Browse Teaching

Explore commonly taught topics along with related primary sources, discussion questions, teaching strategies, and annotated bibliographies.

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Source Collection: Analyzing Historic Churches in the Southwestern US

Today, the US-Mexico border stretches along the path of the Rio Grande River. However, much of the territory that now makes up the Southwestern states of the US once belonged to the Spanish Crown. Studying the historic churches of Texas helps reveal this history.

Short Teaching Module: Cultural Exchange Before Modern Times

Cultural exchange is an integral part of human history and change over time. As cultures have interacted and traded with one another, ideas and goods have spread, wars broken out, and information shared. One way this patterning can be studied historically is by tracing the spread of objects over time.

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Short Teaching Module: The Forgotten Beirut-based Companies in the Global History of Capitalism

The history of capitalism has traditionally centered Europe, but the reality is that globalization and exchange has been shaped by actors from around the world.

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Short Teaching Module: A Human History of Commodities

A commodity is a material that can be bought and sold- and it doesn't automatically have to be a raw agricultural good. Historians have focused on commodities as an insight into past economies, as well as the connections between places and goods via trade in order to better understand capitalism as well as the Columbian exchange.

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. Accounts of his life and teachings spread orally and then in writing, among men and women from all social classes.

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Short Teaching Module: The Legacy of Charlemagne through the Ages

Teaching about the interplay of history and memory is fascinating. This is particularly true in an age when students are so highly attuned to source bias through news, life experience, online and social media interactions, and of course, learning about such issues in school.

Long Teaching Module: Inca Society

In South America in the centuries before 1500, the Peruvian coast and Andean highlands were home to a series of cultures that cultivated cotton as well as food crops. Of these, the largest empire was created by the Incas, who began as a small militaristic group and conquered surrounding groups.

Short Teaching Module: Sick Men in Mid-Nineteenth-Century International Relations

I use political cartoons, newspaper stories, and excerpts from government documents to show different perspectives of a country’s power and foreign relations. I have several aims in using the texts.

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

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. I have several aims in using the images.

Short Teaching Module: Emperor Ashoka and Buddhism

Buddhism is based on the ideas of a north Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama (fl. ca. 500 B.C.E.), called the Buddha (“enlightened one”), who through meditation gained insight into what he understood were cosmic truths.

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. One is to study moments as well as change over time in Europeans’ conceptions of the world.

Image of a sixteenth-century Ottoman carpet showing a portion of the carpet's main design field that contains a triple arch design with slender double columns and a hanging lamp in the central archway

Short Teaching Module: Early Modern Islamic Carpets as Transcultural Objects

Islamic carpets were ubiquitous in the early modern period (1500-1800) in Europe as much as it was in the Islamic world. They were important objects of decor within homes, imperial palaces, and religious buildings. These decorative art objects were produced in great numbers and in a variety of designs and techniques across the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.

Short Teaching Module: Cleopatra, Gender, Beauty and Power in Egypt and Rome

Our most important early sources on Cleopatra are Roman histories, which are problematic in their reliability. Cleopatra held the status as the “enemy” for Romans, which created a bias among Roman authors. Moreover, Rome’s patriarchal culture influenced writers’ views of a powerful female ruler.

Source Collection: Diversity and Change in Greco-Roman Religious Beliefs

This module will examine four different indigenous theologies within the Greco-Roman world to understand the diversity and change that occurred within Greco-Roman religion over the centuries.

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Long Teaching Module: Trade and Religion in the Indian Ocean Network, 1100-1500

Global trade is a central aspect of the contemporary world, but trade was also important in pre-modern eras. The most important trading network in the period from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries was that across Eurasia, both land routes and sea routes, especially those across and around the Indian Ocean.

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Short Teaching Module: Christianity and Slavery in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1480s-1520s

Portuguese missionaries brought Christianity to West Africa in the late fifteenth century. They had their greatest success at conversion in the Kingdom of the Kongo, a powerful state that was never conquered in the early modern period. Here rulers created a Kongolese version of Christianity, combining local beliefs and practices with imported ones.

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Syllabus: Women and Gender in World History, 600-2000

The syllabus below lays out a 15-week course, beginning in the 6th century and continuing through the 20th century. It provides suggestions for how to use units and their various parts with your students, as some of the materials are student-facing, and others are instructor-facing.

Long Teaching Module: Women and Empire

This teaching cluster assembles an array of primary and secondary sources, as well as teaching strategies and lesson plans, for educators to effectively teach the important roles women played in colonial and imperial projects from the 17th century to the 20th century.

Long Teaching Module: The Collapse of Yugoslavia

This case study examines the rewriting and reworking of Serbian national history that accompanied the breakup of Communist Yugoslavia, especially by intellectuals, and the role such groups played in reconstructing and resurrecting a distinct narrative of Serbia’s national history.

This long teaching module includes an activity and two primary sources.

Source Collection: Songs of the Revolution

Music and singing were fundamentally important parts of the revolutionary experience. Amateurs and formally trained composers alike produced thousands of songs and hymns that celebrated or criticized the Revolution. Men and women sang during revolutionary festivals, in bars, cafés, and theaters, and they fought with others who dared to sing royalist or reactionary songs.