World Teach

Here's an interesting story from the PBS NewsHour about a Muslim slave from West Africa who was kidnapped and brought to Ameria in the 1800s. The slave, Omar Ibn Said, wrote his autobiography in Arabic so it could not be edited or censored by masters or even abolitionists. Said begins his autobiography with a quote from the Quran that says only God has true possession of human beings. It's an interesting story because it dispels the idea that slaves were illiterate or incapable of culture. The Library of Congress digitized  the autobiography.  It also has a link to a podcast called the Long Journey of Omar Ibn Said and a video about the preservation of Said's manuscript. Finally, you can read a blog post about how to use the manuscript in the classroom.

Studying the Cold War? Here's a link to a timeline assignment  I made for eight Cold War events. Students used Sutori to annotate each event with a summary, an image, and notation about whether the event was part of containment theory, NATO or Warsaw Pact, capitalism or communism, or a nuclear weapons issue.

India's major political party, the BJP, is renaming towns with Muslim names, like Allahabad, which dates to the 16th century, when Mughals first conquered northern India. The story, which comes from NPR, reminds us of other name changes like Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, and Calcutta to Kolkata. This might be an interesting story for students to see how history impacts current events in India and even to debate the case for changing the names. Does India have an obligation to its Mughal past and is the Modi government trying to change history?  

Studying the Cold War.?  The Korean War figures prominently in that period. Here is a great site, sponsored by the Korea Foundation , that has awesome resources for studying the differences between North and South Korea. It's called World History Digital Education . The lesson is divided into three categories as you can see below--comparison, contextualization, and continuity and change. The comparison lesson includes eight primary documents, four on North Korea and four on South Korea.  The student has to evaluate the state's role in the development of the economies.  One document includes a telegram from  Chairman Mao Zedong to Josef Stalin.  In another document, Kim Il-sung, Premier of North Korea and founder of the Korean Workers' Party Central Committee Plenum, speaks about solidarity in the socialist bloc. The lesson also includes a series of charts and graphs comparing the development of the two states, including military capacity and ...