Plagues, Saints and Empires: The World before 1500

Catalog description

This course will look at themes and patterns in world history before 1500. Topics will include practical issues, such as ways to feed people and develop trading networks; different ways to run increasingly complicated societies, from small nomadic groups to cities to empires; patterns of disease and epidemics and environmental changes; the changing roles of ideas and religions and education; varying ideas about gender roles and class structures; and many ways people tried to integrate different peoples, cultures and ideas into a unified society.