World History II

Course Overview

This course is an introductory survey of World History from roughly 1500 to the present, following up on World History I. As such it cannot pretend to anything like completeness in either breadth or depth, though it is considerably enhanced from our previous versions of the course, since we have extended a one-year survey course into a more thorough two-year sequence. We cvontinue to try to extract a broad and coherent foundation of facts and historical relationships from the text, while pursuing certain themes systematically and comparatively throughout the course, as a way of exercising and developing the capacity for analytical historical thought, and also as an illustration of some of the riches the field has to offer.

The survey component is built around the third edition of Patterns of World History by von Sivers, Desnoyers, and Stow. It is a solid college-level text for a world history course, and it accordingly presumes a fairly mature and sophisticated reader. It is a secular textbook, and does not presuppose any religious perspective, but it also does not skirt important religious issues in history as most high school textbooks seem to do. It is a good deal more nuanced and balanced than most of the other books we’ve examined or used before. It is not, however, perfect, and we are more than willing to point out errors or interpretive gaffes where we see them. Doubtless some slip by unobserved. We also are not perfect.

As established in the first year, the thematic element of the course will primarily center around three clusters of concepts: resources, community, and power. We will continue to use the analytical vocabulary we developed in World History I for describing these things, and then will examine how they are expressed in each unit of the text. Under the first heading we consider the raw materials of cultures and societies, from geography and natural resources to human resources, money, and intellectual capital, and how wealth is amassed, distributed, and mediated. Under the second we consider the relationship of the individual and groups of people, including the formation of tribes, cities, states, and empires, along with other voluntary or involuntary associations of persons. Under the third heading we consider the types and dynamics of power, both personal and institutional, and how it is met with consent or resistance. Each of these three subject areas is of course intertwined with the others as well; we will try to show their points of intersection, to allow students to connect these concepts both in the abstract and in a diachronic perspective.

We will supplement the readings in the textbook with others from the web, and will ask students to engage in regular critical writing about a range of issues. There will be regular quizzes for each chapter, and exams as required. In a departure from previous years, we are going to insist on the essays — which need not be long — being completed prior to the class. the point of them is to prepare the student for discussion, and completing them ex post facto is merely make-work for both students and teachers.

History is by nature a contentious and controversial subject. It has to do with how people interpret their lives and how meaning of any and every sort emerges from human experience. Accordingly, you will probably find things in the textbook with which you disagree (even if they're not the kind of thing that can be proven objectively wrong). That's okay. We will expect you to know what the book says — we don't require you to believe every little bit of it. By the same token, you'll probably disagree with us as well. That's okay too. We often disagree with each other. Learning to manage disagreement in the context of civil discourse is one of the more important lessons one can learn.

The course has no specific prerequisites, but it does require a student to be able to read carefully and critically. World History I is recommended, but not required.

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