Time Schedule:
Genevieve E Mc Coy
BIS 261
Bothell Campus
Situates human history within broadest possible context – from beginning of the universe, through early earth history and the origin and evolution of earth’s biomass and the human species to the development of the great classical societies of China, India, Persia, and the Mediterranean.
Class description
Because the modern world is increasingly a global world sharing world-wide problems and concerns, we need to think about its history in global terms. Rather than constructing human history as the history of particular regions or nations, we will attempt to view the human past in the largest possible context. We will start from the perspective of cosmology and the beginning of the universe, galaxies and stars, move on to the origins of the earth and the atmosphere, and follow with the origins and evolution of earth’s biomass before we even begin to discuss the evolution of our own species. When we consider that 95 percent of human history took place in the Paleolithic era (or “Stone Age”), we can see that looking more closely at our long, long history as stone-using hunter-gatherers lays a groundwork for some big and intriguing questions.
With the large scale of the course, the skills we encourage will have less to do with fact-gathering, than with question-asking. Among other things, we will explore how early human societies answered the large questions involving human origins and survival, how they tested and refined their answers, and how they shared information and solutions to these questions. Here we will focus on how the earliest civilizations, scattered in various regions over most of the inhabitable globe, were followed by much larger civilizations of the great classical societies of China, India, and the Mediterranean and how the contacts between them grew.
Student learning goals
1. To provide students with a common body of knowledge combining both natural and social sciences that will prove helpful as they progress through the UWB curriculum.
2. To give students an awareness of how humankind was integrated in various ways to its environment and to identify how and under what circumstances individual societies were able to interact with and influence each other.
3. To familiarize students with historical modes of thinking and of historical analysis so that they learn to evaluate historical patterns of change and continuity across long time frames and large geographic areas, and to provide them with a basic knowledge of scientific methodologies and natural processes.
4. To acquaint students with the cultural heritage of major civilizations and their contributions to the historical development of the world and modern life.
General method of instruction
Brief lectures, small groups, Blackboard participation, and multi-media presentations.
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
Class participation, essay tests and research paper.
