“People Who Have Interrupted Empire”: African and Indigenous Resistance to the Portuguese and Spanish Empires in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

I’ve looked at more world history textbooks than I want to admit. One thing almost all of them have in common is some discussion of Portuguese maritime expansion along the western coast of Africa in the fifteenth century and the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century. These processes are often […]

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Less Scrambling, More Reflecting: Unpacking Simulations of Imperialism and How We can better Teach about the Berlin Conference, the European Colonization of Africa, and African Resistance

Every year thousands of teachers of world history teach about the problematically-named “Scramble for Africa”, and many of them make use of a popular classroom simulation that seems to have originated in the 1990s, based on what some teachers have told me. I remember first seeing pictures of the activity showing up on the closed […]

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What We Can Learn from a Pair of Skating Owls: Teaching the Little Ice Age in World History Classes and its Importance for Today

For a number of years, Donald Trump has been tweeting about the myth of climate change based on cold weather. Just this past week, he even sarcastically called for more global warming. While most of people reading this essay will quickly dismiss Trump’s claims, it’s important to consider how our students think about not only […]

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Revolutionary Revolutions: Rethinking how we teach the political revolutions between 1750 and 1900

For many people, Twitter is a toxic morass of partisan political commentary, chest-thumping sports boosterism, and witty commentary about the latest awards show, but there are also dozens of teachers engaging in the nerdy pleasure of tweeting about world history pedagogy. Angela Lee, a teacher at Weston High School, started #whapchat (short for World History […]

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