Global History to 1500 (HIS 151) City as Classroom Project Report

This course will explore some portions of the development of global history from about a million years before the present to the voyages of Columbus. We will analyze different aspects of history including the more standard histories of governing and political ideologies, empires and states, and warfare and diplomacy. We will examine humans in motion, stories of migration, sea-faring, evangelizing, trade, and the cross-cultural encounters those all engendered. We will also look at the past via social history, the study of the stuff of every-day life: work, families, sex, religion, social hierarchies, legal systems, and technology. Because humanity has essentially organized itself around eating, the central theme of the course will be food in global history. This project was an extra-credit assignment used to test out the feasibility of creating class-wide assignments of this nature in the future. Therefore, it was optional and done independently by the students who participated. The students (potentially those who are a little less enthusiastic in classroom settings, hence the need for extra credit) would get a chance to see actual artifacts (or occasionally replicas) produced by the people they\u27d studied during the semester. The experience was intended to make the lives of historical subjects more real in their minds, and allow them to do their own independent analysis using models established in the classroom