World History
Majoring in history teaches students to think critically, communicate effectively and solve complex problems, while also deepening their understanding of other peoples and cultures.
More than 12 million Africans were enslaved and taken across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Approximately 1,500 of these ships were captured by the British Royal Navy in the nineteenth century. The documents seized aboard these ships and the interrogations of members of their crews produced in trials at Vice Admiralty courts around the British Empire reveal important details about how the slave trade operated.
In this seminar, students will work with archival manuscript sources to explore the organization and operation of the slave trade and the efforts of abolitionists and enslaved Africans to resist it.
Learn more about a major/minor and career path in History here.
Learning Outcomes in this course
Build expertise in reading and interpreting original handwritten 19th-century documents.
Conduct comprehensive investigations using historical materials to uncover unique insights into societal, cultural and political developments of the past.
Design and produce an original research project, leveraging primary sources to create a well-supported and innovative historical analysis.
Acquire knowledge and strategies for securing grants and fellowships, such as Fulbright, to support academic and professional pursuits in historical research and beyond.
When
Session One
July 6 - July 18, 2025
Tuition
On-Campus Residential
$5,298 USD
Commuter
$2,998 USD
Proposed Activities
Learn how to handle archives properly.
Learn how to secure grants and fellowships (i.e., Fullbright).
Instructor
Dr. Matthew Hopper, Professor at Cal Poly SLO
Dr. Hopper is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University. His book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire was a finalist for the 2016 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, a member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Smuts Visiting Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, a British Academy Visiting at King’s College London and the Ali Mazrui Senior Fellow at the Africa Institute in Sharjah. He has received fellowships from Fulbright (IIE), the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays.
