Day 18: Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Post date: Aug 6, 2013 3:09:30 PM

Essential Question:

Why is the 20th century given its own Threshold? What is so different about the modern world?

Today, we started off class with an overview of major historical trends over the past few hundred years as the modern world was created. We watched the Unit 9 main lecture entitled "How was the Modern World Created". Here is a video about Threshold 8 of Big History: the Modern Revolution. You can of course keep in mind Big History perspective and themes as you continue to study history (and particularly modern times in your TBLS history courses), as traditional history courses will go into much more depth than we are in this class. However, we want to focus on big ideas and major trends in history.

We learned about the Anthropocene and energy use in today's world. For more information on the Anthropocene, please see this Big History project overview of the topic, this Smithsonian article on the debate of its existence, and this The Economist article on the lingering affects and future of the Antropocene. For an overview of energy use through time, see this Big History article. For more information about the Sustainocene, see the first 3-4 minutes of this video from a talk at Harvard for a quick overview. Finally, here is a link the Hans Rosling stats overview of the past 200 years we watched.

We then devoted a major chunk of time for working in your groups on your Little Big History 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're looking at the interconnecting world, industrialization, and the modern era for our final week of class. You have already read:

1. Stokes Brown, Big History, Chapter 12:Industrialization, pages 210-229
2. Christian, Maps of Time, Chapter 13: Birthof the Modern World, pages 406-439

For HW, due Wednesday, August 7, 2013:

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.