The World around 1450: Thinking Like a Historian

One year, many worlds

Picture the world around 1450. In the German city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg is experimenting with metal type and a press. In Beijing, the Ming emperors rule the most populous state on Earth from the Forbidden City. Constantinople is still the capital of the Byzantine Empire, but in three years the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II will take it. In the Valley of Mexico, the Mexica (Aztec) capital Tenochtitlan rises from an island in a lake. High in the Andes, the Inca ruler Pachacuti is turning a small kingdom into an empire. South of Lake Ontario, the Nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy live under, or will soon live under, the Great Law of Peace (the Confederacy's founding date is debated, with estimates ranging from the 1100s to the 1500s).

None of these societies knew all of the others existed. Two hundred years later, by 1650, ships, silver, crops, diseases, ideas and enslaved people were moving between every inhabited continent except Australia. That change is the big story of this unit.

Why 1450 to 1650?

Historians divide time into periods to make it easier to study. This is called periodization. The years from about 1450 to 1650 are often called the beginning of the early modern period. Common reasons for starting near 1450 are the printing press, the fall of Constantinople (1453), and the European voyages that soon followed.

But periods are choices, not facts of nature. A starting date that makes sense for Europe may mean little in Ming China or the Inca Andes. Calling 1492 the "discovery" of America describes the event only from a European point of view: millions of people already lived there. Good historians notice when a label carries a perspective, and they say whose perspective it is.

The four historical thinking concepts

The Ontario curriculum asks you to use four concepts of historical thinking. Each one is a different kind of question:

• Historical significance: Why does this event, person or development matter? Something is significant if it had deep consequences for many people over a long time, or if it reveals something important about the past.
• Cause and consequence: Why did this happen, and what did it lead to? Look for several causes (long-term and short-term), intended and unintended results.
• Continuity and change: What stayed the same, and what changed? Change is rarely total. Peasant farming, for example, continued for most people even as empires rose and fell.
• Historical perspective: How did people at the time see things? Try to understand their beliefs and situation, without excusing or simply judging them by today's values.

In this strand, the curriculum pairs B1 (social, economic and political systems) with significance and perspective, and B2 (relations between groups) with cause and consequence and continuity and change. You will use all four in every lesson.

The inquiry process

A historical inquiry starts with a question and ends with a supported conclusion. The steps loop back on each other: new evidence often makes you change your question.

1. Formulate questions. A good inquiry question cannot be answered with a single fact. Compare: When did Mehmed II take Constantinople? (factual) with How significant was the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople for trade between Europe and Asia? (evaluative).
2. Gather and organize evidence from primary and secondary sources.
3. Interpret and analyse the evidence, using tools such as timelines, cause-and-effect organizers and comparison charts.
4. Evaluate and draw conclusions, weighing evidence that points different ways.
5. Communicate your argument in a format suited to the audience, with proper citations.

Kinds of evidence for 1450 to 1650

• Written primary sources: chronicles, letters, laws, ships' logs, tax records, religious texts, travel accounts.
• Visual and material sources: paintings, maps, buildings, coins, tools, textiles, Benin brass plaques, Mexica stone sculpture.
• Indigenous record-keeping: Inca khipu (quipu: knotted cords that recorded numbers and possibly other information), Mexica and Mixtec pictorial codices, and Haudenosaunee wampum belts that record agreements.
• Oral histories and traditions, passed on by knowledge keepers. Many Indigenous Nations in Canada keep their histories this way; Canadian courts have accepted oral history as evidence (for example in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 1997).
• Archaeology and science: excavations, tree rings, ice cores and DNA studies.

Much of the written record for the Americas and Africa in this period was produced by European outsiders (conquerors, missionaries, traders). That makes source credibility a central skill in this unit.