Founded in 2019 and led by several WHA members, H/21 is an effort by scholars and practitioners to support faculty who are introducing today's students to a deep study of world history.  Content-rich materials produced by H/21 are combined with effective pedagogy and curriculum design strategies.   They center primary sources and multimedia materials to encourage students to perceive transnational pattens and events in history. 

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If you haven't encountered H/21 before, it's a free, open-access library of complete teaching modules for introductory world history courses, including readings, primary sources, lesson plans, slides, and assessments, all built by historians for historians and classroom-tested. H/21 is a collaborative project with the World History Association, helping to bring resources like this one directly to instructors like you. Modules can be dropped whole into a syllabus or mined for individual lessons to address your pedagogical needs.

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We're delighted to highlight the newest of the H/21 modules: "Collecting in the Colonies: Hidden Histories of British Science, 1660-1838."

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Whose knowledge and labor built modern science? And whose contributions have been neglected, ignored, or forgotten?

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History for the Twenty-First Century's newest open-access, ready-to-teach module "Collecting in the Colonies: Hidden Histories of British Science, 1660–1838"  asks your students to investigate the production of British scientific knowledge in the early modern era and its reliance on the transatlantic slave trade and colonial exploitation. Along the way, students will help to recover the contributions of enslaved and free people of African descent, who have often been written out of that story. Students will also build skills in primary-source analysis, comparative evaluation of institutional versus community knowledge, and reading against the grain to uncover marginalized voices. 

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As its author Libi Sundermann explains, “I wrote this module to help students understand the convergence of science and slavery wasn't happenstance; the archive reveals that from its origins, the Royal Society considered the Royal African Company its "twin sister." A handful of these archival sources, further reveal that Society naturalists relied on, but rarely accredited, the labor, knowledge and skills of African peoples forced into the Atlantic World diaspora. The module finishes with a discussion of how contemporary scientific institutions, like the National History Museum in London, are "decolonizing" their collections following closer reading of their own archives."

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Lesson 1 examines the Royal Society's 1662 founding alongside the Royal African Company's Royal Charter, showing how early British naturalists built their scientific networks on the same ships and trade routes that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Lesson 2 turns to the practice of collecting itself: British naturalists, including Charles Darwin, relied on colonial networks — ship captains, plantation owners, trading company employees, and enslaved African and indigenous people — to collect and transport specimens and scientific knowledge back to London for study and display. Lesson 3 reads against the grain to recover the contributions of enslaved men and women whose scientific and medical knowledge rarely earned them recognition.  A concluding lesson connects this history directly to today's efforts to decolonize scientific institutions and collections.

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H/21 materials are free, inquiry-based, and student-centered.    They are designed for introductory/survey courses but frankly it doesn't matter what school, college, or university uses them.   H/21 does not tell educators how they should teach courses.   Instead, educators can freely adapt these resources and materials to the needs of specific classrooms and a wide array of students.   

 

Currently H/21 has produced an exemplary series of peer-reviewed and peer-tested modules revolving around key themes in world history, including: 

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• Africans and the African Diaspora in the First World War

• Atlantic Piracy in Global Perspective, c. 1500-1750

• Experiencing Colonialism: Identity and Resistance in French Algeria [NEW!]

• Hunting, Imperialism, and the Wilderness

• Imperial Strategies in the Early Chinese Empires

• Monuments and Memories in the Atlantic Revolutions 

• Questioning Decolonization

• Refugees in the Early Modern Atlantic World

• The Black Death: The Medieval Plague Pandemic [NEW!]

• The Global 1905: Facets of a Year; Facets of an Era

• The Global Silk Trade

• Unsovereign Space

• Utopian Thinking in the 16th Century [NEW!]

• Women and Anti-Colonialism in Africa [NEW!]

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