Alex Zukas

Cyberworld: Teaching World History on the World Wide Web

WHEN I WAS FIRST APPROACHED to teach a world history course over the Internet, I was fairly skeptical of the whole process of creating and teaching a course in which I would never meet my students face to face. The course was HIS 320: Capitalism, Culture, and Technology in Modem World History. I must say that I actually did not volunteer to teach the course online as much as I was recruited to do so by my university. I had greatness thrust upon me, so to speak. It was like that old comic gag where someone asks for volunteers and one person is not quick enough to notice that the whole line has just stepped back two paces leaving him or her in a position of lone prominence. I say this because my experience in creating and teaching an online course has been much better than my initial feelings would have led me to expect. About what was I skeptical? Well, my teaching philosophy and my approach to student learning were (and are) interactive and participatory and involved a great deal of small group work and dialogue as well as an appeal to diverse learning styles. I got students interested in a topic or issue through readings, short lectures, and questions and then allowed them to bring their diverse understandings of the material to bear on the issues raised by readings or lectures. I kept the discussion focused by asking follow-up questions while students whose interpretations were not

The Cartography of Herman Moll and European Views of Muslim South Asia, 1700–1730

This paper will discuss the work of the premier British cartographer of the early eighteenth century, Herman Moll, and his depictions and descriptions of the Muslim areas of South Asia (Mughal India and the Indonesian archipelago in particular). Moll was a strong proponent and propagandist of British overseas expansion, South Asia being one area of particular interest to him. His maps disseminated and popularized information and perspectives brought back by European merchants, travelers, and pirates and were meant to be purchased by (mainly) British merchants, elites, and wealthy commoners interested in understanding Muslim Asia and the opportunities and challenges for British economic and political interests in that part of the world. Moll’s visual and graphic vocabulary highlighted European commercial and political contact with the societies and empires of South Asia. His maps functioned as strategic documents about British engagement with Muslim South Asia and showed the possibilities and limits of significant cross-cultural encounters during his active cartographic period (ca. 1700 to ca. 1730), a time when an emerging British Empire encountered well-developed indigenous empires in South Asia.

Lazy, Apathetic and Dangerous: the Social Construction of Unemployed Workers in Germany during the Late Weimar Republic

At the end of the Weimar Republic, German business people, socialists, and communists used images of unemployed workers to define the boundaries of what they each considered acceptable and unacceptable in German Society. While concerns over Jews, homosexuals, and so on stayed within narrow discursive boundaries in the Weimar Republic, the public discourse on the unemployed ranged across a number of discursive boundaries and became a nodal point of social critique and commentary. Despite the marginal social status of unemployed workers, discussions about them became central to the self-understanding of different social groups in Weimars political economy. In defining the unemployed, these communities also defined themselves and laid bare their existential concerns.

The Road to Indian Wells: Symbolic Landscapes in the California Desert

Editors’ Note: The approach of this chapter demonstrates symbolization not to be an intellectualist deduction or Kantian construction, but rather an existential generation from pre-cognitive embodiment. Moreover, it exhibits theoretical tensions that we point out in the introduction concerning the relation between the symbolic dimension and material conditions. What strikes us is that the author’s attunement to his lived experiences, his own embodiment in relation to the experienced milieu, resonance within the author’s own body schema that manifests as the uncanny in his felt experience. His awakened attunement to this feeling is what drives him to research the symbolic landscape with which his embodied gestures has had to negotiate. His discussion of the genius loci of the Coachella Valley, the contemporary affluents’ and the prior Cahuillas’ embodied experiences, and their respective symbolizations, illustrates the notion that the genesis of symbolic landscapes (symbolic meanings) involves the lived-body in relation to the milieu (EarthBody) that is enacted in the body schema and objectivated in social/cultural practices and beliefs.