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Global

Methods

Analyzing Music

Everywhere you go, there it is.

Map of the world with colors indicating the level of judicial independence in each state's constitution.
Methods

Primer: Comparative History

Comparison is used in many different ways in world history, both implicitly and explicitly.

Geologic clock with events and time periods noting the formation of earth and development of life.
Methods

Primer: Big History

Big History is an approach to world history that takes as its subject the story of the whole of the Universe, from its creation, 13.8 billion years ago, in the Big Bang.

Drawing of two men working to create a large timeline
Source

Salisbury Crags

Before about 1800, most people in the Christian world assumed that the earth was just a few thousand years old. But growing interest in fossils and strange geological formations made some people think the earth must actually be much older.

Geologic clock with events and time periods noting the formation of earth and development of life.
Source

History of the Earth in a Cycle

Our sense of time has been extended into the deep past in the last two centuries or so, and particularly since the 1950s, when Willard Libby showed that you could use the breakdown of radioactive molecules such as Carbon-14 to date events thousands of years before there were any written documents

image of gender roles being portrayed
Methods

Primer: Gender in World History

Gender history developed in the 1980s out of women’s history, when historians familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men.

Stellar diagram features a drawing of a ship surrounded by Chinese characters
Methods

Primer: Oceans

Oceans, which cover approximately 70 percent of the earth’s surface, have played a crucial role in shaping human history. Using oceans and seas as a unit for analysis is, however, a relatively new framework for historical analysis.

Teaching

Short Teaching Module: European Maps of the Early Modern World

I use images of three historical maps for topics on colonial exploration and for interpreting historical evidence in undergraduate courses on history and historical methodology. I have several aims in using the maps.

Source

From John Bartholomew, Literary and historical atlas of America

This unusual map appeared in a 1911 atlas of America by John George Bartholomew, a prestigious Scottish cartographer and geographer. In this map Bartholomew dramatized the provincialism of European cartography three centuries earlier.

Source

Cantino planisphere

The famous Cantino planisphere was made in 1502 by an anonymous Portuguese official at the request of Alberto Cantino, an Italian agent in Lisbon of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.