Big Era Five: Panorama Unit

Why This Unit?

This teaching unit will help students understand and appreciate the many types of interactions that took place among the world’s peoples during the period 300-1500 CE. While many teachers and students are familiar with the histories and contributions of individual civilizations and regions, traditional instructional materials provide few opportunities to link and compare developments that connected societies across regions and around the world. This unit provides an overview of several important varieties of change. Students will get a “big picture” of the rise and fall of empires and states. They will learn how world population changed during this era. They will view examples of cultural exchanges involving trade, migrations, religious expansion, transfer of knowledge, and diffusion of inventions and crops. These exchanges all contributed in one way or another to the speedup of technological, cultural, political, and economic change in the world.

This unit leads teachers and students to appreciate the cross-cultural exchanges that preceded and laid the groundwork for scientific, technological, and other developments often incorrectly assumed to have originated only in Europe. Cultural achievements typically associated only with one particular civilization or another are presented in the larger context of dynamic interrelations among diverse peoples.