HIST 171 World History, 1500-Present

Overview of Course

HIST 171 introduces students to modern world history through a global and comparative framework that emphasizes mobility, exchange, conflict, and changing power relations across regions. The course shifts away from a primarily Europe-centered narrative and instead uses port cities and maritime worlds as an organizing structure for understanding the emergence of the modern world. Ports offer especially valuable sites for historical inquiry because they make visible the circulation of goods, peoples, ideas, religions, technologies, labor systems, and political movements across time.
Through the study of ports and connected regions, students analyze how global historical change was shaped not only by imperial states and commercial powers, but also by local communities, migrants, enslaved peoples, laborers, translators, religious minorities, reformers, and anti-colonial activists. Major topics include early modern maritime expansion, labor systems, cultural exchange, revolutions, industrialization, nationalism, imperialism, global war, decolonization, and contemporary globalization. The course asks students to connect local case studies to wider historical processes and to understand modern world history as a history of uneven, contested, and interconnected transformations. This framing builds directly from the earlier course emphasis on exchanges and migrations, conflict and resistance, and alterations in the balance of power across regions.
Learning outcomes support core goals in history instruction such as historical thinking, comparative analysis, interpretation of evidence, and written and oral communication. The course also supports general education goals related to global awareness, critical reading, and engagement diverse historical perspectives. Field observations in port offer historical evidence of connection to broader world-historical processes.