HIST-1701H: World History to 1800

Instructor: James Wood

Course Code: HIST 1701H

When Taken: Fall 2020

Class Notes: Class Notes

Major Assignments: 1701Schnurr1, 1701Schnurr2.docx, 1701Schnurr3.docx

I took this class because I had thought it was the thing to do, take a class which promises to give you the entire history of the world? Sign me up. It ended up being a really strange class structure. There were no lectures, massive tests every two weeks, and a truly massive amount of readings each week (one week I think I read 500+ pages just for this class). I remember hating this class as I took it. I thought it was boring, a lot more work than my other classes, and I had no social interaction during it, something that I was hugely craving as I was fully online for my first semester of first year.

In retrospect, I built a lot of skills in this course. It certainly made me a faster reader, as I had so much content to go through every week, and I would be tested on small details in the readings, so skimming or skipping the readings entirely was not feasible. Additionally, it made me a much faster and confident writer, as for the second half of the test I had to write a short essay in 20 minutes.

I also continually find myself looking back on the content I learned in this class to help understand other classes that I am taking. While there are methodological questions and issues with a class promising to give you the history of the world, it has been useful to get the broad sweeps of history, particularly in that this class helped me to understand what was happening elsewhere in the world during the “big events” like the fall of the Roman Empire, or European expansion to the Americas. While this class was probably my least favourite in first year, it has been one of the more useful classes in my degree thus far.