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a brief introduction to the course, including:

What is World History?
course-level questions
Student Learning Outcomes
How the course is organized (weekly modules)
Who we are

In Module 1.1 you were introduced to one of the idea that History, as a discipline, relies heavily on written records. In Module 1.2, you got to see how our understanding of past societies with accessible written records differs from our understanding of past peoples whose voices we cannot hear through their own writing. This creates one challenge in World History, since it means certain historical actors get to speak for themselves for thousands of years, while some others don't enter the historical record via their own voices until the mid-1900s. That is why this course includes an unusually large proportion of resources from archaeology.

A second issue is this: if World History is the history of our growing interactions and interconnections across the globe, how do we deal with the fact that parts of the world were largely or completely isolated from each other for thousands of years? In the earlier parts of World History - up until the 1400s - the tendency is to focus on settled populations in the corridor stretching from the Mediterranean region across to modern China, while largely excluding Southeast Asia, Oceania, much of Africa south of the Sahara, and all of the Americas.

This is partly because we lack accessible written records for many of these places, but it also reinforces a sense that people in the Americas, parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania were frozen in time until they had to respond to the arrival of merchants and conquerors from societies in that China --> Mediterranean corridor.

At the start of each week, this course will open to the first page of the week's module. You can make your way through the activities for the week by clicking NEXT when you finish with each page.

Click NEXT to continue the introduction.