WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

The H/21 Project (History for the Twenty-First Century) is a collaborative project of the World History Association, which seeks to rethink world history curricula by designing inquiry-based and student-centered lessons on critical topics in world history. The goal of this project is to support college and university faculty by offering open-access instructional materials, which include curated lessons with primary sources, instructor guides, and classroom activities. On this panel, three H/21 authors will discuss their new modules: Eric Nelson’s presentation explores a “Big History” module that aims to provide students with a mental map of four critical eras in our shared human history, while also strengthening skills in synthesis and historical empathy. Jodie Marshall will present a module in which students explore the early modern Indian Ocean as a space, connected through imperial ambition, trade, and human movement. Brenna Miller’s presentation will address teaching the history of shifting identities in Southeastern Europe, from imperial collapse, the rise of nationalism, war, and the Cold War. All of these papers offer a discussion of interactive, student-centered pedagogical strategies.

This panel examines how Ghanaians have imagined, navigated, and reshaped the wider world across two+ centuries, using worlding as an analytic to foreground how global visions are generated from particular West African places. We note that Ghanaian worlding’s are often left out of the global ‘world history’ picture, as are many others. Jennifer Hart’s presentation explores Accra as a site where imperial planners, development agencies, and diasporic cultural currents projected competing global ideals—from “model colony” to “capital of cool”—and shows how residents fashioned urban lives that engaged, contested, and reworked these shifting imaginaries. Trevor Getz’s analysis turns to late-nineteenth-century Cape Coast, where Anglophone communities avidly debated global politics, science, religion, and culture. Drawing on AI-assisted analysis of Gold Coast newspapers, it reveals a richly textured public sphere in which Gold Coasters interpreted events from Liverpool to India to the Americas, crafting their own sense of the world and their place within it. Finally, Tony Yeboah examines Kumase’s courtyard architecture as a material expression of transnational life. It traces how colonial interventions and later the remittance-funded building practices of Asante burgers reshaped domestic space and social relationships, producing built forms that make visible the region’s evolving weltanschauung. Together, these papers illuminate the diverse ways Ghanaians have worlded the world.

This workshop is led by History for the Twenty-First Century (H/21), a collaborative project of the World History Association, which develops teaching modules for introductory-level world history college courses. Following an introduction to the project goals and H/21's open-access resources, the organizers (Brenna Miller and Eric Nelson) will lead an interactive workshop to demonstrate practical examples of active-learning materials, that college and university instructors have successfully implemented in their courses. Attendees will have the opportunity to experience those materials first-hand, and consider ways in which they might implement these lessons in their classes. The workshop will also showcase some of the evidence gathered to date of successful outcomes of module lessons, based on surveys and studies conducted by the H/21 team.

This panel asks what happens when we the Second World War by foregrounding perspectives that sit at the edges of empire, nation, and historical memory. Together, the papers trace how people far from the well-known narrative epicenters nonetheless experienced the war as an intimate, dislocating, and world-shaping event. One paper examines British efforts to mobilize West African troops for the Burma Campaign, revealing a web of contradictions: African soldiers trained for desert warfare but deployed to jungles; colonial racial hierarchies so rigid that exiled Polish officers were drafted to lead them; and a conflict imagined for the Sahara that unfolded in Southeast Asia. A second paper widens the lens across West Africa, showing how both soldiers and civilians encountered shifting imperial loyalties, coercive mobilization, and new political ideas that unsettled colonial authority. A third paper shifts to rural north China, where locust plagues, famine, and fractured occupation regimes forced communities into parallel wartime struggles largely absent from global narratives. The final microhistory follows three Polish-Jewish-South African brothers whose wartime service shaped their contested positions within apartheid’s racial order. Together, these papers illuminate WWII as a genuinely global war—one lived and interpreted from profoundly liminal and marginalized spaces.