HISTORY 103G Global History

This Stage I course introduces students to some basic aspects of the study of history. Coverage extends from the late fifteenth century, when communities and cultures around the world started to become globally rather than regionally interconnected, up to the so-called "globalised" world of the present day. The course introduces students to developments which increasingly bound together the fates of different peoples and cultures, including the emergence of world trade networks, the expansion of cultures and religions, the formation of regional and worldwide empires, the global role of violence and conflict, the migrations of peoples across continents, and the ecological and environmental impacts of human societies.

The course is organised thematically as well as chronologically, and offers students a deeper understanding of how our lives today are shaped by the global as well as the local legacies of the past.  Students in this course obtain an overview of key developments in global history and discover that studying history is not merely about finding out what happened in the past; it also involves understanding how and why things happened and why those occurrences are significant. Students will receive a basic introduction to some of the ways in which historians construct, analyse and interpret the past, and will encounter the diverse kinds of evidence (what historians term "primary sources") on which scholars base their interpretations of history.

In both content and approach, this course offers a foundation for understanding how people and societies existed in the past, and a way of understanding change and continuity across time. We study the global past as it was lived by contemporaries, but also examine how that shared past created the world in which we live today. This course is designed to be welcoming and accessible to students with interests outside history, while providing students who plan further study in history with a strong introduction to the field.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

1. Understand ways the global past has shaped and continues to shape the globalised present 
2. Understand and critically evaluate key principal concepts used to interpret the global past 
3. Develop students' ability to offer reasoned historical arguments in both written and oral formats 
4. Understand and explain key transformations and continuities in global history since c. 1450
   

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