This syllabus for History of World Civilization is designed to encourage students to enjoy reading and engage in critical thinking and writing. Primary course readings focus on the history of Africa.
Material Type: Syllabus
In this assignment, students will use primary and secondary sources, including images, to study the use and framing of violence by Black Revolutionaries. The goal of this assignment is to have students to use the images and documents to consider how race and other factors shape Western views on Black Revolutionaries.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Homework/Assignment, Primary Source, Teaching/Learning Strategy
This resource is a document based activity that consists of eight primary sources related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The assignment asks students to consider how the trans-Atlantic slave trade impacted African civilizations using primary sources.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment
This is an upper level college survey course with the purpose to provide an introductory overview of the black experience in Africa and its global Diaspora, using a comparative perspective. The course proceeds chronologically from the ancient Nile River Valley civilizations to the present, and is divided into four units of study: (a) Ancient Africa: From Antiquity to the Medieval Period; (b) The Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas; (c) Emancipation and Abolition in the Nineteenth Century; and (d) The Age of Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: Colonialism/Anti-Colonialism; Imperialism/Anti-Imperialism; Pan-Africanism and Independence; Black Power and Civil Rights. Topics to be examined include ancient state building; slavery; resistance movements; the role of women, religion and other cultural formations in the modern African Diaspora; and a comparison of the development of modern, organized political movements and intellectual currents in black communities worldwide with some emphasis on the historical context for contemporary issues such as globalization and reparations.
Material Type: Syllabus
The presentation explores the political, social, and religious history of the states, kingdoms, and empires of African from roughly the fifteenth century through the twentieth century. It looks at the slave trade within Africa and the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Material Type: Lesson
This assignment asks students to engage with different primary sources and perspectives to understand political change in the Gold Coast between World War II and 1950. Through close readings of documents, students can recognize how historical events, in this case, the experience of the Second World War and the Accra riots of 1948, transformed what was politically possible in the context of the Gold Coast. Students should see that national independence and the establishment of Ghana as a nation state were far from inevitable in the late 1940s as different actors, on the ground in the Gold Coast and from the vantage of the colonial government, negotiated changing expectations and aspirations.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment, Primary Source, Student Guide
This activity asks students to read two primary sources about the Middle Passage, one written by Olaudah Equiano and one by John Barbot, and consider the bias in their narratives. Discussion questions are meant to encourage a close reading and interrogation of the two historical sources. The resource helps students think critically about primary sources and the production of history.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Contrary to what is portrayed in the media, being Latin American can consist of and look like many things. The goal of this unit is to help students understand the connections between colonialism and the ethnic demographics of Latin America.
Material Type: Lesson Plan, Unit of Study
The project asks students to explore the connection between racial discrimination and racial disparities in U.S. prison populations using credible sources of information including qualitative and statistical methods. The resource was developed by a faculty member and librarian in order to promote using library resources in the classroom. It was designed to encourage information literacy among students.
Material Type: Homework/Assignment
No longer considered ‘side’ issues within eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies, slavery, ‘race’, abolition and emancipation are now understood to occupy a central place, not only within the period’s history, but within its literature, philosophy and the concerns of canonical and less well-known writers. The course moves forward to the present day to consider how slavery persists as a central concern within world literature.
Material Type: Syllabus
