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HIST 2001 – syllabus 8-20-13
[ 8-19-2013 ]
Corcoran Department of History
University of Virginia
HIST 2001
Many Worlds: A History of Humanity Before ca. 1800
(Fall 2013)
Course # 16172
4 credits
Instructor: Joseph C. Miller
E-mail: or
Telephones: 924-6395, 924-7146
Instructor # 2333
Course Meets Tuesdays, Thursdays –2:00 - 3:15 pm
Location – Nau 211
Office: Nau 435 – South Lawn
Hours: Tuesdays 3:30-5:00 pm; Wednesdays 2:30-4:30 pm
[and by e-appointment]
HIST 2001 sketches the many and distinct worlds of historical experience all around the globe before approximately the middle third of the nineteenth century. Since then, the numerous worlds of meaning in which people once lived have become embedded in new, modern networks of awareness and action of much larger, even global, proportions. These earlier eras of multiplicity were qualitatively different as times and places to live from our modern perspective of a single world, of universal humanity and human rights, and statistically measurable and highly normative standards. This course is an exercise in thinking outside that “box” of modernity, of seeing others’ many radically different worlds on the terms in which they understood themselves.
HIST 2001 thus endeavors to present the worlds of Native America, ancient Egypt, Hinduism, Korea, Africa, medieval Europe, and other remote times and places – even, arguably, Jamestown, or Mr. Jefferson’s Monticello – and translate their apparent exoticism into terms readily recognizable to students today at the University of Virginia, though without reducing them to pale anticipations of ourselves. The course uses a resolutely historical method to make these connections across time, space, and cultures. “History”, in the rigorous sense that the course elaborates, means much more than just “the past” or “change”. We start from universals of the human experience – with emphasis on ephemerality, or time itself, our far-from-perfect awareness of the surroundings (our historical contexts) in which we all, always act, our limited access to the resources needed to accomplish what we think we want, and our elemental need for the security of belonging and of being respected by those around us. From these experiential universals, we understand the constant dynamics of change basic to history’s narrative style as consequences (often unintended) of human initiatives. Impersonal abstractions – “the economy”, “religion”, “the state” – have no place in this logic. Hence historical understanding does not contemplate ethics – what people should have done – or valorize what modern Americans celebrate themselves for doing (as distinct from what we actually do). Rather it uses the evidence we have of what people, for all their human limitations, ended up doing, for better (at least for some) and – all too often – (for others) for worse. Including ourselves.
The tenacious historical framework of HIST 2001 constitutes an implicit critique of most of the existing literature in world history. The field has always been focused fundamentally not on the people acting, who interest us, but rather on sociological abstractions (e.g. “empires”, “nations”), most of them self-congratulatory ideas created only in the very recent, modern era. These ideas of ours are not those of the people who made the world’s histories. In the earlier eras studied in this course all of them – including people in North America – had other motivations and other means of acting. The course is intended to leave students with heightened insight into the human experiences shared in the many conceptual frameworks of the world’s histories and heightened critical awareness of the historical abnormality of much of what they thought they understood as human universals.
The course will develop these perspectives along four ongoing parallel tracks.
Most basic will be world geography as the environmental contexts of resources that people have optimized and altered in order to act efficaciously, and thus historically.
The most familiar is a world-historical textbook narrative of the usual suspects, “civilizations” and the like, which exhibits more than a few of the modernist limitations that the course will critique.
The most relevant will be the lectures that will introduce and elaborate the alternative historical perspective at the heart of the course.
The most challenging, and the most important, will be the students’ efforts to integrate these three.
The process of learning in the course (a.k.a. “requirements”, offered as productive exercises, not as periodic humiliations) will build on enough basic world geography to understand both lectures and readings analytically. Against this background the lectures will consistently challenge the approaches in the text to illuminate assumptions underlying the limits of the ways that world historians have thought, and contrast those with how they might think historically (since so few of them actually do). We will read a recent and innovative world-history text (Armesto, The World: A Brief History, rev. ed.), touted for its departure from the Western-centered narrative framework conventional in the subject that intends (but routinely fails) to transcend it – however self-contradictingly. We will also read technical articles on concepts and processes integral to understanding historical thinking.
The instructor will stop lecturing well before the end of each class meeting. Students will then use the remaining time to write and hand in one-paragraph “take-home points” (THPs) analyzing each day’s proceedings in the developing context of the course, including the readings for the week, and its historical logic. The instructor (and TA) will read, grade, and return comments on these reflections at the succeeding class meeting, so that students receive ongoing assessments of their understanding of the course and substantive suggestions to improve it. Out of approximately 30 class meetings only the best 25 THPs will count toward final marks.
Since It would obviously be pointless to attempt to reflect on the historical processes that are at the core of the course without the basic geographical framework in which people created them weekly, short (ten-question) map quizzes given in the discussion sections. Students will not be graded on their performance on these quizzes, but they must achieve an average score of 7 (out of 10) on their best 10 (of 15) quizzes in order to write the final exercise for the course (Monday 16 December < 5:00 pm).
Other written requirements will include periodic short (two-page) “position papers” reflecting on the course content as it develops. With the take-home points, examinations are unnecessary; there will be none. A final exercise (no more than five pages, submitted digitally) will ask students to integrate the three streams of course content in the form of a response to a single question:
“Having spent a semester looking through resolutely historical lenses at the many worlds in which people lived before the modern era, how do you now view, and account for, their similarities as well as their many differences? How would you contrast, and account for, all these earlier worlds with our modern world? Remember: there are two analytically relevant components of the subject of this course: ‘world history’.”
Student writing will be considered intensely throughout the semester. You must be prepared to put in the time and concentration necessary to learn to write (a) clearly and (b) coherently.
Discussion sections will open with the weekly map quizzes, which students will correct themselves under the guidance of the teaching assistant, Justin McBrien. They will then consider course concepts and issues in the readings as they emerge during the weeks in question. Participation in discussion will be graded as: (A) active, informed, relevant leadership, (B) consistent contributions, (C) regular presence but only occasional responsiveness, (D) silence, however attentive, and/or irregular presence, and (F) repeated absence or inattention. The only basis for creditable participation is careful preparation, guided by advance alerts that you will receive for plans for each week’s section meeting.
Course # Section Instructor Time Location
16173 101 Justin Mcbrien Th 4:00PM - 4:50PM Gibson Hall 341
16174 102 Justin Mcbrien Th 6:00PM - 6:50PM Nau Hall 142
16175 103 Justin Mcbrien Fr 8:00AM - 8:50AM New Cabell Hall 209
Teaching assistant –
Justin McBrien < >
Office Hours – 11:00 am-1:00 pm Thursdays,
in the Nau-Gibson atrium (a.k.a. Starbucks)
Course grading –
Final grades will approximate students’ “highest consistent performance”. I do not need to remind you that grading is not an exact science – hence no calculations of percentages. Since no numerical reckoning holds a slow start or an isolated low mark against you, the occasional valiant effort gone wrong cannot cause you to miss a higher final grade by 0.1% (or any other meaningless margin). The costs of making a mistake or two are thus low compared to what you can learn from putting yourself on the line by offering an imaginative insight. Make-ups are never necessary, though extra work contributes to consistency. You can blow, or blow off, a given class owing to the inevitable distractions of life, but recurring absences will, obviously, significantly disrupt “consistency”.
“Consistency” also emphasizes – and rewards – steady improvement throughout the term. The instructors’ eventual assessment of your “highest consistent performance” allow you to come up to speed in an unfamiliar approach to the subject, to think for yourselves in disciplined, historical ways, based on the materials presented in the course, to obtain instructors’ supportive interim reactions to your initial efforts, and to move beyond the limits or assumptions or blind spots that these early ventures identify. You learn only by doing, including making mistakes. The course does not hold them against you.
For the course - (A) grades will recognize consistent, creative and integrated engagement with the overall logic of the course, (B) signifies comprehensive awareness of components of the course but incomplete, imprecise, or irregular integration of them, (C) is for viable, but selective (and thus intermittent), comprehension, (D) connotes occasional relevant misunderstanding, and (F - a grade that I do not expect to have to use) would be clueless lack of participation.
HONOR SYSTEM
HIST 2001 proceeds in the spirit of the University’s Honor System, particularly its premise of the prevailing “Community of Trust”; students implicitly “pledge” their written work accordingly. The System’s potential sanctions are distinctly secondary to the collaborative spirit that it establishes for us all to proceed to learn together.
Texts --
Newcomb Hall Bookstore will make the following titles available for purchase. In the meanwhile, Clemons Reserve will place every large work assigned in the syllabus on two-hour reserve. Shorter assignments will be available for down-loading at a COLLAB site for the course, which you access at https://collab.itc.virginia.edu/portal.
WORLD HISTORY TEXT – Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The World: A Brief History (combined volume) (Upper Saddle River NJ: Pearson Education, 2008). (ISBN 13: 978-0-13-600921-4) $74.67 [pb]
WORLD HISTORY INTERPRETATION – David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). (California World History Library, 2) (ISBN: 9780520271449) $23.95 [pb]
To be added --
Topical readings on technical aspects of issues that develop throughout the semester
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CLASS MEETINGS
Week 1 – Organization and Backgrounds
27 August – Introduction to the course
Introductory Map Quiz 1 to be taken in class
29 August – Introduction to history
Reading - David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), chs. 1-3.
Discussion sections – Getting acquainted; be prepared to take Map quiz 2
history – the Consolidation of Community
Week 2 – Open grounds and the invention of community (~ 50,000-10,000 bp)
3 September – Backgrounds to History (< ~ 100,000 bp)
5 September – “Out of Africa” (~ 50,000-15,000 bp)
Reading - Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The World: A Brief History (Upper Saddle River NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2007), ch. 1.
Patrick Manning, “Homo sapiens Populates the Earth: A Provisional Synthesis, Privileging Linguistic Evidence,” Journal of World History, 17, 2 (2006), pp. 115-56. [COLLAB]
Discussion sections – What is history?; be prepared to take Map quiz 3
Recommended reading
William H. McNeill, Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (5 vols.) (Great Barrington MA: Berkshire, 2005).
H-WORLD (http://www.h-net.org/~world/)
The World History Association (http://www.thewha.org/)
Recommended reading – other texts (not exhaustive)
Craig A. Lockard, Societies, Networks, and Transitions: A Global History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008).
Robert Strayer, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History with Sources, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011 [2008]).
John McKay, Bennett Hill, John Buckler, Patricia Ebrey, Roger Beck, Clare Crowston, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, A History of World Societies, 8th ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009).
Robert Tignor, Jeremy Adelman, Peter Brown, Benjamin Elman, Xinru Liu, Holly Pittman, and Brent Shaw, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2011).
Richard Bulliet, Pamela Crossley, Daniel Headrick, Steven Hirsch, Lyman Johnson, and David Northrup, The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, 5th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011).
Peter Stearns, Michael Adas, Stuart Schwartz, and Marc Gilbert, World Civilizations: The Global Experience, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2011).
Week 3 – Key Concepts for a Plural World History
11 September – Backing into History I – Languages (~ 50,000-15,000 bp)
13 September – Backing into History II – Community (~ 15,000-7000 bp)
Reading - Christian, Maps of Time, chs. 4-5.
Discussion sections – Strategies for writing THPs; be prepared to take Map quiz 4
Week 4 – Demographic success, and climate challenges (~15,000-4000 bce) - I
17 September –Strategic Foraging (~ 15,000-7000 bp)
19 September – Aquaculture as an Extension of the Familiar (~ 8000-5000 bp)
Reading - Christian, Maps of Time, chs. 6-7.
Miller and Blier manuscript?
Discussion sections – Reading maps; be prepared to take Map quiz 5
Recommended reading – atlases (not exhaustive)
Jeremy Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
Geoffrey Barraclogh, Geoffrey Parker, The Times Atlas of World History (4th ed., 1993). 5th ed. – as Hammond Concise Atlas of World History (Hammond World Atlas Corp., 1999)
Patrick Karl O’Brien, Atlas of World History (New York: Oxford University Press US, 2002).