This is a webpage written by high school teachers for those who teach world history and want to find online content as well as technology that you can use in the classroom.
Ohio State University developed the website which includes both primary and secondary sources to help students understand the impact on family life because of the shift from a rural lifestyle to an urban lifestyle.
One of the resources is a graph showing the wages for both women and men at a textile mill in Halstead, England in 1825. The chart includes questions to help students understand the difference in the nature of work by gender.
Their software includes story maps for over a dozen titles in World History, including the Age of Exploration, the First Crusade, Ancient Greece, and its geography, the Black Death, the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, Egyptian Funerary Practices, and many more.
The story maps are engaging and include images, maps, graphs, and primary sources presented in an engaging manner like the excerpt below from the First Crusade story map.
I looked at a story map about the First Crusade and was impressed with the layout, images, maps, and primary sources which include an excerpt from Pope Urban's call to crusade and the Muslim view of the crusade pictured above.
In addition to the Black Death, I looked at ancient Greece. This story map is called "A Civilization shaped by Geography," and has lots of maps, amazing images, and even video of a drone flight over the Acropolis.
Student worksheets are included with each story map and include charts and questions for students to complete as they move through the story map.
In 1904, German colonizers in Nambia attempted to wipe out the Herero people who were fighting for their land. In order to defeat the Herero, German General von Trotha issued an extermination order.
Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children. I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at. Such are my words to the Herero people.
In a fascinating essay for Al Jazeera, Hamilton Wende, author and journalist based in Johannesburg, outlines this first holocaust in an essay called "Our Auschwitz, our Dachau."
Wende notes that some estimates say that over 65,000 Herero were killed.
In May 2021, the German government acknowledged what happened in Namibia was genocide and agreed to pay the Namibian government 1.1 billion euros in aid over the next 30 years.
Thanks to Bram Hubbel for sharing the link. I plan on adding this essay when we study 20th-century genocides.
Once you open the site, click "learn more about the manuscripts" in the lower right corner and it will take you here, where you can learn everything about the manuscripts.
I especially like this section, called "Surprising Things you can read in the Manuscripts" which reviews how the manuscripts were first threatened and some of the material they cover.
In another section, you can click on the different topics that the manuscripts cover and read a summary of what they say. Click on the history volume and you can learn the history of empire from Ghana to the Sultanate of Massina.
Learn about the Mosque of Djenne here and its importance as a library for manuscripts.
The theme of Mali Magic is the subject of another interesting section, where you will learn about the four marvelous M's- Mali, Manuscripts, Music, and Monument.
Here are two excellent clips about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a book written mostly in hieroglyphics with vignettes and stories about the deceased and their journey into the afterlife.
And here is a short activity students can complete after the videos. It includes some of the entries in the Book of the Dead and asks students to create categories for the entries.
One of the clips comes from TedEd.
The second clip comes from the World History Encyclopedia.
Dalrymple says the first season will focus on India. "This week," he notes, " is the 75th anniversary of Indian Independence, so the first season is about British imperialism in India 1600-1947."
After that, he says, "we'll branch out: Cholas, Khmers, Ottomans, Tang China."
Here is an excellent review of the events that led to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the Ohio State University (OSU). You can also read an essay about the events written by Professor Craig Nelson.
I was not aware that one of the important considerations in dropping the bomb had to do with the pending participation of the Russians in the Pacific War. The Truman administration feared that if the Russians entered the war, they would want a zone of occupation in Japan just as they had in Germany.
Another interesting observation from the video was that by 1945 the United States had "fully embraced" killing civilians in its bombing campaigns. Examples include the American firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden, Germany. Between 75,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed in Dresden.
Coptic Christians and Mamluk Muslims did not get along.
In fact, in 1321 violence broke out and spread throughout the city. According to this fascinating essay on the Medievalistsnet website written by Peter Konieczny, "over a couple of weeks, eleven Christian churches would be damaged or destroyed in Cairo, and another 49 in other parts of the country."
Violence continued and grew. Some of it had to do with anger over the Crusades and the belief that Coptic Christians supported them.
In addition, many jobs in Cario seemed to go to Christians at the expense of poorer Muslims. Konieczny compares this to the way Jews were treated by Christians in parts of Medieval Europe.
In an engaging and fascinating embedded 17-minute video, Princeton Professor, Marina Rostow, explains how people lived in medieval Cairo. One interesting occupation was the carving of rock crystal, which is a kind of quartz and valued for its transparency. Shopkeepers who dealt in rock crystals learned the trade at a very young age and had to pay traders to get the crystal. They had to travel to mines in Africa or East Asia, which was no easy feat in 1321.
The second half of the video clip is fascinating. Professor Rostow explains that she is a social historian and looks at history from below. She also questions the term medieval. "Are we forgetting," she says, "that the bloodiest century was the 20th century?" She notes that
only in the 20th century have states employed industrial violence in the service of coercion. Neither medieval Europe nor the medieval Middle East produced anything close to a totalitarian regime.
Here are some excellent resources for teaching the Silk Roads, especially to younger students. They come from Professor Peter Frankopan and are based on an illustrated adaptation of his best-selling book by the same name.
The resources include a timeline activity, a travel guide that focuses on the ancient city of Baghdad, and a chart and map activity that focuses on the ideas, people, and religion that moved along the Silk Roads.
Did civilization arise before religion or did religion arise before civilization?
History books teach us that civilization arose with the Neolithic Revolution when hunter-gatherers first settled down because of the discovery of agriculture. Settled life then led to cities, writing, and religion. The discovery of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey several years ago may change that story.
Göbekli Tepe contains a series of circles with limestone pillars carved with bas-reliefs of animals like gazelles, foxes, and wild boar. The tallest pillars are 18 feet high and weigh 16 tons. It looks like a temple "reminiscent of Stonehenge," according to the National Geographic.
But Göbekli Tepe is much older than Stonehenge and over seven thousand years older than the Pyramid at Giza. It was built before the Neolithic Revolution, 11,600 years ago. As the New Yorker Magazine noted, most historians believe that hunter-gatherers did not have the "complex symbolic systems, social hierarchies, and the division of labor, three things you probably need before you can build a twenty-two-acre megalithic temple."
According to the online magazine, Archaeology, Klaus Schmidt, of the German Archaeological Institute and the chief archaeologist at Göbekli Tepe, believes that the animals on the pillars "probably illustrate stories of hunter-gatherer religion and beliefs, though we don't know at the moment. The sculptors of Göbekli Tepe may have simply wanted to depict the animals they saw, or perhaps create symbolic representations of the animals to use in rituals to ensure hunting success."
Does Göbekli Tepe mean that the need for religion or for a scared site led hunter-gatherers to organize themselves into a workforce, settle down for a long period of time, and eventually discover agriculture?
Here's a clip from the History Channel about the discovery of Göbekli Tepe.
Haiti gained independence from the French in 1804, becoming the first independent black republic in the world.
But self-rule did not mean economic independence. That's because France forced Haiti to pay reparations to descendants of slave masters or face another invasion.
How was Haiti able to pay reparations? The French forced the Haitian government to accept a loan out of which they could pay the reparations. According to the New York Times, this loan was called the "double debt--the ranson and the loan to pay it — a stunning load that boosted the fledgling Parisian international banking system and helped cement Haiti’s path into poverty and underdevelopment."
The essay is an ideal assignment for world history students studying the unit on revolutions in the 1700 and 1800s.
Here is an interesting interview with Professor Marcus Rediker about the transatlantic slave trade. One of Professor Rediker's books is about the slave ship itself. He discusses the characteristics of those ships and types of resistance. This interview would work well with a unit about the time period between 1450-1750.
The history department at OSU (Ohio State University) tweeted this excellent 10-minute clip about Magellan's voyage and its importance to Spain and to world history.
The voyage led to the beginning of global trade and generated new scientific knowledge about global time and the earth's circumference.
Thompson notes that in 1903 the British led a force into Tibet and killed over 600 Tibetian soldiers with Maxim machine guns. The forces looted monasteries and then burned them to the ground.
Examining primary sources about the looting, Thompson notes that one soldier wrote his mother that in one monastery "I got rather a nice gong which no doubt you will find useful when I am able to get it home."
Another soldier, a captain, wrote that 'his wife had secured a few trifles' from the monastery, including paintings that fetched high prices when auctioned at Christie's later in 1904.
The British force that killed the Tibetian soldiers and looted several monasteries was known as the Younghusband Expedition.
Here is an excellent 10-minute clip about the Swahili city-states by Stefan Milo. He outlines the origin of the states and how they eventually adopted Islam. He notes three reasons: traders became familiar with Islam, some may have converted because it gave them protection from slavery, and finally it offered major political, legal, and commercial benefits.
A commercial advantage was that Islam gave Swahili a written alphabet. Milo notes that the states grew wealthy by facilitating and controlling trade between mainland Africa and Eurasia.
Here are two great resources to help students understand the similarities and differences in the Middle Ages in different parts of the world, including the Americas.
Another project looks at the connection between East Africa, Asia, and Mediterranean Europe and includes an interview with Chapurukha Kusimba, an Archaeology Journal Article on Early Swahili Towns and a 3D Reconstruction of the Songo Mnara site, which is a UNESCO site.
Another site looks at interesting women during the Middle Ages. Students will learn about Bharima from Bangladesh, an untouchable and a prostitute who eventually adopted Tantric Buddhism. The Royal Dancer of Gao demonstrates that while states like Ghana adopted Islam, they held on to many of their own indigenous beliefs. And in Tibet, women from the Hrug family contributed to the founding of Buddhist monasteries.
These three stories show the importance of religion and that women sometimes played an important role in its development.
Thanks to AP World teacher, Catherine Brown, for sharing the website. She included some discussion questions based on the two sites.
What are the benefits for medievalists of learning about what was going on in the Americas at the same time?
What are the drawbacks of bringing the Americas under the "medieval" umbrella? Consider the existing archaeological periodizations of the Americas as well as the effects on Native peoples today
What does historical reconstruction art offer that more traditional academic output might not? What compromises must an artist make that a historian writing an article or book might not have to think about or might not accept?
How are medieval women and historical women of color represented in art you've been exposed to, whether in public art, pop culture or textbooks?
Looking through the stories on this website, did anything surprise you about the options women had open to them or the roles women could play in their societies?
Here are two excellent sources for understanding the caste system. One comes from the BBC in an essay called "What is India's Caste System," and the second comes from Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization.
Dr. Audrey Truschke tweeted both links and notes that
Caste and its core practices--purity rituals, untouchability, and endogamy--have their roots in ancient India. It offers power and control.
You can identify caste through various factors, including surname, accent, dress, region of origin, and even visible face markers."
Dr. Truschke also recommends the first few pages of the book, Everyday Hindusim, for its review of caste, which she says appears in the first 5 pages of the book.
They include Twitter threads about Islamic calligraphy, Islamic gardens, unique mosques in Africa, the dome interiors of mosques around the world, the use of geometric patterns in Islamic art, and Islamic scientists who study the cosmos.
These threads, which I have saved as pdfs could work well in a unit on Islam in World History. Groups might work on one of the topics, create a short google slide show, and then present.
Here is an excellent 8-minute overview of Genghis Khan from the Life Guide. I found it on the Ancient Origins website which also has a good biography of the Mongol leader.
