This course covers the history of the human species from its origins on the African continent up to the new interconnections of human populations initiated by the Voyages of Discovery around the year 1500. "Global" implies history at its most encompassing, but we will meet the challenge of these vast temporal and geographical expanses of history by taking a thematic approach. We will look at the evidence for human evolution and the development of particular cultural features that moved Homo sapiens beyond the sociability exhibited by other primates to the intensely complex modes of language, food production, habitation, and travel that have helped make humans the only truly global species. In this way, we can examine human societies of all types, in both the Old World and the New, whether they remained hunter-gatherers or organized into empires, including the largest land empire in human history, that of the Mongols in the 13 th century. The goals of the course are to develop a sense of the deep roots of modern culture: the roles of migration and settlement, trade and empire, language and religion, which have acted to unite (and divide) peoples for the last hundred millennia. You will be asked to do small individual and group investigations into such questions as the cultivation of certain food products, textile production, writing and other modes of communication, the histories of certain world cities. Most importantly, you will learn how to think historically and appreciate the value of doing so: you will come to understand how we can understand the surface landscape of present-day society by looking deep into its historical roots.
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Books discussed and reviewed: David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of theModern World, 1650- 1900
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This is the draft syllabus I have created for a new online course which will be run in Summer 2017. In addition to the main syllabus, I have included the detailed schedule for Week 5, which lays out the work we will be doing teaching the Black Death. This draws on the latest work in the field and is meant to introduce K-12 teachers to a new framework for teaching the history of the world's worst pandemic. This course is meant to address the pedagogical needs of teachers of world/global history at all levels, K-16. The history of all of humankind for some 200,000 years is a topic beyond the grasp of any single historian. World/global history is not a field you will have already mastered before you begin to teach it. World/global history is a field you begin to master while you're teaching it. What we aim to master now is competence with historical narratives that help tell the story of humans in the pre-1500 world—and, indeed, up to the present day. Since participants in this course may likely be teaching the " After 1500 " sequence as well, we will focus on topics that can be carried through to the latter side of that divide: the domestication of certain plants and animals; the development of long-distance trade in certain key natural commodities and manufactured goods; the practices of slavery; the development of major cities; and the history of disease. The two intense case studies we will do in Weeks 4 and 5 of the course—on the Mongol Empire and on the Black Death—are staples of all world/global history courses. In Weeks 2 and 3, we will also explore topics that allow better integration of narratives from the Americas and Africa. Since we are all becoming lifelong learners now, this course places emphasis on new technologies, research methods, and digital archiving initiatives that are producing hitherto unsuspected knowledge about the deep past.
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