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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

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

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.

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.