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Ancient (before 500 CE)

Teaching

Short Teaching Module: Constantine and Christianity

Christianity is based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (ca. 3 B.C.E.–29 C.E.), a Jewish religious thinker who according to Christian Scripture lived in Judaea, a province of the Roman Empire.

Front and back of aged coins. One side has a side profile of a person and the other has an insignia.
Source

Coin minted by Constantine

Constantine erected large monuments to his rule, most notably the Arch of Constantine in Rome, but he also portrayed his religious sentiments and celebrated his reign in smaller ways, through coins and portraits.

document icon
Source

Selections from Eusebius, Life of Constantine

The most important record that remains of Constantine’s life is a biography written shortly after his death by the historian and Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 263–339 ?), a close adviser to Constantine.

Source

Constantinian Edicts

Many of the records that survive from Constantine’s reign are official edicts and proclamations, written on papyrus and parchment.

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.