For most of human history, humans lived in small groups who hunted and gathered their food, but around 8,000 B.C., things changed. Humans developed agriculture, settled in urban communities and eventually built huge empires, created religious institutions and explored the planet. In many areas of life, civilization brought about striking improvements and innovations. On the other hand, oppression, exploitation, and massive human suffering accompanied civilizations.

The goal of this course is to provide you with a foundation for understanding the world in which we live, keeping in mind humanity’s accomplishments as well as failures. Learning about history is not just memorizing a sequence of events, or a bunch of facts and dates; the point is to critically examine continuity and change over time. The large scope of this course will encourage more synthesis of ideas and integration of knowledge than thorough information on particular topics.

The course is arranged so as to avoid two common pitfalls of teaching and learning about civilizations. First, it will be stressed that the global dominance of Europe is a phenomenon that occurred only after c. 1500 and it is a mistake to project it backwards and read the whole world history from the perspective of European hegemony.  Secondly, historians of civilizations usually tell the stories of glorious empires, states, armies, monuments, wars, treaties, great men, etc. and tend to ignore women, the poor, peasants, slaves, and so on. In this course, we will put special emphasis on how important historical developments influenced those social groups who have traditionally been written off of history.