Mary Wollstonecraft, if you don’t have her already.
And if Mary Shelley, how about Margaret Cavendish, author of the first fantasy novel in English (The Blazing World)?
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If not now, when?
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So do you have a working list? Once we know the gaps we can expand that to 300 to 400 names each with a compelling reason why they MUST deserve the MOST attention.
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Lol! I mean historically goofball!
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I do have a running list… I don’t need that many names, though, primarily because there is just no way I could even get to the most important of figures in a semester.
The structure of the class is this: I spend 12 weeks presenting 12 historical figures that represent some aspect of the time period - in this case for world history going from the 15th to the end of the 20th (obviously that means I have to skip a whole lot, so I’m really trying not to be too eurocentric). I give their biographies, then I give the students the larger historical context… At the end of the semester, the students, who have been working on a particular project doing something similar will present their figures, along with the context. I think I’ve firmed out my list for what I’ll be teaching, and am still building the list of figures the students can pick for their own projects… If you’d like, I can post both later on…
Right now, how we teach history in college is in flux. Much of the thinking around teaching history at the college level has lately been less about covering everything as well as we can (an impossible task in the postmodern classroom) to focusing on what historians do, critical thinking, research and writing skills, demonstrating cause and effect, and other kinds of historical thinking. There has also been much talk about digital humanities and how we teach the past in a world that is so awash in computers. Much of that seems to have boiled down to building websites, blogging, and GIS stuff with mapping (ie, making a map with historical details kind of thing). But everyone is trying to come up with a way to capture students interests and talk to their needs in the world today.
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Okay, that leaves an average of about 2 people per century.
I would suggest Zheng He for the 15th century, to oppose Gavin Menzies’ nonsense. And talk about trade, navigation, etc.
I am partial to Harriet Tubman for the 19th century, because of her neurological issues, and the erasure of Black liberation struggles by “Lost Cause” historiography. Although she’s not the best one to talk about the wider slave systems of the Americas.
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I nominate James Burke then, and his Connections series, the first one. Still eurocentric, but it handily demonstrates we were networked and computerised well before the internet came along, and that this weird “computers are new tech!” attitude that’s been kept alive for over forty years is bogus on a lot of levels.
It also sets out to demolish the “great men” theory of history, which had some interesting repercussions.
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If Napoleon had not existed, would the Europe of 1815 really be so different?
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Connections doesn’t look at the Napoleons. It’s more about the history of ideas.
In the series, Napoleon is a background to the invention of canned food.
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Right? It doesn’t always have to be about the already well known, pivotal figures. In fact, I’m trying to avoid that a little bit at least. I find it more instructive to discuss the antebellum period through, say, Harriet Jacobs or Mary Ellen Pleasant, than through Abraham Lincoln and John C. Calhoun. What I’ve found useful about this structure is that it allows to focus on people as historical agents and as existing within the structures around them that they can’t change easily.
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Feel free to keep making suggestions, if you’d like. I think this is a pretty good list, but I can always add more (plus, I do let students pick their own, depending).
My lectures (the person and the topic/larger historical context I’ll address) - a couple I’ve added possible readings:
week 2 (): Mehmed II (Ottoman Empire/Changing Europe)
Week 3 (): Yasuke the African Samurai (early Globalization/Asian world)
week 4 (): Sir Felim O’Neill of Kinard (European wars of religion/Early English colonialism)
Week 5 (): Toussaint L’Ouverture (Revolutions/Atlantic World)
Reading: Haitian Constitution
Week 6 (): Karl Marx (1848 revolutions/Communism/globalization of class identity)
Selections from Communist manifesto?
Week 7 (): Yaa Asantewaa (Ashanti Empire/Carving up of Africa)
Week 8 (): Magnus Hirschfeld/Walter Benjamin (High Modernism/Philosophy/Gay rights)
Week 9 (): Primo Levi (World War II/Holocaust/genocide/human rights regimes)
Week 10 (): Yizhak Rabin/ Yasser Arafat (New Middle East/Israel/Palestine)
Reading: Joe Sacco?
Week 11 (): Josip Broz Tito/Patrice Lumumba (Cold War/Non-aligned World/anti-colonial movements)
Reaading: Fatherland by Nina Bunjevac
Week 12 (): Fela Kuti/Laibach (Non-aligned world/world music/art)
List for students to pick from:
Early Globalization (1450-1776)
Murad II (1405-1451)
Niccolo Michiavelli (1469-1527)
Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540)
Saint Francis Xavier (1506-1552)
John Calvin (1509-1546)
Juan Vazquez de Coronado (1523-1565)
Henry IV of France (1553-1610)
Queen Ana Nzinga (1583-1663)
Tisquantum (1585-1622)
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673)
Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
Isaac Newton (1642-1726)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646-1684)
Thanadelthur (1697-1717)
Ando Shoeki (1703-1762)
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhad (1703-1792)
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812)
Charles Byrne (1761-1783)
Age of revolutions (1776- 1915)
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)
Ottobah Cugoano (1757-1791)
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
Omar Ibn Said (1770-1864)
Georg Hegel (1770-1831)
Simon Bolivar (1783-1830)
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
Demasduit (1796-1820)
Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
John O’Mahony (1815-1877)
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)
James Stephens (1825-1901)
Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891)
Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Emperor Meiji (1852-1912)
Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935)
William Cooper (1860-1941)
Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925)
Henry Sylvester Williams (1867-1911)
Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952)
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Francisco “Pancho” Villa (1878-1923)
Age of Chaos (1915-1950)
Alice Guy-Blanche (1873-1968)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
William Ferguson (1882-1950)
Fritz Lang (1890-1976)
Tristan Tzara (1896-1963)
Leon Theremin (1896-1993)
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003)
Puyi (1906-1967)
Virginia Hall (1906-1982)
Josephine Baker (1906-1975)
Alan Turing (1912-1954)
Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000)
Cold War/Neo-liberalism (1945-2000)
Pope Saint John XXIII (1881-1963)
Haile Selassie I (1892-1975)
Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
Sukarno (1901-1970)
Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906-2001)
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)
Avraham Stern (1907-1942)
Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972)
Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
Mother Teresa Bojaxhiu (1910-1997)
John Cage (1912-1992)
Gamel Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)
Henry Kissinger (1923-)
Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961)
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
Che Guevara (1928-1967)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)
Miriam Makeba (1932-2008)
Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986)
Tenzin Gyatso - 14th Dalai Lama (1935-)
Verity Lambert (1935-2007)
Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936-)
Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001)
Pele (1940-)
Hayao Miyazaki (1941-)
Eusebio de Silva Ferreira (1942-2014)
Leila Khaled (1944-)
Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister (1945-2015)
Andre the Giant (1946-1993)
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey (1947-)
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015)
Alan Moore (1953-)
Viv Albertine (1954-)
Masami Akita (Merzbow) (1956-)
Neil Gaiman (1960-)
Ari Up (1962-2010)
Sinead O’Connor (Shudada’ Davitt) (1966-)
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Why not cover the 30 years war?
Reading that makes me want to take your class! Y’know, if I could teleport or whatnot. 
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Me too!
Also I just discovered the “Bookmark this post” feature inside the ellipsis icon. 
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I am so glad you’re including Hedy Lamarr.
One of the reasons I love her so much is we have such a tendency to pigeonhole people – especially Hollywood celebrities and women. And she was one of the Hollywood celebrities: one of the most famous jokes in Blazing Saddles referenced her. In other words, she was a drop-dead gorgeous woman in a world where her only function was supposed to be decorative working in an industry that is associated more with parties and personal assistants for everything, and she was absolutely brilliant in a world that had no room for brilliant women.
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I’ll certainly talk about it as it’s prat of the larger historical context, but for the historical figure, I’m leaning into less well known figures that reflect the same issues. Plus, Ireland connects to what’s happening right now, too (with Brexit and all). I’m honestly interested in de-centering Europe when possible. Note that I talk about an Ashanti leader instead of focusing on a European figure for late 19th colonialism/scramble for Africa.
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Okay, so they want me to teach the world history course TO 1500!
Any suggestions for figures from this period? I’m thinking so far, starting with Otzi… some Sumerian figures… mythical figures like Queen Medb or King Arthur… Or maybe someone like Boudica… St. Patrick for sure. Hillel ben Samuel.
Any suggestions?
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Ever read “A Distant Mirror” by my favorite historian, Barbara W. Tuchman?
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