Modern (1800 CE - 1950 CE)
Primer: Comparative History
Comparison is used in many different ways in world history, both implicitly and explicitly.
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.
Excerpt from Travels in Africa
Imperialism is one of the most pertinent topics in relation to travel and exploration. By the end of the 19th century, the spread of European imperialism had made many areas of the world “safe” for women travelers.
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.
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
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.
Enslaved Archive
The site also contains narratives and photographs of twelve slave interviews conducted as a part of the Federal Writers Project in 1937.
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.
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.
Primer: Transcultural History
Broadly, transcultural histories include those historical contexts and processes brought about by circulation of people, objects, and knowledge through travel, trade, migration, or globalization.