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:
For HW, due Wednesday, August 7, 2013:
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: