UCSB Hist 2c: World History, 1700-pres.

The "Global Village" /
History Quotations

Handout for Discussion Section, Week 1

(Hist 2c Course homepage, Prof's homepage)
created March 31, 2008, updated 3/31/08

This handout is designed to be used in the first discussion section meeting of a large survey course in World History, 1700-present. The students will be asked to write down what they'd guess the distribution of population, languages, religions, etc. might be, and also to write down how they would define what history is.

The TA would then collect answers on the board, writing down the range of answers present among the class. Ditto for a few definitions of history.

Then the handout would be passed out to compare with their own notions of the Global Village in group discussion. If time remains, the definitions of history can be compared.

As homework for next time, students would be asked to try to classify the 21 History Quotations into the three types of history that Nietzsche defines in his 1874 essay "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" (which is in the course reader), namely antiquarian, critical and monumental. That would be the lead-in to the next week's discussion of that text and Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift model of change.

The Global Village
(.pdf version; .doc version)
[both formatted to print on two pages]

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like this (see note on sources, below):
[compare to the demographics of the 2006 2c course]

In 1990

In 2005

58 Asians
12 Africans
15 Europeans (including Soviet Union)
8 Latin Americans
5 North Americans
1 Oceanian

52 would be female, 48 would be male
70 would be non-white, 30 would be white

16 would speak Mandarin
9 English
8 Hindi or Urdu
5 Spanish
6 Russian
4 Arabic

30 would be Christian
         (18 Catholics, 8 Protestants, 3 Orthodox)
17 Muslims
13 Hindus
6 Buddhists
5 Animists
21 all other religions, including atheists



6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth , and all 6 would be from the United States (20 people would have 75%; 20 others 2%)

33 would be children (half of them immunized)
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would die each year, 3 would be born
1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer

89 would be heterosexual, 11 homosexual

60 Asians
14 Africans
12 Europeans
8 Latin Americans
5 North Americans
1 Oceanian

50 would be female, 50 would be male
80 would be non-white, 20 would be white

14 would speak Mandarin
8 English
8 would speak Hindi/Urdu
7 Spanish
4 Russian
4 Arabic

33 Christians

22 Muslims
15 Hindus
6 Buddhists
14 non-religious, agnostics, atheists
10 all other religions [1 would represent Sikhs,
        Jews, Spiritists, Baha'is, Confucians, & Jains
       (and a few others)]

5 people would possess 32% of the entire world's wealth, all of them from the US

33 would be children
80 would live in substandard housing
34 adults would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would die each year, 2 would be born
2 would have a college education
7 would own a computer, 7 an automobile
(76 electricity: 42 radios, 24 TVs, 14 telephones)

For sources, see: http://odtmaps.com/behind_the_maps/population_map/state-of-village-stats.asp.
(There are some inconsistencies due to rounding, and taking from various versions of the sources.)
[see also my 2006 version of this handout; the quotations below were culled from this hnn.us page]

What is History? -- Some Quotations

  1. This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
    Tacitus (ca. 56 - ca. 117), Roman senator and historian
  2. Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
    Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Italian diplomat and philosopher
  3. History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning.
    Lord Henry St. John Bolingbroke (1678-1751), British politician
  4. History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.
    Voltaire (1694-1778), French Enlightenment philosopher
  5. In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
    Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Anglo-Irish statesman
  6. History is a myth that men agree to believe.
    Napoleon (1769-1821), French military & political leader
  7. The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
    Georg Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher
  8. History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
    Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist
  9. History is the self-consciousness of humanity.
    Johann Gustav Droyson (1808-1884), German historian
  10. Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. Karl Marx (1818-1883), German political philosopher
  11. If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
    Lord John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), British historian
  12. History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.
    Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), Dutch historian
  13. The supreme purpose of history is a better world.
    Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), US president
  14. A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
    George Santayana (1863-1952), (Spanish) philosopher
  15. We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened.
    Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929), British historian
  16. History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.
    Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) in A Room of One's Own (1929)
  17. In mass societies, myth takes the place of history.
    William Bossenbrook (1897-ca. 1970), US historian
  18. History is not a catalogue but … a convincing version of events.
    A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990), British historian
  19. [History is] not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments.
    Geoffrey Barraclough (1908-1984), British historian
  20. History isn't really about the past--settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
    Ken Burns (1953-), US documentary filmmaker
  21. History is, indeed, an argument without end.
    Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007), US historian
prepared for web by Harold Marcuse, March 31, 2008, updated: see header
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