Research Guides: #History: HIST 2321: World History to 1492

Course Info

Course Description
Learning Outcomes

The history of human societies from the earliest evidences of ancient peoples until the voyages of Columbus from Europe to America. Consideration is given to all major cultural regions (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia/India, East Asia, Africa and Latin America). Emphasis is placed upon comparative aspects of history, and upon interactions among the major cultural regions.

Create an argument through the use of historical evidence.
Analyze & interpret primary & secondary sources.
Analyze the effects of historical, social, political, economic, cultural, & global forces on this period of world history.
Study, analyze, and quantify historical data.

Sites

Travelers' Accounts
Collects a large number of travelers' accounts found in the Internet History Sourcebooks Project. As outsiders, travelers often note aspects of a culture that are too commonplace for local commentators to mention. More than this, travelers often provide some insight into how their own society understood itself in relation to other cultures.
Internet Global History Sourcebook
The Global History Sourcebook is dedicated to exploration of interaction between world cultures. It does not, then, look "world history" as the history of the various separate cultures, but at ways in which the "world" has a history in its own right.
Women in World History: Primary Sources
World History Connected
Articles, discussions, and book reviews; updated thrice annually. WHC is published by the University of Illinois Press, and its institutional home is Hawaii Pacific University.

Selected E-Books

Chambers Dictionary of World History
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Collection: Credo Reference
Published: 2005
Contains entries providing clear and authoritative coverage of the most significant people, ideas and events of world history.
Cultures in Motion: Mapping Key Contacts and Their Imprints in World History by Peter N. Stearns
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Collection: Ebook Central
Published: 2001
Stearns focuses on fourteen important historical examples of intercultural exchange from around the globe. For each example, original maps reveal geographic patterns and provide a clear sense of the impact of that particular meeting of cultures.
Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World by Kurt A. Raaflaub
- This link opens in a new window
- This link opens in a new window
Collection: Ebook Central
Published: 2014
Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World presents a cross-cultural comparison of the ways in which ancient civilizations thought about the past and recorded their own histories. Written by an international group of scholars working in many disciplines Truly cross-cultural, covering historical thinking and writing in ancient or early cultures across in East, South, and West Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas Includes historiography shaped by religious perspectives, including Judaism, early Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism

Video

World History in Video
- This link opens in a new window
World History in Video is a wide-ranging collection of critically acclaimed documentaries that allow students and researchers to explore human history from the earliest civilizations to the late twentieth century. The video content offered here is truly global in scope, covering Africa and the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Oceania.
more...less...
Via Alexander Street Press (Academic Video Online: Premium)