Day 16: Thursday, August 1, 2013

Post date: Aug 1, 2013 3:50:13 PM

Essential (Seminar) Questions:

1) Stokes Brown says that prehistorians are convinced that homo sapiens from 35,000 years ago are the same as us with the full brain power of modern people. Using the earliest hunter gatherers as your lens, what makes humans human?

2) What are the characteristics of a hunter-gatherer society? To what extent was the hunter-gatherer society considered the “original affluent society”?

3) To what extent did the Agricultural Revolution and the development of cities improve the lives of humans?

4) Using the 20th century as a lens, to what extent is collective learning beneficial?

Today, we had a seminar on agriculture and cities, and we worked on the LBH projects.

Your projects and presentations are due in class on Monday, August 12, 2013. We will be presenting on Monday and Tuesday of that week to end our course.

We'll be looking at the interconnecting world, industrialization, and the modern era for our final week of class. To prepare, for HW for this weekend (due Mon, Aug. 5), please:

1. Prepare for closed book essay exam on Monday (40 mins) on Agriculture and Cities
2. R&A Stokes Brown, Big History, Chapter 12:Industrialization, pages 210-229
3. R&A Christian, Maps of Time, Chapter 13: Birthof the Modern World, pages 406-439

To give you a preview into other readings for our last week of class, for Wednesday, August 7, 2013, please:

1. R&A Christian, Maps of Time, Chapter 14: TheGreat Acceleration of the 20th Century, pages 440-464
2. R&A Stokes Brown, Big History, Chapter 13: What Now? What Next?, pages 230-248

All four of these chapter should be printed in your packets and constitute the last of your readings.

Lastly, here are Little Big History documents:

• The assignment document, detailing steps and due dates
• The initial topic graphic organizer
• The narrowing topic graphic organizer
• Little Big History Thresholds Graphic Organizer
• Here is an anchor for the annotated bibliography.
• Here is the graphic organizer for the annotated bibliography (due Wed, July 31)
• This is a guide to different kinds of sources and how to cite them for your bibliography.
• Here is a guide to footnotes (what they are and how to use them)
• A guide to JSTOR and how to log in and search for articles
• An initial list of possible text sources you can use for the project if you're feeling stuck
• A graphic organizer to help you write your conclusion to the LBH project.
• Here is the Little Big History rubric for 2013, off of which you will be assessed.