Sp12-IHUM-69B-16 : Human History: A Global Approach. 2012 Spring
Abstract/Contents
- Course Description
- Second of a two quarter sequence. 75,000 years ago there were barely 20,000 people on earth and each of them consumed about 4,000 calories of energy each day, half of it for food and half for everything else combined. Today, by contrast, there are 6,000,000,000 people on earth and in the US we each, on average, burn through 230,000 calories per day, for everything from driving Hummers to eating much more than we need. We take for granted things that would have seemed like magic a hundred years ago; we have penetrated every niche on the planet and have even moved beyond planet. Yet at the same time, other species are going extinct at the rate of one every 20 minutes and we have poisoned the atmosphere and seas. Depending on how you look at it, people are the greatest success story or the greatest disaster of the last million years. We may be on the verge of an astonishing transformation, transcending biology and making death obsolete; or we may be on the verge of destroying ourselves (and everything else) completely. How did we get here? And where are we going? This course tries to answer these questions by taking a global approach to the whole of human history. It looks at every continent, from the Ice Age to 21st century, asking how and why humans have multiplied so much, spread out so much, fought so much, and consumed so much; why some of their number?chiefly those in Europe and North America?became so much richer than others; and why that is now changing. The course aims to identify the long-term patterns of history and asking whether we can project these questions into the future to see what will come next. In the process the class focuses on the great global processes that have brought us to this point?the evolution of humans; the creation of art and religion; the origins of agriculture; the invention of hierarchy, gender discrimination, and slavery; the rise of cities and states; the formation of empires; globalization; the scientific and industrial revolutions; and finally the ongoing revolutions in genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics and the competing revolutions in weapons of mass destruction. The course aims to provide a framework to make sense of the world and skills to analyze the relevant evidence, including artifacts spanning 15,000 years and written texts spanning the last 5,000. The goal is to provide the tools you need to put the greatest questions of our age into historical context. Only by knowing where we?ve come from can we see where we?re going. GER: IHUM3
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Extent | 1 text file |
| Place | Stanford (Calif.) |
| Date created | 2012 |
| Language | English |
| Digital origin | born digital |
Creators/Contributors
| Sponsor | Stanford University. Introduction to the Humanities | |
|---|---|---|
| Teacher | Wolfenstein, Gabriel |
Subjects
| Subject | Stanford University |
|---|---|
| Subject | Teaching > Outlines, syllabi, etc |
| Genre | Syllabi |
Bibliographic information
| Finding Aid |
|
|---|---|
| Course ID | Sp12-IHUM-69B-16 |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/gs286vr7776 |
| Location | SC1454 |
| Repository | Stanford University. Libraries. Department of Special Collections and University Archives |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives (universityarchives@stanford.edu).
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
Collection
Stanford University Syllabi
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