Zusammenfassung der Ressource
HIST1601 Essay Topics
- What common problems did the first cities and states have?
- Flag; flag designer; where the flag goes
- Leader - who/what/democratically elected gov?; residence for leader
- Bureaucracy to support leader - public servants; police; soldiers
- Taxes - accountants; sanitation/health; religion - shared belief
- As communities grew in size, so did managerial difficulties they faced
- Solution: Grant managerial power to elite groups
- At first this worked; but over time, elites gained control over large amounts of resources
- Critical transition from personal relations to impersonal power
- From power over things to power over people
- What were the major causes of the emergence of our modern form of society?
- Agriculture
- Agriculture raises productivity to partic. degree
- By grooming so intense that it eventually transforms favoured species
- Transformation through early form of genetic engineering, "domestication"
- Increase in population
- Spurred by technological changes
- These 20th c. changes supported huge pops.
- Leads to rise in agricultural productivity
- Increased food production
- Collective learning
- Humankind added another level of behaviour 250000 years ago
- Our use of language and other symbols began to introduce new capacity for "collective learning"
- Distinctive to humans is that they learn collectively
- Innovation
- What can we learn from 'Big History' that is of relevance to understanding the challenges we confront in the 21st century?
- Scope of human history; long-term trends can be seen from a "stepping back" view
- Trend: as global inequalities increase, resources are being consumed in ever-increasing amounts to sustain vast hierarchical structures of modern capitalist societies
- History is complex
- History is about context - nothing happens in isolation - events are linked
- Punctuated evolution - punctuated with new ideas; we make progress and take steps forward
- It is in the nature of reality to be unpredictable
- This type of unpredictability often described as chaos
- Choas theory: billions of tiny uncertainties can accumulate through long chains of causation until they create large-scale unpredictability