Pseudo-Galen: Kitab al-Diryaq (Book of Antidotes), Fronticepiece
Northern Mesopotamia, 1199 C.E.
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris (Arabe 2964, fol. 37)
Obviously there have been millions of separate events and developments, and individual actions and activities, which have together produced world history. In a single couse, let alone in a single life, it is impossible to examine even a fraction of these. It is necessary to organize them in themes and broad subjects and topics in order to begin to make sense of the global past, which is the prelude to our present. In turn, it is always important to recognize that our present will soon become someone else's past.
In this course, we will begin the process of this organization of the many pasts into an understandable past. It will be a challenging, interesting, and I hope enjoyable exercise. In the process, we will focus on careful reading and thinking about important subjects. You will have many opportunities for analytical writing. The assignments will be on this WWW syllabus. Below you will find the reading and writing schedule for this course, information about the grading system that I will use, and other information.
This course is the first semester of a year-long course on World History.
In HST 140 I include the long period before 1400 - a hundred years or so before the
first European circumnavigation of the globe. I have picked this
approximate date intentionally - so that we can examine global history without
having to consider the eventual European - "Western" - domination of the globe. In 1400, Europe was not the most advanced region of the
world - far from it. Most European cities were still recovering from
the devastation of the Black Death; two of Europe's most powerful states
were in the midst of a hundred years' long war which left both exhausted
and financially depleted. We will see together that by 1400 many areas
of the globe were in cultural and economic contact with each other and that
there were important interconnections long before the last millenium in many
of the important realms of human experience: economics, technology,
politics, religion, and more generally culture as a whole.