2022年4月30日 星期六

STEM

 

Cerebral cortex The outermost part of the brain is called the cerebral cortex. Humans have an unusually large cerebral cortex. Deep grooves divide it into areas called lobes. Some mental tasks, such as processing language, are concentrated in specific lobes. However, most mental tasks involve many parts of the brain working together in ways that are not yet understood.

2022年4月20日 星期三

A Global History

 From the Author to the Reader

The use of history is to give value to the present hour. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The old term "western civilization" no longer holds. World events and the common needs of all humanity are joining the culture of Asia with the culture of Europe and the Americas, to form for the first time a world civilization.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

This book is distinctive in three ways. First, it connects the past to the present. History is something more than "one damned thing after another," as a famous historian once complained. That type of history is more likely to give intellectual indigestion than intellectual understanding. This does not mean that only the study of current affairs is useful and worth while. Rather it means that the past should be

analyzed in a manner that is meaningful for the present, and that the relationship between past and present should be noted and emphasized. This is why each of the four parts of this volume ends with an essay entitled "What It Means for Us Today."

The second distinctive feature of this book is that it connects not only the past and the present but also the present and the future. Many argue that history cannot be used to foresee the future because it is not an exact science like chemistry or physics. They argue that history deals with human beings whose actions cannot be predicted with the precision and certainty with which a chemist can predict what will hap pen when element A is combined with element B. Therefore it is argued that the historian can not use the past with the confidence with which a scientist can use predictable experiments in the laboratory.

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On first thought this argument seems correct, but it we think again we find that it is false. Its error becomes clear if we compare meteorologists with historians. Meteorologists are very successful in predicting that tornados will strike in this region or that, and therefore they are considered scientists. But meteorologists cannot predict which house in a given region will be struck and which house will not. This does not mean that meteorology is not a science. It only means that different sciences provide different levels of predictability. Therefore chemists with their flasks can predict more precisely than meteorologists with their gauges. Yet meteorology remains a valid science with useful predictive purposes, and it is becoming steadily more precise with the use of computers and satellites.

So it is with history. It cannot be used like a crystal ball to predict which political party will win or what national leader will be assassinated or which country will have a revolution or where a war will break out. But history, properly studied, shows what combination of conditions and policies have resulted in the past in assassinations and revolutions and wars. If we understand such past patterns, then we have some guide to the present and the future. But if we have not studied the past, the present will seem mysterious and the future terrifying.

The last chapter in this volume is entitled "Second Industrial Revolution: Global Repercussions." It shows that all societies today-developed and underdeveloped, capitalist and socialist are experiencing profound internal disruptions as well as the external threat of "nu clear winter." If we end our history with that chapter, the future will indeed seem hopeless. For this reason the final chapter is followed by a concluding essay entitled "Human Prospects,' in which we try to find some guidelines from our study of the past and present so that we can have some idea what to expect in the future.

This brings us to the third distinctive feature of this book, which is that it is a world his tory. It deals with the entire globe rather than with some one country or region. It is concerned with all peoples, not just with Western or non Western peoples. It is as though you, the reader, were perched on the moon looking down on our whole vast planet. From there your viewpoint would be different from that of an observer liv ing in Washington, D.C., London, or Paris-or for that matter, in Peking, Delhi, or Cairo.

We cannot truly understand either West ern or non-Western history unless we have a global overview that encompasses both. Then we can see how much interaction there is be tween all peoples in all times, and how important that interaction is in determining the course of human history.

At first the interaction was fitful and rather slight. But then the Europeans Columbus and da Gama set forth on their overseas explorations. In the following decades they and their successors brought all parts of the world into direct contact, and the intimacy of that contact has grown steadily to the present day. By contrast, the many human communities prior to 1500 had existed in varying degrees of isolation. Yet this isolation was never absolute. During the long millennia before the European discoveries, the various branches of the human race had interacted one with the other-though the precise degree to which they did differed enormously according to time and location. The details of this teraction, from rly human his tory to roughly the year 1500, are the subject of this book. Following that date, the earth, in relation to humankind's growing communication and transportation facilities, has been steadily shrinking faster and faster, so that today it has become a "spaceship earth." a "global village."

If we accept the fact that all peoples share a common world history, how can we possibly learn about the whole world by taking a single course or reading a single book? Some historians say that world history, by definition, encompasses all civilizations, and thus it is a subject far too broad for classroom purposes. Western civilization, they say, is barely manage able by itself; how can all the other civilizations including the Chinese, the Indian, and the Middle Eastern-also be encompassed? The answer, of course, is that they cannot, and that world history, thus defined, is obviously impracticable. But such a definition is inaccurate and misleading. World history is not the sum of histories of the civilizations of the world, just as Western history is not the sum of the histories of the countries of the West.

 

If the study of Western civilization were simply a series of surveys of British history, of German history, of French, Italian, Spanish, Balkan, and the rest, Western civilization would not be a feasible subject of study. Yet, in fact, it is feasible, and the reason is that the approach is not agglomerative. Rather although it naturally considers the essential internal developments of the principal states, it focuses on those historical forces or movements that affected the West as a whole, such as Christianity, Islam, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and so forth. So it is with world history, though the stage in this case is global rather than regional, and the emphasis consequently is on movements of worldwide in fluence.

 

In the first half of this text, we will see that in Paleolithic times, for example, humans emerged in Africa and gradually spread through Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas. The lateful breakthrough to agriculture occurred during the neolithic period, followed by metalworking and assorted other crafts and leading to urban life and civilization. This in turn led to the development of the great Eurasian civilizations the Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, and European-which for millenia developed autonomously along parallel lines. The amount of interaction among Eurasian civilizations varied as a result of powerful interregional historical forces such as Hellenism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the recurring invasions from the central Eurasian steppes.

 

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The second half of this World History text, by contrast, focuses on the emergence of West ern Europe as the occurrence of greatest global significance in early modern times. At the end of the fifteenth century, Europe was only one of four Eurasian centers of civilization, and by no means the most prominent. By the end of the eighteenth century, Western Europe had gained control of the ocean routes, had organized an immensely profitable worldwide commerce, and had conquered vast territories in the Americas and in Siberia. Thus, this period stands out in the perspective of world history as one of transition from the regional isolation of the pre 1492 era to the West European global domination of the nineteenth century.

If the early modern period is seen from this viewpoint, then it becomes apparent at once that the traditional topics of European his tory are irrelevant for world history and must be discarded. In their place, accordingly, the following three general topics are emphasized in this study:

1. The roots of European expansion (why Europe, rather than one of the other Eurasian centers of civilization, expanded throughout the world).

2. The Confucian, Moslem, and non-Eurasian worlds on the eve of Europe's expansion (their basic conditions and institutions, and the manner in which they affected the nature and course of European expansion).

3. The stages of European expansion (Iberian

stage, 1500-1600; Dutch, French, and British stage, 1600-1763; Russian Siberian

stage).

This organization allows us to clarify the main trends in world history during these centuries, and in a manner no more difficult to understand than the very different organization usually followed in the European History course. Also, the reader should note that the role of Western Europe in this early modern period is emphasized, not because of any Western orientation, but because from a global view point Europe at this time was in fact the dynamic source of global change. This is true also for the nineteenth century when the unifying feature of world history was Europe's domination of the globe. Finally, in the twentieth century, world history becomes the story of the growing reaction against Western domination and the dangerous groping toward a new world balance.

This, in a nutshell, is the rationale and structure of world history. It is a structure that is no more complex than that of Western history. The difference is merely that the stage is our planet, not just the continent of Europe.

 

 

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors and publishers for 

Harry1AP26~P30

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