HIST 125: Introduction to Global History

HIST 125-DLG: Introduction to Global History
(Fall 2025)

Online

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Section Information for Fall 2025

As we collectively live through the 4th Industrial Revolution, replete with AI, quantum computing, and robots increasingly mimicking human interactions in startling ways, the question of how we arrived at this historical juncture seems more pertinent than ever. What forces shaped and gave rise to the modern world? What do we even mean by the term “modern”? The movement of peoples, animals, raw materials, consumer products, and ideas of all stripes across territories and borders is not a new phenomenon, and yet, there is something different about how the current world system functions and delivers consumer products to our doorsteps. “Systems are never in reality to be found in their pure form,” historian Maurice Dobb has written. “In any period of history elements characteristic both of preceding and of succeeding periods are to be found, sometimes mingled in extraordinary complexity.” Parts of the new society “are contained in the womb of the old; and relics of an old society survive for long into the new.”

HIST 125 is about historicizing these paradoxically incremental and sudden changes in global history by studying the forces—empire, war, trade, capitalism, religion, disease, industrialization, decolonization, to name a few—that made the modern world global in scope and form. The goal is for us to think more analytically and precisely about the big trends of history, seeing just how powerfully everything has been connected since at least the sixteenth century, if not before. Our course begins in roughly 1300 and marches forward to our present day.

This is an online asynchronous section.

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Course Information from the University Catalog

Credits: 3

By focusing on historical experiences that reflect the diversity of Mason’s student body, students will be able to see how their families and communities fit within, and contribute to, global history from the pre-modern period to our present day. This course offers a long-term historical perspective on structural issues challenging our world today, including demographic and environmental changes, national and global inequalities, and the underrepresentation of marginalized groups. Students will gain an understanding of how interconnections and inter-dependencies have been forged through the global movement of people, pathogens, goods, and ideas. Offered by History & Art History. Limited to three attempts.
Mason Core: Mason Core, Global History
Schedule Type: Lecture, Recitation
Grading:
This course is graded on the Undergraduate Regular scale.

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