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HIST 1111 & HIST 1112 - World History (OER)

Central (Thematic) Organizing Questions for the Modules

Module 1: What is World History?

  • Central Question: Why should we study world history?
  • Key Topics
    • World History
    • Historical Thinking
    • Historiography

Module 2: Colliding Worlds

  • Central Question: How did the collision of the Eastern and Western hemispheres in the late 15th century affect global interactions and transformations?
  • Key Topics:
    • Mesoamerica
    • Changing Role of Africa 
    • European Expansion
    • The Columbian Exchange
    • European Empires in the New World

Module 3: Revolutions & their Consequences

  • Central Question: How did political and economic revolutions fundamentally transform societies, cultures, politics, and economies across the Atlantic World? How did that contribute to what historians have called the Great Divergence?
  • Key Topics
    • Nationalism & the Long 19th Century
    • Atlantic Revolutions
    • Industrial Revolution 

Module 4: Imperialism & Western Hegemony

  • Central Question: What fueled the new wave of Western imperialism and colonialism in the late 19th century, and how did it impact colonized societies?
  • Key Topics
    • New Imperialism - How & Why?
    • US Imperialism
    • Scramble for Africa
    • Imperialism in Asia
    • The Great Divergence

Module 5: The Bloody 20th Century

  • Central Question: How did World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II radically transform international relations and global power dynamics?
  • Key Topics
    • World War I
    • A Punitive Peace
    • Great Depression & Political Radicalism
    • Failure of the League of Nations
    • World War II

Module 6: A Bi-Polar World

  • Central Question: How did the Cold War competition between the US and USSR shape geopolitics and decolonization in the postwar era?
  • Key Topics
    • The Cold War
    • The Middle East since 1918
    • Decolonization
    • The End of the Cold War 

Module 7: New Global Systems

  • Central Question: How has economic and cultural globalization reshaped international systems and relationships in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
  • Key Topics
    • New Technology & Increased Globalization
    • A Multi-Polar World
    • New Questions

Teaching & Learning Activities

Module Overview

The following resources are built to support the video lectures found at the following site:

World Civilizations Video Textbook, Vol 2 (since 1500)

This page hosts the new materials created using an Affordable Learning Georgia Continuous Improvement Grant (round 22), which concluded in December 2023. 

The terms of the grant proposal called for the creation of the following resources:

  • Central (Thematic) Organizing Questions -  The revision will include news central questions for each week or module of materials that provide cohesive themes and overarching questions to guide the general direction of both learning and instruction. 
     
  • Teaching & Learning Activities -  we plan to develop a number of assignments and activities based on primary historical documents and short secondary sources such as academic journal articles. These assignments and activities include short answer document-based questions, group discussion questions and think, pair, share activities for face-to-face classes, discussion questions for online classes, and short writing assignments. These materials will be organized into online packets that are ready-made for eight-week classes.
     
  • Primary Source Packets - We will create primary source packets to accompany the teaching and learning activities described above.
     
  • New Test Bank - Revision & expansion of the multiple-choice questions currently used in the quizzes and exams of our four main survey classes. Our revision efforts along these lines will strive to test higher-order thinking instead of merely testing students’ abilities to recall basic historical facts. We will revise existing questions and write new multiple-choice questions such that we have questions that fit into categories such as Chronology, Historical Thinking, Data Analysis, and Source Application. This will create a broad pool of higher-quality questions that will sharpen the critical thinking skills and historical knowledge of our students and serve instructors of our survey courses well for years to come. There will be fewer "Google-able" questions based on rote memorization. 

Resources are available below.

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