Current Events in World History

Current Events in World History is a practice or apprentice scholar class exploring current events by studying events in world history.

We spent two weeks on each topic, although more could be used, but we had a 12-week semester.

As a weekly activity, we did "Factoids" where each student would find an interesting factoid to share with the rest of the class on a given topic. This served as a mini-research exercise. The topic was usually related to the lecture of the week before. I would stress the interesting part of the factoid. Toward the end, some of them were merely reading from a wikipedia page they had printed out before class. They should be automatically disqualified if it is not interesting enough that they can tell us about it without a paper in front of them.

Lecture Topics

Topic 1: Haiti and Toussaint L'Ouverture

Topic 2: Simon Bolivar

Topic 3: Viet Nam

Topic 4: Northern Ireland

Topic 5: The Balkans

Climax: Current Events in World History

(One of the inspirations for this class was the book "Ender's Shadow", specifically the part where Bean, through his study of the past and comparing with present news, is able to predict what will happen when the war with the buggers ends. Many of the specific topics were inspired by stories on Democracy Now!)

Off-topic

Annotated booklist compiled when teaching tjyc-prep class.

My Worldview Summary.

South America notes