Time Schedule:
Genevieve E Mc Coy
BIS 262
Bothell Campus
Explores world history frm the time of the ancient classical empires to the global Enlightenment periods of the Eighteenth century. Investigate the interaction of different peoples with their social and natural environments.
Class description
This class, which covers the period between the ancient classical empires and the global “Enlightenment” periods of the 18th century, weaves together two stories – of human societies’ interaction with nature and with each other. The human-focused environmental theme will highlight aspects of the environments in which people lived as they sought sustenance, shelter, wealth, and community and tried to avoid disease and death. With the cultural theme, we will return again and again to the ways people made contact with each other, whether through trade, pilgrimage, war, migration, travel, or imperialism. We will also investigate human social frameworks: economic and political arenas, states and civilizations, genders and generations, classes and other clusters of human identity. In avoiding Eurocentric and an in-depth focuse on specific regions, students will be able to better relate the histories of particular regions to world history as a whole during the period covered. They can also survey world history without excluding major peoples, regions, or time periods and come to understand the past by connecting specific topics to larger historical patterns.
Student learning goals
1.) To provide students with a common body of knowledge incorporating research from history, anthropology, archeology, sociology, political science, and environmental studies that will prove helpful as they progress through the UWB curriculum.
2.) To provide students opportunities to become better speakers, able to communicate clearly and engagingly about complicated topics, arguments, and issues, and to work well collaboratively with other class members as fellow learners and researchers.
3.) To familiarize students with historical modes of thinking and of historical analysis so that they learn to evaluate historical patterns of change and continuity across long time frames and large geographic areas, and to give students an awareness of the expanding interaction of human cultures from earliest times to the present.
4.) To acquaint students with the cultural heritage of major civilizations and their contributions to the historical development of the world and modern life.
5.) To enable students to become better researchers, who can efficiently and effectively use the library’s data base resources at UWB and elsewhere in order to identify existing scholarship while producing original knowledge through data gathering and interpretation.
General method of instruction
Lecture, films, whole class and small group discussion.
Recommended preparation
An interest in historical topics is helpful.
Class assignments and grading
Out of class essay-tests and short research paper.
