This project emerged out of a dialogue
between world historians and world geographers. It addresses the
rampant historical and geographic illiteracy among the current student
population and their inability to see connections between the two disciplines.
These tutorials foster a greater awareness of the impact of geography in
understanding history and the importance of historical analysis in analyzing
spatial conceptions. Too often, students think of history as a study
of people and events and geography as a study of places. What these
tutorials highlight is the study of historical and geographical processes
that over time shaped the world we live in today. Processes are defined
as broad movements of peoples, ideas, technology, organizational principles,
religions, commodities, and general economic structures across cultural
and regional boundaries. Such movements have occurred since Homo
sapiens emerged and spread out of Africa to inhabit much of the planet
starting 150,000 years ago. Theses exchanges across place and time
shaped the past as much as they do the present. Simply understanding
the importance of an event such as the life of the Buddha and the place
he lived, northern India, for example, does not teach students how and
why this religion shaped the history of societies as diverse as the pastoral
nomads of Central Asia to rice growers in Southeast Asia. Students
need to understand how both geography and people and events influenced
this process such as the diffusion of religions over long distances and
over long periods of time. Understanding such long-term processes
is the crux of both World History and World Geography. What me aim
for is a better concept of metageography, “a set of spatial structures
through which people order their knowledge of the world; the often unconscious
frameworks that organize studies of history, sociology, anthropology, economics,
political science, or even natural history.” (Martin Lewis and Karen Wiggins,
The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, University of California
Press, 1997, p. ix)
A lack of adequate resources handicaps teachers
and students of both disciplines. Textbooks in both disciplines tend
to divide subject material into narrowly defined regions that mirror current
perceptions of geography and culture. Chapters are organized to focus
on one region or society at a time. They often fail to capture the
larger processes that transcend those regions or societies over time.
For example, the Eastern Coast of Africa became predominately Muslim in
terms of religion after 1000 C.E and remains so today. This resulted
from a system of trade and cultural exchange that transpired among various
societies in the Indian Ocean basin that began long before Islam even emerged
in the seventh century. But by focusing on Africa as a unit, many
textbooks reinforce the idea of Africa as a separate entity.
Maps available for students and teachers also hinder
the awareness of large historical and geographic forces operating throughout
human history. They too are often regionally focused and even if
they explore transregional processes, tend to be limited in chronological
scope. And too many maps are constructed using the prism of nation
states that exist today, and do not consider other ways of organizing and
representing long-term processes that transcend this paradigm. Besides,
printed maps are static and have a hard time explaining change over long
periods of time and wide space.
The following tutorials use the power of the Internet
and animation software to address these problems. Each one explores
an historical process that transpired across region, culture, and time.
The center of each tutorial is an animated map. They also include
related Internet sites to provide further visual and textual information
to explore the process in further detail. Theses activities force
the student to analyze the role of geography in shaping historical
development. And they move beyond the simple study of events and
places in order to encourage the realization that events and places are
better understood as parts of widespread and long term processes that have
shaped the past, the present, and will continue to do so in the future.
Note: The maps used below show contemporary boundaries
of nation states. This is intended to give students a reference point,
not to suggest that nation states guided the processes examined.
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