HIST 487
Lives Across Cultures in the Early Modern World Spring 2018
Division II Writing Skills Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

The early modern era, 1500-1800, was the first truly global era in human history. While the period can be studied in terms of transregional trade and flows of capital, macrohistory cannot reveal the human texture of global interaction–the many ways in which people from different continents, religions and languages responded to each other as they increasingly came into contact. In order to explain what early modern globalization looked like on the ground, historians of our time have attempted to recover individual lives that played out across cultures and religions. They have debated whether intercultural experiences caused people to question their own assumptions or to harden in their beliefs, and whether the transition between religious and cultural environments empowered or entrapped these men and women. Through a series of case studies, we will investigate how people made lives across the early modern world, how historians have written about them, and what these historical experiences tell us about how the modern world was made. Readings will combine primary sources with global biographies by major historians of our time. The course will contribute to the College’s Exploring Diversity Initiative by examining how people interacted across cultures in the first global era.