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: "Utopian Thinking in the 16th Century."  

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What did it mean to imagine a better world in a sixteenth century wracked by devastating pandemics, new awareness about global cultures, and reform movements that challenged basic assumptions about the universe? History for the Twenty-First Century’s newest open-access, ready-to-teach module Utopian Thinking in the Sixteenth Century invites your students to explore how groups across the Atlantic World responded to crisis and upheaval by imagining—and sometimes building—something better. 

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Created by Jesse Spohnholz at Washington State University, this module asks your students to weigh both the imaginative power and real-world limitations of utopian writing and experiments across Europe, the Americas, and sub-Saharan Africa.  Along the way, your students will build skills in close reading of primary texts, comparative analysis across regions and time periods, and critical evaluation of idealized visions against historical reality. As Spohnholz explains, “I wrote this module to help students understand the creative potential for the world opening up in the sixteenth century, and to see how the limits of people’s imaginations then led to inequalities we still grapple with today. I hope that this learning will also help them imagine constructive possibilities for their own futures, and to identify the inadequate creativity of so many promises for the future being offered to them today.” 

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Lesson 1 sets utopian thinking among the Mexica and in the Kingdom of Kongo alongside three fifteenth-century European visions—an architect's ideal city, an imaginary city built to critique patriarchy, and a prophecy of Christ's imminent return. Lesson 2 turns to the Atlantic World transformed by contact: students examine Thomas More's own Utopia  alongside Vasco de Quiroga's vision of utopian villages for Indigenous communities in colonial Mexico. Lesson 3 moves from imagination to experiment, examining the Taqui Onqoy movement in the Andes, Brazil's Santidade movement blending Tupí, Catholic, and West African beliefs, and Protestant efforts to build persecution-free Christian communities in the Americas and Europe. A concluding lesson ends around 1600, with  one imaginary utopian city and one real-life utopian project —asking students to weigh what these utopias delivered, and at whose expense.

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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

• Collecting in the Colonies: Hidden Histories of British Science, 1660-1838 [NEW!]

• 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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