Global Humanities

History of the World (HOW) since 1300 - Professor Jeremy Adelman - University of Cambridge General Syllabus Overview: This course takes you on a voyage into the past. Like many of the explorers you will meet along the way, you will travel across time from when Chinggis Khan’s armies conquered Beijing and Baghdad in the 13th century and the Black Death scoured the Eurasian world – and the course will end with reflections on globalization and its discontents in our times. Do earlier modes of integration and disintegration help us to understand our own age? Along the way, we consider the economic, military, scientific and cultural forces that brought the world together – and drove it apart – for the past seven centuries. This course invites as to learn globally. It connects you to students elsewhere in the world. Across 22 locations around the world, between Bangladesh and Lebanon, between France and Nigeria, between Argentina to Afghanistan, students are taking the same course simultaneously and posting and sharing their ideas on the course Gallery site. By listening and exchanging with each other, you will learn different perspectives and co-create knowledge about the global past.

ENROLMENT TO THE GLOBAL HISTORY LAB We'll be giving priority to the ones among you who have successfully completed the first year's exams. The GHL is a Cambridge-led course on Global History created by Prof. Jeremy Adelman. Students are requested to work on a weekly basis to their assignments, to prepare reports and write short essays, to deliver presentations and to actively work in a team. Each team will be supervised by a Teaching Fellow appointed by Cambridge and the attendance to each class is compulsory and preceded by homework assignments based on Prof. Adelman's lectures (delivered on a specific platform) and other reading materials. The course begins by the end of September and you will be coordinated by Prof. Mara Matta and myself together with the two Teaching Fellows directly chosen by Prof. Adelman. The course is a stimulating and a truly unique experience, but it is also time-consuming and offered to those students who can commit to it seriously and consciously. Please, carefully consider the following issues to know whether you can commit or not to the Lab: 1. Can you guarantee full attendance to the classes? 2. Can you commit to study the materials every week and prepare the work you'll be assigned? 3. Can you keep track with others as this is a team-oriented lab? 4. Are you seriously interested in fully engaging with your peers - also external to Sapienza - and working with scholars and students from various institutions? The GHL is highly demanding but also highly rewarding. However, there are certain things that make this course unfit for students who prefer to organize their studies in a different manner. Another important thing: If you'll have overlapping classes, you'll have to give priority to the GHL. You will learn to use a new platform and you will be asked to commit to ALWAYS doing your homework on time, as your team members will depend on you and you on them. If you think you are keen to learn more about global history and want to commit to the GHL, kindly send me and prof. Mara Matta an email where you state your reasons for choosing this special course.

Readings: The readings consist of a textbook (Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 3rd Concise edition, volume 2). The function of the text is to elaborate on detail and concepts raised in lectures. This book was written specifically for this course by a team of largely Princeton-based authors who have taught this course. Each week, we will assign one chapter of the book to read

Lectures: All lectures are pre-recorded and online. Two weekly lectures (and textbook chapter) will be posted every Thursday midnight UK time on Canvas. You can watch these lectures when it suits you, but must watch these lectures BEFORE your weekly classes. Each lecture is about 40-minutes long. Plan accordingly. Importantly: each lecture will be broken into FOUR-FIVE segments. Be sure to watch all segments. Each segment ends with a short pop-up quiz that asks you to apply what you have just learned in the segment. You can take your time. But you must pay attention both to the lecture and to the quiz. (they are not as easy as people often think!). These quizzes are important because they measure how much you are learning and they allow us to assess your progress. Classes. There are two obligatory face-to-face class times each week. Sometimes, they are back-to-back, sometimes on separate days. Each partner institution will schedule weekly classes according to local circumstances. The classes consist of: 1. Town Halls: These are occasions to review the week’s materials, especially from lectures. We develop a tool called “Narrative Mapping.” You will find this an instrumental skill for mastering so much material – seven centuries covering the whole planet. Narrative Mapping involves identifying key elements about the past. Being able to identify vital historical episodes and explain their importance over time is one of the key learning objectives of this course, and Town Halls are the setting for you to learn and practice the art of Narrative Mapping to give you the tools to think like a world historian! 2. Team meetings: At the beginning of the course, you will be assigned to a team of between 7 and 12 students for the duration of the course. Together with your team-mates, you will tackle a Case Study and answer a weekly “Challenge Question.” Based on primary documents, your team will be tasked with debating your evidence and developing an answer to the question. The materials for your weekly Case Studies are always to be read before your team meeting. For more detail on these documents, go to page 6. Your ideas will be posted on the online Gallery. Every Friday evening, the Gallery will open to reveal all the world’s teams’ ideas of the week. On the Gallery, you will be invited to explore each other’s arguments and leave feedback for each other.

Quizzes (40%) Teamwork (60%)

Course format: This course is hybrid – it is both online and face to face. All the materials are posted on the Cambridge Advanced Online (CAO) platform, Canvas. When you register for the course through GHL’s partner institution, we will enroll you on the site. On Canvas, you will receive all the lectures, the course textbook, and the weekly case studies. The site is also the home for the course Gallery, where you will be interacting with peers around the world. Why online? For one, the ability to watch, pause, or replay lectures on your schedule is an effective way of learning more from lectures. But there is more. Going digital allows us to go global. This is the world’s first global history course in which the world is inside the course. Students to learn global history globally, talking with each other from Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. We will be interacting with them over the course of the semester.