Oregon State University HST 105/Winter 2017 1 HST 105 WORLD HISTORY II: Middle and Early Modern Ages T/Th 4-5:20 pm Kearney Hall 212 Professor Rena Lauer (Rena.Lauer@oregonstate.edu) Office hours: T 12:30-2:30 pm (and by appointment), 306a Milam Hall Teaching Assistant: Gus Paoli (paolig@oregonstate.edu) Office hours: T/Th 2:30-3:30 pm, 301a Hovland Hall Course Description: From the seventh through the eighteenth centuries, Europeans were developing states, building universities, fighting each other and everyone around them, reclaiming forests and swamps for settlement, persecuting minorities, rediscovering ancient learning, trading goods, exploring the Atlantic, settling colonies in the Americas, and becoming “Enlightened.” These are familiar tales. But what about the rest of the world? The events of European history did not happen in a vacuum, but rather were part and parcel of social, cultural, and technological changes that shaped much of the world at the same time. In this class we will investigate the major events which shaped Asia, Africa, and America— as well as Europe—and ask how they affected each other and the parts of the world more familiar to most of us. In short, this is a class about cultural contacts and exchanges across the globe…before the age of globalization. In order to look to these contacts, we will follow objects and people as they traveled across this world, traded goods and ideas, and learned about people and cultures very different than their own. As a world history class covering a thousand years of history, we will necessarily look at snapshots of time in order to get an overview of the large period we must cover. In order to do that, we will often focus on objects, people, texts, and ideas and explore them in their historical and cultural context—and watch the ways they traveled across large swaths of space and time. Think of this class as a “world history museum” where we can see individual artifacts of history and get a taste for a wide variety of persons, places, and things. Hopefully that taste will make you hungry to know more about the history of the medieval and early modern world! A section of the famed Catalan Atlas (1375 CE) showing Mansa Musa, the king of gold-rich Mali.