the ways in which the environment shaped, and has been shaped by, world historical events. Among the major topics this course will focus on are the importance of water to the rise of sedentary societies and empires, natural disasters, disease, capitalism and the environment, the impacts of European expansion and imperialism, and climate change. This syllabus is for a six-week course taught online.
Material Type: Syllabus
In this introductory course, students will study history from a distance. It will cover tens of thousands of years of time and touch upon all the locations that humans have ever inhabited. The class will be about looking for patterns and comparisons rather than memorizing facts about names and places. By the end of the course, students should be able to identify and understand long-term and large-scale dynamics of complex change in the past. In particular, this course thinks about what happens when formerly disconnected peoples come into contact with one another. This is a class about connections (some violent and exploitative, others creative and productive), not about places in isolation. It explores the movements of people, goods, ideas, and non-human species—from microbes to mammoths—and the results of the encounters among them. This is also a course about the craft of history. In addition to learning about big structures of change in the human past, students will be practicing the skills and habits of the history major.
Material Type: Syllabus
The podcast and map gallery are intended to prompt listeners to think broadly about the kinds of documents that can be thought of as maps, and to help teachers think about how to use many kinds of maps critically in their classrooms. People all around the world create visual representations of spatial relationships and their worlds in ways that matter to them. This guide explores the diversity of these representations and the ways that spatial information travels between people, often in the context of imperialism and colonialism.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
This course is a history, from ancient to modern times, of the interactions between human societies and the natural environment, including other forms of life that inhabit the planet. This course investigates how environmental changes have affected the history of human societies, and also how human activity has transformed nature.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course examines how the natural world has shaped and been shaped by the exercise of state power over time. It considers how the pursuit of natural wealth has led people and governments to alter the world around them, and what the consequences of those alterations have been for natural and human communities. It considers places and practices as wide-ranging as silver production in sixteenth-century South America, sugar in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, opium in nineteenth-century India, cocaine in twentieth century Latin America and the United States, and petroleum in the modern Middle East. It examines how capital investment in labor and technology has reflected political regimes and how the production and circulation of natural commodities have shaped global patterns of forced and free migration. It will also examine global themes such as imperialism and colonialism, the spread of epidemic diseases, and global capitalism, among others.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course addresses the several ways in which historians approach the process of globalization, its periodizations, and origins. Out of the many possibilities, the course concentrates on the last 250 years. The historical analysis of globalization is based on the interplay between four main variables - economic globalization, hegemonic world order, political regimes, and social inequality - and their articulation into a synthetic overview.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course is an introductory survey of world history. It will offer a historical overview of major processes and interactions in the development of human society since the emergence in Africa of Homo sapiens, or modern humans, some 200,000 years ago. The course should enable students to treat world history as an approach to the past that addresses large-scale patterns as well as local narratives, and though which they can pursue their interest in various types of knowledge.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course approaches the idea and practice of World History through the lens of commodities and consumption. Over the course of the semester it will consider the last 1000 years of world history by examining the global production, circulation, and consumption of goods. In addition to its focus on the role of commodities in shaping local and global histories, the class will focus on several central themes: mass migrations of people; colonialism and imperialism; the global formation of capitalist economies and industrialization; the emergence of modern states; nationalism; and the rise of consumer societies.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course will provide an overview of the long-term historical development of the concept of human rights and how understandings of those rights have developed over the last century across the globe. It will begin with some of the earliest written evidence of human beliefs in rights and will conclude with some of the most significant human rights issues facing humanity today. As a world history course, this class will highlight the connections linking human communities and the different ways in which people have conceived of and used human rights at different times.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course studies history from a distance, covering tens of thousands of years and touching upon all the locations that humans have ever inhabited. Its focus is on finding patterns and comparisons rather than memorizing facts about names and places. By the end of the course, students should be able to identify and understand long-term and large-scale dynamics of complex change in the past. Themes of the course include connections between groups of people, the movements of people, goods, ideas and non-human species, and human exploitation of the earth and its inhabitants.
Material Type: Syllabus
This course draws on connections and makes comparisons across human history by examining humanity’s production, exchange, and consumption of commodities. Using commodities as a jumping off point, this course grapples with big questions in world history.
Material Type: Syllabus
This is a list of teaching materials and resources for teaching world history. It contains links to resources for pre-secondary, secondary, and post-secondary classrooms as well as world history syllabi.
Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy
This 16-week course approaches world history through the study of Okinawa, rethinking world history from the perspective of a small place located between empires.
Material Type: Syllabus
This resource contains directions for a project about Indigenous mapmaking. Informed by readings on Indigenous mapmaking, students are asked to re-create a map incorporating Indigenous map-making practices and methods and to write a reflection essay.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment
This course is about the history of Indigenous people in Northern Virginia. The resource contains a list of suggested readings, classroom activities, and group and individual assignments about the topic. The resource also offers a list of historical and cultural resources available throughout Northern Virginia that showcase the history of Indigenous people in the region.
Material Type: Syllabus
This presentation is about the first encounters between Europeans and Arawak peoples in the fifteenth century. It also discusses the cause and consequences of the fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires.
Material Type: Lesson
This resource contains excerpts from two primary sources, "Tecumseh's Speech to the Osages" and "Tenskwatawa’s Vision", with accompanying critical questions.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment, Primary Source
