1.  Outline the most basic contours of prehistory and assess the causes and consequences of the rise of civilizations.

2.  Compare and contrast selected world civilizations within an analytical context.

3.  Explain the significance of and explore the interrelationships between the great belief systems of the ancient Near East and Asia, including Judaism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.

4.  Analyze changes in ancient Greek society, including the rise of philosophical and scientific inquiry, and the invention of the concept of citizenship.

5.  Account for the formation of a unified China under a bureaucratic government, and compare China's early history to Rome's path from republic to empire.

6.  Explain the circumstances that led to the spread of Christianity in the West.

7.  Outline the origins of Islam and analyze its rapid expansion.

8.  Explore the relationships between the economy, the political structure, the culture, and the social organization of particular civilizations.

9.  Identify central themes and issues from the past, and theorize about the complex connections between the ancient, classical, medieval and contemporary eras.

That you are interested in world history and eager to learn as much about it as possible in this course.

That it will be impossible to learn all that you would like to learn given the massive amount of relevant material and the time constraints involved.

That history should involve not merely the struggle to understand past events but also to find meaning from those events.

That my job as instructor is to strike an appropriate balance between providing a common core curriculum and setting up structures that also allow you to study materials of personal interest.

That this course should help to set you up for future formal or informal study of world history rather than being a survey that teaches you "all that you need to know" about the ancient past.

Reading Assignment:

Reading Assignment:

Tony Perrottet, Naked Olympics

Reading Assignment:

Listening Assignment:

  "The Aftermath Of Collapse: Bronze Age Edition," Throughline, NPR, September 2, 2021.  (56 mins)

Listen to at least two episodes from  The Museum Of Lost Objects series.

Reading Assignment:

  Greeks, National Geographic:

Optional Extras:

Adrienne Mayor, "The Real Amazons," National Geographic History Magazine (May/June 2020): 32-45.

Watch either of the following programs:

Viewing Assignment:

Optional Extras:

Viewing Assignment:

  "Confucius," Episode 3, Genius Of The Ancient World, BBC, 2015.  [59 mins]  Also available through NIC and Films On Demand.

  "China: The Warring State Period," In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, April 1, 2004.

Reading Assignment:

Browse in Mayans In The News

Browse extensively in the Golden Road Discussion Topic

 "Journey To Nalanda And The Library Of Jewels," Episode 132, Empire, March 19, 2024.  [44 mins]

Optional Extras:

a)  Letter of Introduction (1%)

Write a short letter of introduction to me at the beginning of the semester.  This should be at least 100 words in length and is designed to give me a beginning idea of who you are and how I might best serve you as a teacher, and to provide me with an opening snapshot of the class as a whole.  You need not use the following questions as cues but they may be helpful.  Who are you?  Where are you from?  How might you begin to describe your community and what life is like there if you've come to NIC from far away?  What do you miss and what do you think would most surprise me if I were to visit your hometown?  What are your interests?  Why are you taking this course?  What are your thoughts and reflections as you begin HIS 120?  How familiar are you already with World History?  Are there topics associated with the course that you know will be of potential interest?  Do you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions?  This is an assignment I ask of students in each of my classes.  Although this is not a graded assignment, I would appreciate it if you took several minutes writing a thoughtful introduction?  If you are enrolled in more than one class with me this semester, a single letter of introduction will suffice, but mention something about each of the courses.  If you have taken a class with me before, please update what you wrote before and complete a new letter of introduction.

b)  Journal (30% + 30%) = 60%

The most substantial assignment in HIS 120 will be the on-going World History to 1000 CE Journal.  The purpose of the journal is to provide you the opportunity for frequent thoughtful, analytical and personal commentary upon course-related material.  The Journal should consist of a series of short writings or entries of varying lengths that offer your analysis of and responses to the curriculum.  These entries must be entirely in your own words without any use of Artificial Intelligence tools.

The regular starting place for the Journal should be the weekly Reading, Viewing, and Listening Assignments on the Syllabus Page.  Although you certainly are not expected to write about all these resources, you should demonstrate sustained engagement with the core curriculum.  It is expected that you work regularly on the Journal throughout the semester, writing in it on a weekly basis. The Journal is meant to be coordinated with our class discussions and your willingness and ability to stay current with your course responsibilities will have a major impact upon the overall quality of this course.

You will be handing in your Journal four times during the semester.  I want to check at the three-week mark of the course that you have got a good start on your Journal that we share a mutual understanding as to the nature of the assignment.  This will be an ungraded submission.  You then will hand in your completed First Half Journal at the mid-way point of the course. This submission will be worth 30% of your course grade.  We'll follow a similar procedure in the second half of the semester in which you will be expected to hand in your In-Progress Second Half Journal in mid-March for an ungraded check-in and then again at the end of the semester for a formal evaluation (30% of your course grade).

The emphasis in the Journal should be upon your own commentary rather than upon a mere repeating of historical information.  What are you learning?  What is most interesting?  What analysis might you offer?  How might you draw connections between different topics; between the history discussed and more contemporary times; or between the course resources and your own experiences, interests, and knowledge?

In order to give you a basic structure for the Journal, I have provided you with Recommended Journal Entries for both your First Half and Second Half Journal in the Assignments sections of the course web-site.  You should return several times throughout the semester to these lists.  But while these lists should provide the core structure of your Journal, you need not treat it as an everything-on-this-list-must-be-completed mandated.  You are encouraged to be imaginative in your own investigation and analysis of World History and to devote extra time to those parts of the course that you find to be most interesting.

Some of you may find it useful to take notes on different course resources.  If you do this, I encourage you to hand these in at the same time as your Journal.  Rather than being folded into your Journal, however, such notes should be in a separate file labeled as your Note-Taking Appendix.  These notes can be hand-written or digital, and can be in whatever format works best for your own learning.  Some of you may want to engage in active note-taking in which your own voice and comments are interspersed with your notes.  Some of you may want to draw out main points from the resources and summarize these in your own words, while others of you may choose to frequently highlight and lift key passages verbatim from the readings or documentaries to your notes.

Creative use of Artificial Intelligence is not inappropriate for some sections of your Note-Taking.  However, it is fundamental that you consistently engage directly with the core curriculum yourself rather than encounter it indirectly and inauthentically.  And the Journal entries themselves must be entirely in your own words.

c)  Seminar Notes (2 x 10%) = 20%

Rather than being graded on a letter scale, the seminar notes will be evaluated on a check, check-plus, check-plus+, and check-minus basis:

Check:  A fully satisfactory seminar note (7.3/10, B) --  The seminar note offers evidence that you have engaged directly and substantially with the text and drawn something of larger meaning from it.  Your ideas may not be fully developed or as clearly stated as might be the case, but you do demonstrate that you have taken something away from your encounter with the book.

Check-Plus:  A strong seminar note (8.6/10, A) -- The strong seminar note will offer thoughtful analysis and/or a well-developed commentary upon the text.  It will probe chosen themes in an original, organized, and analytical manner.  The commentary with effectively connect together your larger ideas with the particularities of the reading, using examples and specific text to accentuate your writing.

Check-Plus+:  An outstanding seminar note  (9.5, A+) -- Such a note pushes far beyond the basic expectations for this assignment in terms of both its originality and the extent to which it probes the reading.

Check-Minus:  A weak seminar note (6.1, C)  --  The seminar note includes some material of relevance and evidence of direct engagement with the text.  However, it seems to be based upon limited reading and/or a lack of understanding of the book's core themes.

Check-Minus-Minus:  An unsatisfactory seminar note.  (0, F)  A note in which it is impossible to tell whether there was any direct engagement with the text.  The assignment seems to have relied entirely upon secondary sources and/or to have been completed using Artificial Intelligence tools.

There typically will not be the opportunity to revise Seminar Notes and submit them a second time.

Seminar notes will be evaluated separately from the Journal.  However, they are not meant to be intimidating.  I consider them to be very similar to particularly thoughtful and well-developed Journal entries.

The Dawn Of Everything is a lengthy and challenging book that we will discuss later in the semester.  Although it is a reading that can add much to the course and one that I will encourage you to analyze within your Journal, seminar notes are only required for our two shorter book-length readings.

d)  Class Preparation And Participation (19%)

The class participation grade will be based upon attendance; pre-class preparation; and the willingness to contribute thoughtfully to small-group and full-class discussion.

HIS 120 will combine lectures and documentaries with extensive small-group and full-class discussion.  Sometimes we'll devote an course period to a major reading.  Other times, we will have shorter but focused conversations about a particular topic.

I would like to encourage a classroom environment in which all are eager to share their ideas and in which lectures are accompanied by thoughtful dialogue.  This will be dependent not just upon your willingness to speak, but your pre-class preparation and your willingness to listen.  The significant class participation component derives from my belief that the most engaging and successful courses are not ones in which knowledge is merely transferred from instructor to student but in which a genuine learning community exists in which all participants share their perspectives and insights.

Although attendance is not required, I will take roll, and those who are not in class regularly will both receive a poor grade for this part of the course and deprive others in the class of their own insights.

I do appreciate that some students are shy or for other reasons may find it intimidating to speak in our full-group setting.  I do want these students to push themselves to nonetheless fully engage with the class and participate in discussions.  I will nonetheless be understanding of these students so long that they can clearly demonstrate to me by other means that not only do they come to class but they do so well-prepared and are engaged with the course material.

Academic Integrity, Artificial Intelligence, And My Approach To This Course

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