100

This course begins with the emergence of modern humans in the Paleolithic era and concludes in 1500 with the beginning of the Early Modern Period. It is the story of early human responses to the natural environment and how they exploited it for survival as well as how it determined the parameters of early civilizations. It explores the political, economic, social, cultural, artistic, and ethical relationships and institutions people fashioned to provide order and purpose in their lives. Early human encounter with the natural world encouraged beliefs in the supernatural and eventually gave birth to formalized religious faiths and institutions. These issues will be explored through an examination of the diversity of early, classical, and medieval civilizations, their contribution to the human experience across the globe, and our shared community.

This course begins with the Early Modern Period in 1500 when the voyages of discovery linked world trade routes and transformed human encounters and civilizations. A basic question the course explores is how and why the West came to dominate the modern world. The causes are traced to ancient Greek humanism, rationalism, and trust that natural laws governed the universe. Renaissance Europe revived these values and laid the foundation for one of the world's most transformative events - the scientific revolution. the Age of Reason and Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries applied natural law to politics, economics, and social institutions and toppled feudal monarchies and aristocracies and ushered in an era of individual human rights.These movements spawned the creativity of the Industrial Revolution and a capitalist economic system which provided the West with political, economic, and military might to lay the foundation for modern imperialism, racism, and global warfare. Western modernization forced other world civilizations to reckon with these transformations. Old values and modern demands continue to be negotiated on the global stage in a multi-polar world. The course concludes with a return to a theme from Global History 1 - human use and abuse of planet earth and speculations on the future of humanity.

This course provides students with the opportunity to study topics of interest to historians. Subject matter will vary.

This survey begins with the early context of three cultures - Native American, European and African - and concludes with the Civil War era.

This survey covers the period from the Civil War to the present.