Trying to find your way around this place? Like most expositions, we offer a map: 
Just caught this at Boingboing: Here you have history professor, Dr. Alan Charles Kors, attempting to encapsulate the entirety of human history in a 60 second lecture. The transcript goes:
* First, tribes: tough life.* The defaults beyond the intimate tribe were violence, aversion to difference, and slavery. Superstition: everywhere.
* Culture overcomes them partially.
* Rainfall agriculture, which allows loners.
* Irrigation agriculture, which favors community.
* Division of labor plus exchange in trade bring mutual cooperation, even outside the tribe.
* The impulse is always there, though: "Kill or enslave the outsider."
* Gradual science from Athens' compact with reason.
* Division of labor, trade, the mastery of knowledge, plus time brought surplus, sometimes a peaceful extended order and, rules diversely evolved and, the cooperation of strangers - always warring against the fierce defaults of tribalism, violence, and ignorance.
* No one who teaches you knows what will happen.
The video (which is cooler) can be seen here, although you will need RealPlayer to see it.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Hmmmm.... I'm pretty sure there are anthropologists who would disagree with Kors' descriptions.
Posted by: etbnc | December 7, 2007 9:57 AM
I once summarized human history for my 11-yr old son thus:
"Human history in a nutshell: I'm going to kick your ass and take your stuff." Time for us to move to the next level...
Posted by: dave | December 7, 2007 10:59 AM
I am inclined to agree with "etbnc" - on both counts - yet it is a fun way to view one literate person's condensed view of what's happened .... so far
- Kare, movingfrommetowe.com
Posted by: Kare Anderson | December 7, 2007 11:44 AM