The Course at a Glance
Welcome to HIST 2F90:
Money and Power in the Atlantic World
This page is intended for students of HIST 2F90, and anyone else who'd like to learn about the course themes. If you've stumbled upon it by accident, HIST 2F90 is a credit course for students at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Ontario university students from other campuses are also welcome to take the course for credit through the eCampus Ontario course offerings. Some of the course content is password-protected, but much is available on the open web.The course will be led by Trudy Tattersall, a long time member of the HIST 2F90 teaching team. You will meet her in the forums, and in later videos, but for now we leave this video by Professors Mike Driedger and Daniel Samson for you as an introduction to the course, as it provides the clearest insight into the course's background, purpose, and goals.
To learn more about this course, please watch this video.
We have offered this course online for at least the last 7 years! Below you will find an overview of the course schedule and progression of themes for the 2024-5 academic year at Brock University.
Historians ask questions about the past, and our big question for the course is:
Historians rarely agree on the answers to big questions like this one, and in fact, there are many possible answers. Nevertheless, attempts to answer big questions like this one are at the very heart of what historians do. How might it be possible to answer such BIG questions? The most straightforward way to make answers to big questions manageable is to break down bigger questions into related but smaller questions, and then to examine particular sources and evidence to answer these smaller questions. This course will help you arrive at your own answer(s) to particular as well as big questions. Along the way, you will learn a great deal about the history of the Atlantic World before 1850, as you practice the foundational skills that all historians use to make sense of evidence from the past.For the period between about 1400 and 1850, what were the most significant factors in the rise of the liberal-capitalist West?
The open, up-to-date parts of this e-textbook have live links below. Some parts of the e-textbook require some updating and will be made available in up-to-date form as soon as possible. All parts of the e-textbook are also available in the drop-down index (in top left of your computer screen) -- but you should note that not all of these are up-to-date.
