Exploring Periodization in the Classroom: A Seminar on the Early‐Modern World

Abstract

AbstractThe idea of an ‘early‐modern world’ has come into common use despite historians’ lack of enthusiasm for it as a concept. Possible implications of teleology, eurocentrism, and artificial homogenization not unfairly discourage professional confidence in it. The article describes an undergraduate seminar that takes advantage of the professional uncertainty about early modernity. As they move through a series of thematically organized readings, participants construct and revamp a potentially multifaceted definition of the early‐modern world. Simultaneously, each student specializes in a chosen region and uses that place as a test case to evaluate the working definition as it evolves. The result is a learning experience that maximizes both cooperative and individual research to achieve a balance between the specific and the global.