2025-06-28 –, Mezzanine A
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, based on their original research. Eric Nelson’s presentation explores the relationship between “Big History” and local history, challenging students to draw connections between their lives and large-scale developments in cosmic and human history. Wendy Urban-Mead will present a lesson about Africans and the African diaspora in World War I, centering the experiences of African colonial subjects in French West Senegal and German and British East Africa. Brenna Miller’s presentation will address teaching the history of the construction of large-scale dams in the twentieth century, through case studies of post-World War II damming projects in Egypt, Ghana, and India. All of these papers offer a discussion of interactive, student-centered pedagogical strategies, highlighting the use primary sources in the classroom, critical thinking, and historical empathy.
World history, pedagogy, big history, World War I, African American history, environmental history, Cold War, damming
“Glocalizing” Big History
Title for Additional Participant 2:Africans and the African Diaspora in the First World War
Title for Additional Participant 3:Dams, Development, and Decolonization
Urmi Engineer Willoughby is an Associate Professor of History at Pitzer College. Her research focuses on histories of disease and medicine from a global and ecological perspective. She is part of H/21, a collaborative project of the WHA that supports college and university faculty by offering free, inquiry-based, and student-centered learning materials. Her first book, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Louisiana State University Press, 2017) was awarded the 2017 Williams Prize for the best book in Louisiana history. Her current project, titled Cultivating Malaria: The Historical Ecology of Fever in Early America, is an environmental and cultural history of malaria in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.