Office Hours:CLO 212 Monday and Wednesday, 5-6pm or byappointment.
Email:Dalspach@calumet.purdue.edu
Course Description:
This course investigates the rise of human civilization and its progress through history up to 1500 C.E. Tracking significant historical trends that bind each civilization together is fundamental to understanding our past. As a class we will be searching out those trends and formulating our own historical arguments based on primary source documents. Historians are concerned with explaining change and continuity over time. In this class, each student will have the opportunity to act as the historian and share their own ideas and arguments throughout the semester during the designated discussion days.
Our class begins this historical journey with three of the four major river system civilizations. This journey begins in the Middle East with the cultural accomplishments of Mesopotamian peoples. From there, we move southwest into the mysterious lands of Ancient Egypt before heading to the Far-East where we will encounter the puzzling, yet sophisticated, Harappan civilization of the Indus River Valley. Before long, we will find ourselves back in the Near-East discussing the rise of the Hebrews, the idea of monotheism and the significance of "covenant" in the Hebrew Scriptures. By this time, we have entered into what one historian has termed the "International Age" of world history. Civilizations are no longer developing in solitude, but are interacting with one another politically, economically and theologically. The great empires of world history; Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome and China have their foundations firmly established in this era. We will discuss history's great conquerors from Persia's Cyrus the Great to Macedonia's Alexander the Great to Rome's Pompey the Great. Politically, we will witness the rise of democracy in Greece, the revolution from Republic to Empire in Rome and the unification of China under one emperor. Theologically, we will study the paganism(s) of the Greco-Roman world and their response to members of a mystery cult from Palestine who called themselves "Christian." By this time, we have entered into the world of Late Antiquity, a world that witnessed the "triumph" of Gentile Christianity over paganism and the triumph of "barbarians" over the western Roman Empire. In the East, we will discuss the survival of East Rome as the Byzantine Empire, and its encounter with Islam, a fledgling faith that would grow into the most dominant political and theological power throughout the Middle East and North Africa. While the Islamic world is preserving and advancing the knowledge of the Ancients, the kingdoms of Europe are stuck in a "Dark Age"; an age of feudalism, monasticism and warfare. By now, the western world can be considered "Christian" and the Eastern world, "Islamic." However, both claimed the "Holy Land" as their own. As a class, we will seek to understand the causes and the motivations behind the Crusading movement. The wars between Christianity and Islam would last for over three centuries. Yet, the wars led to some important cultural achievements for both east and west. Unfortunately, those achievements would be stalled and threatened by the invasion of the Far-Eastern Mongol Empire and the coming invasion of the Black death...
