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

Posted on February 9, 2019 by Bram Hubbell · 16 Comments

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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Decolonizing Modern World History

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Bram Hubbell · 7 Comments

For the last couple years, I have been struggling to figure out what I want to do with this blog. When I began posting more regularly during my sabbatical in 2015-2016, I imagined it to be a place to reflect on my ideas about world history pedagogy. For the most part, that is what the […]

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Healing the Sick Man of Europe

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Bram Hubbell · Leave a comment

If the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was going through a period of transformation, rather than beginning a 400 year decline, it would seem that the Empire, which collapsed in 1922, had to be declining in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While it’s true that the Empire lost substantial territory, too much […]

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Eurocentrism and the Myth of East Asian Isolation

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Bram Hubbell · Leave a comment

The idea that China and Japan from c.1450 to c.1800 were “isolated” is one of the more persistent myths in world history. Each year at the AP World History reading, I can’t even begin to count the number of times I read some variation of this argument. It even has shown up in essays that […]

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