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Two Resources for Teaching Religion in the Classroom

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Here are two great resources for incorporating religion into your curriculum. One is an excellent podcast about religion called  The Classical Ideas Podcast  and the other is a terrific youtube channel about religion called  Religion for Breakfast . Classical Ideas Podcast Gregory J. Soden, a doctoral student in social studies education, hosts a podcast about religion. Some of his topics are ideal for the classroom.  For example, Episode 74 reviews the basic beliefs , practices, important people, and specific goals of the Sikh religion . His guests are two prominent Sikhs,  Dr. Harbaksh & Jasmine Sangha, and Dr. Chetan and Ranjana Hans. Another episode deals with Shintoism .   Eric Lancaster is Soden's guest.  He is an instructor of Japanese at the University of Missouri and an instructor of religious studies at Columbia College. Soden tackles Toaism in Episode 57 with Dr. Pablo Mendoza, Assistant to the President for Social Equity at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He h
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Teaching Religion in World History

T EACHING RELIGION IN WORLD HISTORY Part I: THE LIMITATIONS OF BELIEF Dr. Robert Strayer Earlier this year, Dr. Robert Strayer , author of the textbook , Ways of the World , wrote a fascinating two-part reflection on the AP World Facebook page about teaching religion in world history. With his permission, I am reposting his reflections below. Dr. Strayer offers some good advice to those of us who incorporate religion into our world history curriculum. For example, he reminds us that we must remain agnostic "about the validity of the "truth-claims" in world history." And in Part II, he notes the importance of showing how religion changes and evolves over time. The heart of religious life, it seems to me, involves human interaction with an assumed but invisible realm. At least until the European Enlightenment, the assumption that such a realm existed, that there is more than meets the eye, was pretty much universal, though expressed and experienced in a great variety
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Science Revises the Heavens: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler

Here's the dated, but still very good, James Burke documentary, Science Revises the Heavens, from the series, The Day the Universe Changed. Burke examines the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Some parts are terrific for class. For example, Burke does a great job of explaining the heliocentric view of the universe.
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Decline of the Ottoman Empire: Short Clip from Caspian Report

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Here's a terrific 10-minute clip from Shirvan Neftchi for the Caspian Report about the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Neftchi notes that there was no single catastrophic event that caused the Ottoman downfall.  He notes that the empire was falling apart from the inside for centuries. The Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683 both weakened the empire. But the decline of the Ottoman empire was very gradual and, according to this report, began with Venetian traders who, along with other European traders, put so much pressure on Ottoman guilds that the government banned Europeans from buying strategic raw materials.  This led to a large black market which eventually corrupted the bureaucracy.
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The Global Nature of WWI: Two Awesome Twitter Threads

The 100th anniversary of the end of World War I has spawned a number of new resources about the war. Two of those resources remind us of the global nature of that war.  Both come from writers on twitter who tweeted the nature of the war in China and Africa I snagged both twitter threads and used a service to embed them below. My thanks to Angela Lee for tweeting both. The first comes from Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, Director of Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism. Chow notes that although China contributed much to the war effort, including an untold story over 140,000 Chinese laborers who fought on the European frontlines beside French, Russian and British troops,  she got few concessions at Versailles. The thread includes some interesting links including a trailer for a new movie from Yellow Earth Productions called "Forgotten" that is about China during the war. Another link takes you to a fascinating National Post Story about Chinese Labor Corps during the war. The second tw
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European Sailors and Navigational Tools in the Age of Encounter and Exchange

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NOTE: I changed the title of this post from "European Explorers and their Tools in the Age of Discovery" to European Sailors and Navigational Tools in the Age of Encounter and Exchange. I did so because of an excellent essay by Bram Hubbell,  an AP World History teacher in New York. Hubbell notes that referring to the period between 1450 and 1750 as the age of discovery is misleading because it "implies that Europeans were the first to reach the Americas." And, notes Hubbell, Da Gamma, Magellan, and other Europeans were not really explorers,  "They were playing catch up & learning about Indian Ocean navigational knowledge that others had known for 1500 years already!" Studying European sailors in the 1500's? Here are two good resources, both of which might work for short web quests. One includes the Mariners Museum lets you explore the instruments of exploration as well the explorers by time period.  During the Age of Discovery, you can look at s
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Using Images in AP World History

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Images offer students a great way to understand history. The AP World History chat recently asked teachers to suggest images they used in their classes.  Here are a few that I snagged. Bram Hubbell tweeted the handout below for analyzing images which ask students to consider the context, audience, and message of each image. The nine images below cover all periods from post-classical to the early 20th century. The image below represents the Danse Macabre, or the Dance of Death, painted in the 16th century during the Black Death. Here's an image from the Song Dyansty scroll which shows society and urban life in Song China. Here is a 1918 image from an Indian Home Rule pamphlet. It shows the British keeping Indians off Wilson's boat of self-determination. The image below from Puck in 1899  shows Japanese perceptions of the West. The image below come s from a Chinese newspaper in China on western colonialism and the response of the Qing court.  According to the essay from which th
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