The Need to Know our Global Past

Abstract

Dramatic changes of the present suggest to some that we need not worry about the past. But these same changes have revealed important new knowledge about the past and have convinced leading researchers that we are still governed by past processes. Continental drift, genetic change, and social history each show our tight connection to the past. This chapter identifies key historical variables and shows how they reveal change and continuity over the past five centuries. It emphasizes that, to document the history of human society, one needs to account for numerous factors interacting in a social system at local and global scales. Nevertheless, new technology makes it possible to create a large-scale connected record of the human experience.