A History of the World since 1300 @ FIX University Cultural Campus

A History of the World since 1300

Jeremy Adelman

This course will examine the ways in which the world has grown more integrated yet more divided over the past 700 years.


Dear FIX,

“A World History since 1300” is about to start. Many have already begun discussing the text and sharing views and information. The global conversations are off to a great beginning. Almost 5,000 of you have joined the course since I sent out my first general email. For those who’ve just joined the group (if I can call a 70,000-plus assembly a group – it’s more like a society), let me urge you to look around the site of the course and familiarize yourself with its components, the schedule, the format of the assignments, the menu of active Forums. If you have questions, chances are they have been posed in the Forums, with lots of helpful tips from around the globe.

This email will do three things.

The first is to remind you that the lectures begin on Sunday at 6:00 pm (Princeton-New York time); lectures 1 and 2 will be posted for your viewing any time you like during the following week and will remain posted until the end of the semester. We figure that 60-70% of the enrolled students live outside the United States, so be sure to adjust for your time zones.

Second, I want to introduce you to some people who will feature in the conversations in the Forum discussions. One theme of this course is that the scale of an economy, from a village to a world market, denotes a division of labor. A course of this size, like the world economy, will benefit from a bit of labor-dividing.

Three Princeton graduate students will assist me. They are:

Valeria López-Fadul. You will recognize Valeria as the person helping me in the recording studio, so you will see a lot of her. Valeria is from Cartagena, Colombia. Her research focuses on the early modern Iberian world. Her dissertation explores how a group of early modern Spanish scholars, working under the patronage of Philip II, thought about language and the empire’s linguistic diversity. It considers the methods that these scholars employed to understand the origins of peoples and the history of places; and how the Spanish crown, through scientific expeditions or the creation of libraries, attempted to harness this linguistic knowledge for its own political benefit.

Melissa Teixeira. Melissa is a third-year graduate student in Princeton’s history department, with an interest in the history of Latin America and the Portuguese-speaking world. Her dissertation explores the history of social and economic ideas and strategies for economic development during the twentieth century in a transnational perspective, by following the exchanges of ideas, people, and policies between Brazil and Portugal. Originally from New York, Melissa has studied and conducted research in Great Britain, Brazil and Portugal.

Franziska Exeler is a Ph.D. candidate in Princeton's history department. Originally from Germany, her research focuses on Russian and Eurasian history. In her dissertation examines post-World War II Soviet Belorussia; she investigates the legacies of one totalitarian state (the Nazi wartime occupation regime) as they unfolded in the postwar years within the context of another totalitarian state (Stalin's Soviet Union).

All three will be present to some extent in the Forums as “Instructors”, but Melissa Teixeira in particular will be my co-troubleshooter.

I’d also like to introduce you to several students in the course whom I have asked to take on the role of “Community Teaching Assistants.” From the beginning, they have taken a special interest in contributing to the Forum discussions and I have given them the task of helping to guide discussions. You will see them as Susan Spaulding, Jude Adamson, Bill Camarga, Antonio M C Vieira, and Helga Maria Saboia Bezerra. They will appear as “Community TA’s”.

I am grateful to all of them for their help in this great experiment.

Third, it will help us all to sustain the global conversations if we understand and share some basic conventions in the Forum discussions. This component is potentially the most innovative aspect of our new venture and what adds the global to global learning. It can also go awry. There are currently 160 threads with about 1,700 postings, 1,200 comments, and 47,000 “views” already and the lectures have yet to begin! We are going to need to work together to make this manageable and accessible at the same time. My ability to be engaged with you – and this is my commitment – depends to some extent on how many threads are open. If there are too many, I can’t keep up, and nor will many of you. So, let’s try to keep a balance between our many voices and some focus on key themes and questions. Not easy: a history of the world over seven centuries?

Here are a few steps we are taking and hints for how to exploit best this resource that we ourselves create.

1. I am working with Coursera to create some meaningful Forum categories. You will already see that the Forums menu is different from the first day. These categories of “sub-forums” will give you at a glance ways into the forums rather than having to scroll through the 160-plus threads. Some are related to threads related to components of the course (lectures, readings, Global Dialogues etc), and some are related to topics (environment, technology, states, etc). If you have an issue with a reading, check the set of threads clustered under the sub-forum of “Readings.” Want to know more about technology? Check out the threads under the sub-forum “Technology.” Do this before starting a new thread so we can prevent duplication.

2. There are a lot of threads with invaluable information in them, but they are older and often piled under newer threads. In fact, many are so buried that people start new threads on issues that have already been resolved in older threads. In the coming week, I will work with Coursera to start moving older threads into the sub-forums so you don’t have to go all the way back to the beginning to find something interesting. This is a system of “archiving” the shared knowledge we have created. This too should prevent duplication.

3. When you post, consider whether you want to respond to a particular comment or reply to a whole thread. The comment option appears right at the bottom of an entry; the reply option appears at the bottom of the thread. This helps readers sort out whether you are adding something new to the whole discussion or engaging a specific point by a peer.

4. When you do have a reply, be sure to identify what argument/what people in the thread you are responding to. A thread can be a little bit like a party with many conversations going at the same time. Be sure we all understand who or what you are speaking too – or we are going to wind up shouting to be heard.

5. When you create a new thread, make sure you choose a useful title. “An Interesting Fact” is not a useful title. Nor is “What is this?” We will have no idea whether to open your thread. Given the number of threads, we probably won’t. Be specific about the content and which domain your forum addresses.

6. Use “Tags” in the upper left corner when you create a discussion. Accurate your tags make it easier for everyone to search and find the material that will be embedded in your thread.

This is all a work in progress. Coursera’s platform evolves constantly, as will this course. As I learn, I will send you weekly emails like this one to keep us all in tune.

So, as we are about to go “live” I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to think globally with you and wish us all an active and creative semester.

Jeremy Adelman & "A History of the World since 1300" Course Staff