TimeMaps Learning Centre: Colleges

Learning Centre: Universities and Colleges

Many universities and colleges offer world history courses, or courses with a large content of world history; in the US, for example, History 101 comes to mind. The TimeMaps Atlas of World History is a free online resource which will eventually cover all the world's history, and will be of great benefit to students following these courses.

However, I believe this resource will also offer a great deal to students following more specialized courses.

A personal anecdote....

I was on a plane to Rome recently, and got talking to the guy sitting next to me. He turned out to be a university history professor. His field was modern Italian history. I hesitantly told him about the project I was working on (i.e. this Atlas), wondering how interested he would be.

In fact he was fascinated, and said that something like this would be of real use to him. He said he could really do with a “ready-reference” to pre-modern Italian history, both for himself and his students. He thought a map-based approach would be a very effective model, and what would be particularly useful about such a resource, he said, was that it would present history in such a way that the broader context could be readily accessible, and so the significance of what was happening could be more easily appreciated.

We very much hope that educators will encourage their students to use this free online resource. We believe that it will offer important benefits for history students:

1. It will give them the “Big Picture”, which will give meaning and context to the topics they study. By seeing how the different civilizations, empires and nations fit into the broader context of world history, students will see clearly how they relate to one another, chronologically and geographically.

2. Using the maps will give them an understanding of “place”, crucial to the most rudimentary understanding of a topic but often hard for students to grasp.

3. The maps and their accompanying texts will offer an excellent starting point for the study of a subject, designed as they are to provide a broad overview.

4. Using the maps will greatly enhance a student’s understanding of “what happened where, when” – in other words, seeing how historical episodes and events developed over time. This is often difficult to convey with text but graphically illustrated with maps.

5. Students will have access to the history of places and civilizations which may not be covered by the curricula on offer. This may be of particular importance to those whose families come from parts of he world left out of the curriculum they are following, but will be of interest and benefit to all students.

6. Much of the information presented in the atlas will be quite new – not only to the students but quite possibly also to you, their teachers. This atlas gives teachers as well as students the access they need to broaden their knowledge.

7. A breadth of knowledge of the history of all regions of the world is an increasingly important attribute of full citizenship in the modern world.

8. Most importantly of all, we believe that students – and hopefully teachers too - will find the information presented in the atlas fascinating.

At the moment the Atlas covers only the BC years of the ancient world in any depth – and even here there are many more maps, diagrams and articles to go in. As the coverage expands, the above aims will be increasingly achieved. The atlas is being constructed with these aims very much in view. Please bear with us!