Global History Lab

This course takes you on a voyage into the past. Like many of the explorers you will meet along the way, you will travel across time from when Chinggis Khan’s armies conquered Bejing and Baghdad in the 13th century and the Black Death scoured the Eurasian world to the global nomads and pandemics of our day. Do earlier modes of globalization help us to understand our own age? How can we understand old and new global divides? The dynamics of combinations, differences, and divisions are many: spiritual, economic, environmental, ideological, military, and political. The aim of this course is to understand the big forces that pull the world’s parts together as well as those that drive them apart.
This course is unique not just in its scale and scope. We learn global history globally. This course connects you to students elsewhere in the world. Across 25 locations around the world, from Vietnam and Lebanon, to France and Nigeria, from Argentina to Afghanistan, students are taking the same course simultaneously and posting and sharing their ideas on the course Gallery site.