Session B-1: Messing with the “Rise of the West”

This session will present strategies and lesson plans for World History teachers who want their students to learn how to interrogate the idea that modern European hegemony began in 1492. Was the Renaissance the Renaissance? Does modernity or early modernity have origins in Song China, Abbasid Baghdad, and Mongolian Asia? Does the era of western hegemony begin with the Opium Wars and the repression of the Sepoy Rebellion? We will examine these and other questions in a session that will question some of the basic assumptions about we teach world or global history courses