History, Geography, and Time Landscape Units In a world with nuclear weapons and ecological problems that cross all national borders, we desperately need to see humanity as a whole. Accounts of the past that focus primarily on the divisions between nations, religions, and cultures are beginning to look parochial and anachronistic—even dangerous. So, it is not true that history becomes vacuous at large scales. Familiar objects may vanish, but new and important objects and problems come into view.   David Christian Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

What is the best way to “get started” teaching and learning world history? In some curriculums and textbooks the first major topic is the agricultural revolution in the Fertile Crescent 12,000 years ago. In others the first focus is the founding of river valley civilization in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago. In modern world history courses the first topic might be the Renaissance in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By contrast, World History for Us All rests on the premise that study of the human past should not start at a particular spot on the globe but with the world as a whole. As the essay titled Why an Integrated World History Curriculum in the Foundations section of this curriculum states:

The primary geographical context for studying human history is the globe. The earth is a "place" whose inhabitants have a shared history. Events and developments may take place within the confines of continents, regions, civilizations, or nation-states, but those "spaces" remain parts of the globe in all its roundness.

We can push this point even farther. The earth itself is framed by even larger contexts—the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the universe. As we explore how human beings evolved, acquired mental abilities that no other animal species possessed, and came to populate almost all parts of the world, we must remember that when our species emerged the earth had already existed for about four billion years. Complex processes of physical and biological change had long been underway when our first bipedal ancestors appeared on the scene. This curriculum recognizes that the story of our species should be situated in the largest possible context by devoting Big Era One and Big Era Two of the nine Big Eras to the 98 percent or so of our history that occurred before any men and women took up agriculture, an event that happened a mere 12,000 or so years ago.

Throughout the curriculum the primary “unit of investigation” is humankind as a whole, and all of the nine Big Eras start at that level of scale (except for Big Era One, which starts at the scale of the cosmos.) Therefore, students and teachers may benefit most from this curriculum if they start, not by investigating the Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, or classical Athens, but by thinking about some big questions regarding 1) scales of time and space in history and 2) the large physical and natural features, the geographical personality, as it were, of the whole earth.

Learning to “Think the World”

Celebrating the new millennium, New Year’s Eve 2000 Long Island Unversity B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library

One of the wonders of our Electronic Age is that for the first time in history people everywhere in the world can experience the same event almost simultaneously. A spectacular example of this is the world-wide celebrations that greeted New Year 2000. The planet revolved through the time zones, midnight struck again and again, and the festivities broke out in rapid, rolling sequence around the world. Among the first to celebrate were the people of the Kiribati and Marshall Islands, which lie in the South Pacific just west of the International Date Line. From there, the New Year swept on to Sydney, Beijing, New Delhi, Jerusalem, Lagos, London, Caracas, Seattle, and, at the last, Honolulu. Those who had the stamina to watch TV long enough could see the entire relay of parties, prayers, and fireworks displays, for twenty-four straight hours. This spectacle was a compelling reminder of the unity of humankind as inhabitants of a single tiny “marble” suspended in the universe. Also remarkable is that millions of people could consciously witness the world-wide commemoration and reflect upon it in real time.

Electronic marvels invented in the twentieth century enabled men and women to “think the world” in a way that no one could have done in 1000 CE or even in 1900. We live now in what two scholars have called a “condition of globality.” Careers, family life, community relations, and even mental health all depend to some degree on our understanding the astonishing complexities that intertwine all human beings. The ability to “think the world”—its economy, science, technology, science, politics, and culture—must be a primary aim of all education today. This challenges us to rethink humanity’s history in a more holistic, interconnected way.

Most young people in the United States spend their typical days—when not sitting in front of a computer screen—congregating with family members, fellow students, friends, or work associates. But those bonds are only our most intimate. We are also connected, often unconsciously, to numerous other networks of human relationship that affect the course of daily life. Some of these “communities” may be fleeting (passengers sharing an airplane flying at 30,000 feet), and some may be very large (all members the Roman Catholic Church). No individual anywhere in the world is truly isolated from such complex global relationships, not hunters in the Amazon rainforest, not peasant girls in high Himalayan valleys.

In fact most people are continuously affected by events and trends initiated in distant parts of the globe. Supermarkets in Wisconsin raise the price of coffee because of weather conditions in Brazil. The office fax machine breaks down, causing minor panic over a deal closure in Germany. A teacher faces a classroom where the pupils speak eighteen native languages. A family of refugees from the Sudan moves in next door. Our continuous encounters with the wide world are an aspect of the dizzying pace of change, the single most conspicuous feature of contemporary life. Whether in the United States, Italy, Burma, or Swaziland, society is perpetually transforming itself because of the growing complexity of world communication and the never-ending birth of new ideas, techniques, and products.

The Marmite FAQ Philip R. Johnson http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/marmite.htm

Our culture, that is, our language, institutions, laws, moral codes, and regular social routines, buffers us to some extent against the gales of change. Shared culture enables people to have some expectation of how others will think and behave. It helps us predict with at least some accuracy the pattern of affairs from one day to the next. In so far as we have a place in a familiar system of cultural values and organizations, we can usually cope quite well with new things or disruptive change. When a social group—a family, religious denomination, business community, or nation—confronts something new or foreign, its members try to fit the strange thing into the existing cultural system with a minimum of fuss. Or the group may reject it altogether as useless or distasteful. So far, for example, American children have stoutly resisted Marmite, the yeast paste that British children love to spread on bread. And a lot of people in the world do not like peanut butter. On the whole, social groups do well at using their cultural yardsticks to sift through the new and strange, accepting one item, rejecting another, so that life does not appear to change all that much from one month to the next.

Yet the forces of change, ricocheting around the world, are much more encompassing than we generally realize or wish to believe. Global change is not simply a matter of one event there (war in the Middle East) affecting some condition of life here (a rise in the price of gas). Nor is it just that products or ideas spread quickly from one place to another. The most striking feature of global interaction is that a significant development occurring in one place is likely to set off a complex chain reaction, disrupting and rearranging numerous relationships over an extensive area, maybe even around the world. A surge of change in one network of relationships, international trade for example, easily sets off changes in other sets such as diplomatic negotiations or the migration of workers from one country to another. Or, consider the transnational flow of pollutants. Border checkpoints have proved useless barriers against the drift of factory-generated acid rain from China to Korea and Japan and even to the northwestern United States.

When did the world get like this? For how long have peoples of the world been interconnected? Since the Industrial Revolution? Since World War II? Since the invention of the Internet? A better question might be: How far back in time would we have to go to find a world divided into a collection of separate, self-contained societies, each moving through time along its own track, and unresponsive to wider regional developments? The answer is that we could cast back two hundred, five thousand, twenty thousand years and still not find such a world of completely atomized societies. Indeed even the early history of humankind hundreds of thousands of years ago is a story of long-distance migrations of hunting and foraging bands across Africa and Eurasia, a process that involved interaction between one group and another and therefore at least small disruptions and surprises wherever such contact occurred.

In a sweeping way, then, the history of humankind from remote times is a tale of how groups of women and men connected with one another and how those interconnections affected and complicated the lives people lived in different parts of the earth. Because of the intricate lacework that ties the peoples of the world together today, this long story is one that needs telling.

The History, Geography, and Time Teaching Units

History, Geography, and Time includes two teaching units. The first one (Teaching Unit 0.1) is titled Getting our Bearings: Maps of Time, Space, and History. The lessons in this unit encourage students to think about scales of space and time in history, particularly the idea that these scales are relative. In terms of geographical space, study of the history of a rural community, a town, a city, a nation, an empire, a civilization, the world, or even the universe are all valid and useful. It is not that one geographical scale of history is more important than another (it isn’t). Rather, at different scales we can perceive and identify different kinds of interesting historical questions.

The same is true for scales of time. An investigation, say, of world events around the year 1688 CE, which is in fact the topic of a recent book, is just as valid as is a narrative of the human past that sweeps from 2.5 million years ago to today in just 327 pages, the subject of another recent volume. Both of these books are global in their spatial scale, but because their time scales are so different, these books inevitably address very different historical issues. Both books offer instruction and insight. It is a matter for readers to decide which set of historical subjects they want to explore.

An Introduction to Big Geography (Teaching Unit 0.2) is the second unit under History, Geography, and Time. To “think world history” in a way that makes room for all peoples requires that we see the spherical surface of the planet as the primary place where history happened. Globe-encircling history requires a global setting. Students need to have a basic knowledge of what we call Big Geography, that is, the largest-scale features of the earth’s physical and natural environment. These are the patterns of topography, hydrography, climate, vegetation, and weather that cut across particular nations or cultural groups and that give the world as a whole its distinctive “face.” The lessons in this unit stimulate students to consider the earth as a single “space,” a single arena of history. This introduction prepares them to explore particular events, time periods, and regions in a way that encourages making connections between whatever subject matter they are addressing and the world-scale context.

An Introduction to Big Geography as well as teaching units throughout the curriculum introduce some geographical concepts that may be unfamiliar to some students and teachers. Here are definitions of these terms:

Afroeurasia. The land mass made up of Africa and Eurasia together. Afroeurasia was formed during the last 40 million years by the collision of the tectonic plates that contained Eurasia and those that contained Africa and Arabia. This geographical expression serves as a helpful tool in discussing large-scale historical developments that cut across the traditionally-defined continental divisions of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Even though Africa is separated from both Europe and Asia by the Mediterranean and Red seas (except at the Isthmus of Sinai where modern Egypt meets Israel), these bodies of water have historically been channels of human intercommunication, not barriers to it. Therefore, we may think of both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea as “lakes” inside Afroeurasia.

America, the Americas. The continents of North America and South America, including neighboring islands, notably the islands of the Caribbean Sea. Until the twentieth century, most geography books classified North and South America together as a single continent, labeling them the “New World” (“new” to Europeans beginning in the late fifteenth century CE) in contradistinction to the “Old World,” that is, Afroeurasia. In the twentieth century school children in the United States and most other countries (though not in some Latin American states) were taught to see the “Western Hemisphere” as constituting two continents, joined only by the narrow Isthmus of Panama. On the other hand, humans in North and South America have never been entirely disconnected from one another. As far as we know, humans first migrated from North to South America 12,000 years ago or more by advancing along either the isthmus or its coastal waters. Also, it is not hard to perceive the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea as two “internal seas” of a single American land mass, much the way we may think of the Mediterranean and Red seas as “inside” Afroeurasia. The Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico are bounded on three sides by land and on the west by a long string of closely clustered islands.

Australasia. The continent of Australia, plus New Guinea, New Zealand, Tasmania, and other islands that neighbor Australia. During the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower, Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania constituted a single land mass known as Sahul. Human settlement of Australasia began as many as 60,000 years ago, though Polynesian mariners did not reach New Zealand until about 1000 CE.

Eurasia. The land mass made up of Asia and Europe. Today, this term is widely used in history and geography education. The idea that Europe and Asia are separate continents goes back many centuries, but scholars who accept the definition of a continent as “a large land mass surrounded, or nearly surrounded, by water” know that the definition applies to neither Europe nor Asia because these two land masses are conjoined. Moreover, the Ural Mountains, which eighteenth-century European geographers designated as the proper boundary between the European and Asian continents, have never been a serious obstacle to the flow of migrants, armies, trade goods, or ideas. In this book we define Europe as a subcontinent of Eurasia (or of Afroeurasia), parallel to South Asia or to the Indochinese peninsula.

Great Arid Zone. A climatic map of Afroeurasia shows that a good part of the land mass is a belt of dry or semi-dry country that extends all the way from the Atlantic coast of Africa in a generally northeasterly direction to the northern interior of China. This enormous tract comprises a chain of interconnected deserts, mountains, and semi-arid steppes. A steppe may be defined as flat or rolling grassland, equivalent to what Americans call “prairie” and Argentineans call “pampas.” The main climatic characteristic of the Great Arid Zone is low annual rainfall, which may range from an average of less than 5 inches in the bleakest of deserts to 20 inches or so in better watered steppes. For several millennia, the Great Arid Zone has been home to pastoral nomadic peoples. Where water has been available from rivers, springs, or wells, it has also been home to farming societies and even large cities.

Indo-Mediterranea. The region of lands and seas extending from the Atlantic coasts of Europe and North Africa to North India. This expression includes the Mediterranean basin as a whole and extends eastward across Southwest Asia to northern India as far as the Bay of Bengal. In the long term of human history from at least the third millennium BCE to modern times, this region has been characterized by a proliferation of clusters of dense population (notably in river valleys) and by intense commercial and cultural interchange.

Inner Eurasia. The huge interior land mass of Eurasia, whose dominant features are flat, semi-arid regions of steppe and forest. The historian David Christian defines Inner Eurasia as the territories ruled by the Soviet Union before its collapse, together with Mongolia and parts of western China. Poland and Hungary on the west and Manchuria (northeastern China) on the east may be thought of as Inner Eurasia’s borderlands. The northern margins are boreal forest and Arctic tundra. The southern boundaries are the Himalayas and other mountain chains.

Oceania. The basin of the Pacific Ocean and its approximately 25,000 islands. Human settlement of this enormous region, sometimes called the Island Pacific, began in western islands near New Guinea about 1600 BCE. Polynesian mariners reached both Hawaii to the northeast and Easter Island to the far southeast around 500 CE. The majority of the islands lie in the tropical belt south of the Equator. The first peoples of Oceania spoke mostly Polynesian languages. Some geographers include both the large island of New Guinea and the continent of Australia as part of Oceania.

Southwest Asia. A designation of the region, often referred to as the Middle East, which extends from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea to Afghanistan, including Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula, but not including Egypt or any other part of Africa. World History for Us All uses the term “Middle East” only in the context of history since the start of the twentieth century. For earlier periods, “Middle East” has caused students of history considerable confusion because it is used sometimes as a synonym for Southwest Asia, sometimes to encompass Southwest Asia plus Egypt, and sometimes to embrace the entire region from Afghanistan to Morocco.

Teaching Units for History, Geography, and Time