Bronx Community College of the
City University of New York
Department of History

Welcome to the History 10 Web Site

Colonial North America in 1713

 Please send comments, questions, suggestions, and contributions to Professor Howard Wach at howard.wach@bcc.cuny.edu
What is this Web Site?

The History 10 Web Site is designed to support the classwork and reading assignments required in History 10--History of the Modern World. The World Wide Web contains a vast universe of historical sources: texts and images that can help us to study every topic we take up in History 10. This site is a starting point for exploring that online universe. Eventually, it will include a separate page for each topic on the History 10 syllabus. Clicking on the link for each syllabus topic will take you to a page specifically about that topic. Each page contains links to primary sources and other web-based material that will help you learn about the topic. The History 10 web site may be used in several ways. Your instructor may want you to look at a particular document and complete a specific assignment based on what you find. Or you may be asked to explore these resources on your own and find a source to report on, to write about, to discuss in class, or to complement your assigned reading. Remember: this web site is not a substitute for textbooks or classwork.

If you are logging on to this site for the first time, please continue reading the next section--Using the Web to Study History. If not, you can go directly to the Syllabus Topic Web Pages.


 
 

Using the Web to Study History 

  • What are historical sources? Many of the sources linked to the History 10 Web Site are "primary sources," the most important kind of source for learning history. Thousands of primary sources, unavailable to us anywhere else, are "a click away" on the web. Read this lesson on the Analysis of Primary Sources.  It will help you to think about the written documents in this web site and in your course reader, Documenting the Modern World. 
  • How do you know a good web site from a bad one? As you use the Web more frequently and discover different web sites, this question becomes more and more important. Anyone can write a web site and publish it for the whole world to see. There is no authority or expert who can decide what gets put on line. This is very different than a college library, where books have been selected by people who are qualified to judge them. Just as we should question any other source we use in historical study, we ought to be able to judge the intentions and the truthfulness of what we find on the web. To learn more about how to judge the value of web sites, read this Web Site Tutorial compiled by librarians at the University of Maryland. 
  • Pictures are sources too. The Web contains millions of visual images. Many of them (like the two pictures below) can help us to learn the history we are studying. Read this page on Looking at Visual Sources in order to introduce yourself to using visual sources to study history. 
Ivory Boat ST

Carved Ivory Boat, West Africa, ca. 1870 
(to learn more, see the Topic V Web Page)
Who is this woman? Hint: Her initials are S.T. 
(see Documenting the Modern World, p. 99)

History 10 Syllabus Topics

A NOTE ON GETTING AROUND: Following the links on the History 10 web site will take you to other sites all over the World Wide Web. Part of the unique value of the web is exactly the ability to do that--to follow links wherever our interests and curiosity take us. In other words, you might begin by reading a document on the French Revolution and soon find yourself looking at an on-line exhibition of historical paintings in the Louvre Museum in Paris. No matter where you end up on the web, you can always return to the History 10 page you began with by closing out the site you are in. If you are using a Windows-based computer, do this by clicking on the "x" in the upper right hand corner of your screen.  If you're using a Macintosh system, click on the small square button at the upper left corner of your browser window. This will return you to the History 10 page where you started. To begin, click on one of the Topic Pages below:

  • Topic X: The Cold War 
  • Topic XI: Post-War Revolutions in Asia and the Middle East 
  • Topic XII: Post-War Revolutions in Africa and Latin America  
  • Topic XIII: The Twentieth-Century Legacy  
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