This seminar takes you on a voyage into the past. Like many of the explorers you will meet along the way, you will explore the history of the modern world. You will learn about the past you will also learn about how to think about the past – to consider models and concepts for explaining the cycles of integration and disintegration, like empire and free trade, religious conversion and global governance. The aim of this course is to understand the forces that pull the parts together as well as those that drive them apart.
Course themes include migration and statelessness, economic integration, warfare and conflict, the transformation of the ecological balance, and cultural responses and innovations. To grapple with these themes, we explore first-hand perspectives of historical actors through a collection of texts and images. And because learning global history is much more exciting in a global context, you will join teams from different universities all over the world, including from the University of Cambridge’s Global History Lab.
In this global history course, you will learn not just by reading excerpts from the textbook, watching lectures and engaging in class discussions. The core of this course is a series of weekly lab assignments in which you will work in teams to use historical knowledge from the course to solve problems and develop new connections and interpretations of primary sources. You will then discuss your results across teams and themes.
This class consists of online lectures, in class group work to solve challenges and questions based on primary source problem sets, textbook reading, and class discussions. The course will run from October until Christmas break only and will give you the option to write a final paper (due date March 31st).
If you are interested in taking this course, please email the course tutor Alejandro Pascual Iranzo alejandro.iranzo(at)uni-potsdam.de so we can get you signed up to the online learning platform for this course.
Worlds Together, Worlds Apart by Robert Tignor et al. Norton and Company, 2017.
In accordance with your Studienordnung.
