World History from 1200 to 1750

(Update Nov. 7, 2008: These courses are no longer available, but check the UCSD course podcast site for current offerings.)

Back when I was in college in the 1970s, “world history” really meant the history of Western civilization, usually starting with the Greeks and the ancient Israelites, and traveling through the familiar historical archipelago with stops in medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and moving on to finish in the atomic age.

When my daughter went to UC San Diego a generation later, “world history” had become indeed World History. She took a two year sequence of courses called Making of the Modern World (MMW for short), which covered events and cultural developments in China, India and the Moslem world as well as touching on key happenings in western civilization.

Now, in the era of Internet course podcasts, I have had the opportunity to listen to part of the UCSD MMW series, and I can only hope that UCSD will post other segments of MMW in the future. The segment currently available to Internet podcast fans is MMW 4, which looks at the world from 1200 to 1750, and gets us through the career of Genghis Khan, numerous Chinese emperors and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, along with the beginning of the scientific revolution. I listened to the fall 2006 version of the course taught by Stanley Chodorow, which is available on iTunes (link). You can also access the fall 2007 version of MMW 4 (feed), taught by Matthew Herbst, on the UCSD podcast website.