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Early Modern (1450 CE - 1800 CE)

Bronze monument of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Monument Avenue, Richmond, Virginia
Teaching

Short Teaching Module: Controversial Historical Monuments

I use images of three historical statues that triggered controversy beginning in the 2010s to teach about the concept of contested historical memory and to have students consider parallels and differences among public history controversies in different parts of the world.

Removal of Christopher Columbus statue near the Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Source

Christopher Columbus monument removal, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The Monument to Christopher Columbus (1451?-1506), located in a plaza in front of the Casa Rosada government palace, was inaugurated in 1921.

Christopher Columbus statue near the Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Source

Christopher Columbus monument, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The Monument to Christopher Columbus (1451?-1506), located in a plaza in front of the Casa Rosada government palace, was inaugurated in 1921.

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.

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Source

Excerpt from letter by Lady Mary Wortley

Travel writing by women can reveal a number of themes in world history. One useful example are the letters written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1786) who worked as a missionary in Turkey.

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.