HIST 3379: World Civilizations to 1500
HIST 3379: World Civilizations to 1500 (University of Houston). Instructor: Professor Sally Vaughn. This course is a comparative survey of six major geographical and cultural areas (West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, Europe, and Meso-America) from 4000 BC to 1500 CE.
The course explores most of the early civilizations throughout the world. It tries to examine the basis on which civilizations are built, the resources required for them to develop, and the conditions under which they thrive, growing in different directions. And also it examines why civilizations fail to thrive, or end.
| Lecture 1A - Introduction: What is History? What is Truth? |
| Lecture 1B - Before There was History |
| Lecture 2A - Mesopotamia, The Search for Order, The Middle Eastern Cradles of Civilization |
| Lecture 2B - Ancient Egyptian Civilization |
| Lecture 3A - The First Barbarian Invasions into the Middle Eastern World |
| Lecture 3B - The Hebrews, The God Who Did Wrong |
| Lecture 4A - The Indus Valley Civilization and The Hindus: The Search for Divine Realty |
| Lecture 4B - China: Three Ways of Thought |
| Lecture 5A - North and Central America |
| Lecture 5B - South America |
| Lecture 6A - The Glory that was Greece |
| Lecture 6B - The Greek Mind |
| Lecture 7A - The Grandeur that was Rome |
| Lecture 7B - Jesus and His Followers, Son of the God Who Did Wrong |
| Lecture 8A - Byzantium, the Second Rome; or Has Rome Really Fallen? |
| Lecture 8B - Origins of Imperial China, The Han Empire |
| Lecture 9A - Indo-China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific |
| Lecture 9B - Tang and Song China |
| Lecture 10A - Early Germans, Charlemagne, How Dark were the Dark Ages? |
| Lecture 10B - Islam: Return of the Middle East |
| Lecture 11A - The Flowering of Africa |
| Lecture 11B - The Vikings and the Year One Thousand |
| Lecture 12A - The Mongols East and West |
| Lecture 12B - Japan |
| Lecture 13A - Medieval Renaissance of the 12th Century |
| Lecture 13B - Medieval Renaissance of the 12th Century (cont.) |
| Lecture 14A - The Age of Discovery |
| Lecture 14B - The Age of Discovery (cont.) |