History 213: 2020-21

I'm teaching four sections - 22, 23, 24, 25 - of HIS 213 this year. So far, we've looked at how we measure historical time (decades, centuries, AD/CE, BC/BCE, etc.) and how to show events on a timeline. After a brief look at the first 13 billion or so years of the universe since the Big Bang, we started studying how and when nomadic humans began becoming sedentary. Beginning in the Fertile Crescent region of the Near East, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 14 000 to 12 000 years ago, people gradually started to abandon their hunting and gathering way of life in favor of settling down in permanent communities and focusing their efforts on agriculture. Depending on the section, we are up to around page 15 or 16 in the My History Log workbook. We've been using videos and handouts too.