Browse Teaching
Explore commonly taught topics along with related primary sources, discussion questions, teaching strategies, and annotated bibliographies.
Short Teaching Module: Science, Technology, and the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex during the Cold War
For decades, the relationship between science and the U.S. government during the early Cold War years was understood largely as a story of a militaristic state persecuting and co-opting scientists and scientific institutions to serve national security interests.
Short Teaching Module: Borderland Migration and Communities in Twentieth-Century West Africa
Cross-border mobility has created borderland cultures and led to the development of vibrant communities that in some cases have stretched across several states. One example of this is West Africa, where during the colonial period, people continued to move between different colonies, ignoring the limits that colonial powers sought to put on their mobility.
Short Teaching Module: Building Materials as an Indicator of Transnational Encounters in Malaysia
Building materials are an important component of construction. The characteristics of each material determine the properties of a structure that can be built. Building styles in different parts of the world are markedly different from one another due to various factors such as climate and humidity, not to mention the availability and convenience of each material.
Long Teaching Module: Caribbean Seafaring in the Archaic Age (2000-400 BC)
There have been many different approaches to studying seafaring in the past. We can look at the evidence of voyages in books written by prominent explorers or follow the maps maintained by successful prominent trading companies. We can use the objects left behind, showing who traveled where, when, and across what expanses of sea.
Short Teaching Module: Portraying Women Workers: Beyond Norma Rae
Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. and insular government offices and textile and garment businesses incorporated women of the New South and Puerto Rico into manufacturing in distinct yet interrelated ways. Despite these complexities, Crystal Lee Sutton, a mill hand and union member in North Carolina, became the focus of media attention in the early 1970s.
Short Teaching Module: Indian Immigrants and U.S. Citizenship in an Imperial Context
Scholars often study citizenship and denaturalization in national frameworks. The history of legal status and its attendant politics and bureaucratic processes in the United States has long been tied to imperial constellations however.
Short Teaching Module: Connecting the French Empire
For a long time, historians tended to study colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries one colony at a time, or through the relationship of one colony to its metropole. Increasingly, though, historians are interested in studying global empires as interconnected systems that shaped globalization by channeling the flow (or lack thereof) of people, goods, and ideas through imperial pathways.
Source Collection: Pan-Africanism, Anticolonialism and Addressing the Problem of the Global Color Line in the 20th Century
At the turn of the 20th century, a growing number of Black intellectuals and activists across the Atlantic world no longer saw institutionalized racial inequality, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy as problems confined to the borders of individual nations. Rather, they increasingly viewed the “color line” as a power dynamic that operated globally and transcended national borders.
Short Teaching Unit: The Omani Empire and the Center of the Emerging Global Economy, 1500-1850
This essay pushes back against European-dominated narratives of world history to suggest that the Omani Empire was a crucial space for the emergence of our present-day system of global capitalism. By 1850, the Omani Empire was a marketspace with its capital in Zanzibar, stretching from there north to the Persian Gulf.
Short Teaching Module: Music and Decolonization in the Black Atlantic
The decades after World War II witnessed rapid decolonization of European empires and a dramatic increase in independence movements for colonized peoples.
Social Capital in World History: Lyon and Pittsburgh as Examples
Lyon, France, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are connected by the thread of social capital, or people power. This essay situates social capital as an non-financial asset possessed by people who have little wealth, but who use a variety of strategies to facilitate community improvements.
Short Teaching Module: Teaching the Intersection of Gender and Race through Colonial Medical Texts
This module focuses on medical texts written by British doctors working in India and their gendered and racial categorization of ailments and diseases. A detailed analysis of medical texts from the nineteenth century shows the ways in which medical practitioners in Colonial India dedicated much of their time to treating female issues such as menstrual cramps, hysteria, and labor pains.
Short Teaching Module: Translation and a World History of the Qing Empire
In 1953, L. P. Hartley famously wrote: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." His observation is particularly relevant for world historians, who have to engage in translation projects to bridge the distance between our world and the worlds of our historical actors.
Short Teaching Module: Transnational Connections and the Long Cold War in Nicaragua
A strength of teaching from a transnational perspective is that it forces us to reorient our viewpoint and consider new approaches to our subjects. This is particularly true when looking at modern Latin American history.
Short Teaching Module: Global Microhistory and the Nineteenth-Century Omani Empire
In their primer essay, Jessica Hanser and Adam Clulow note how scholars of global microhistory explore relationships between macro and micro, deep structures and contingency, and big state actors and minor players.
Short Teaching Module: Spatial Histories of Law, Race and Empire
Law is not only to be found in doctrine and documents, but also in structures and materials, in buildings and in cloth, in paintings and in photos. World historians use visual and material evidence to examine colonial courtrooms and other imperial legal spaces and to address broader questions of law, race and empire.
Short Teaching Module: Agricultural Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth Century
Knowledge knows no national boundaries. Therefore, the history of knowledge also has to move beyond national boundaries to understand how knowledge was produced, moved, and adapted. Telling such a history without the limitations of national boundaries is challenging.
Long Teaching Module: Border Changes of the Soviet Union
Border changes have been a central part of 20th century European history. This lesson will examine a few key maps and documents that explore the creation, expansion, and dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union arose from the First World War, was expanded by the Second World War, and was destroyed by the Cold War.
Short Teaching Module: Nineteenth-Century American Trade on Zanzibar
Although American merchants often fade from historical narratives after the eighteenth century, they remained influential actors in the United States and abroad. As western expansion and industrialization reshaped the nation’s economy, American traders dispatched voyages around the world in search of new opportunities.
Short Teaching Module: Transnational Efforts at Controlling Yellow Fever
Early twentieth century microbiologists thought of their work as inherently transnational, and world historians have begun to do the same. The West African yellow fever epidemic of 1927-28 offers an exemplary opportunity to study how French scientists and African politicians used imperial and international networks to reimagine colonial public health policies.