Check out the t-shirt you’re wearing. John Green thinks it’s a pretty good metaphor for globalization. Our world is deeply interconnected and economically interdependent. This has been going on for a while, but in the last century, the scale of this interconnection has increased exponentially. Trade, travel, and communication have all sped up. John Green walks you through how t-shirts are made in the twenty-first century. How has this system improved our lives? How has it endangered us?

This video provides you with evidence at the global level to respond to the Unit Problem. It should also help you understand how globalization has made the world both “flat” and “lumpy.” Finally, it should provide information to help you evaluate whether the changes in production and distribution brought on by globalization have been a good thing for humanity.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. How does John Green define globalization?
2. What are some factors that John Green points to in order to explain why the scale of global trade has increased?
3. What does John Green list as some of the advantages of globalization?
4. How does John Green say your t-shirt is an indication of how globalization has made your life better?
5. John Green mentions some of the radical changes brought by globalization. What are they?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. Using evidence from this video, explain how globalization has affected economic systems over time.
2. This video is subtitled “the Upside”. But John Green still seems to give a lot of downsides to globalization. Do you think the advantages of globalization are “worth it”? How might your answer change if you lived somewhere else or in different circumstances?

Globalization is often seen as a positive development, but there are many downsides to what John Green calls this “cultural phenomenon”. In this activity, you will consider the negative outcomes of globalization. This will remind you that there are always multiple perspectives, or many sides to one story.

First, with your class, brainstorm the upsides of globalization. If needed, review the transcript from the video Globalization I—The Upside: Crash Course World History #41 to get some ideas.

Next, choose three of the upsides to globalization and try to come up with three downsides that relate to the upsides. In other words, what is the other side of the story? Even if you don’t have solid evidence for your downsides, do your best to use intuition and logic to come up with ideas.

Be prepared to share your downsides with the class, and be sure to notice whether you came to similar conclusions about the downsides, or if you and your classmates ended up creating multiple perspectives regarding similar issues.

Those who support globalization argue that it creates freedom and prosperity. Free trade deals like NAFTA open up borders and create close economic ties, bringing down the cost of consumer goods. But all around the world, many workers have had to shoulder the burdens of a world economy. The processes of globalization upend communities and disrupt local patterns of life and production. The Zapatista movement in Mexico and anti-WTO protests in Seattle are two examples of some of the ways people have worked together locally and transnationally to resist globalization.

This article digs deeper into the negative sides of globalization. It provides you with evidence at the local, national, and global levels for understanding the challenges of increasing global connections. This article will help you evaluate the impacts of globalization on human communities, networks, and production and distribution. It provides several examples of globalization’s impacts on global and local economies as well as some networks and communities that resisted its spread. These examples will help as you consider the Unit Problem, which asks how our lives today are both similar and different, and what the causes are of these variations and commonalities.

Read 1 – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2 – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Who were the Zapatistas, and how did they react to globalization?
2. What was the Zapatistas’ main complaint about NAFTA?
3. What is direct action? What example does the article provide for direct action?
4. Is Nike “woke”? In other words, does the clothing company promote social justice through globalization?
5. What is austerity, and how it is an example of the downsides of globalization?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. To what extent does this article explain the continuities and changes in the global economy from 1900 to the present?
2. This article ends by asking “is it possible for globalization to benefit all parts of the world?” But the evidence in this article clearly seems to point toward the answer being “no.” Using examples from your life or from other parts of this course, challenge this claim. What evidence can you think of that shows how the benefits of globalization outweigh the negative examples in this article?
3. The actions of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the “direct action” tactics of the WTO protesters in Seattle were extreme. These people were clearly pushed to a breaking point by the injustices of globalization. What would it take for you to engage in “direct action” and protest injustice in the streets?

Humans are able to drastically alter the biosphere (the air, land, and water that make up the Earth) and some scientists seek to highlight this by calling the current epoch of geological time the Anthropocene, from the Greek root for human. Humans have changed the environment, particularly the oceans and atmosphere, through the burning of fossil fuels, which creates excess CO2. In addition, humans have produced nuclear power and artificial chemicals that further change the biosphere. Surviving these changes will take the commitment, innovation, and cooperation of a large portion of all humans on the planet.

This article introduces you to the idea of the “Anthropocene”, and especially to global environmental change over the last century. This information will be important evidence for addressing the Unit Problem, which asks how life has changed over the last century. It’s also important background knowledge for a lot of articles and videos to come.

Think about the following question as you read the article: Using evidence from this article, explain the causes and effects of environmental changes in the period from 1900 to the present. Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2 – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What is the other geological name for the Anthropocene?
2. What does the graph “Human Influences on Global Temperature” (figure 2.1) illustrate?
3. Using the same reference, compare the period between 1880 and 1940 and that between 1940 and 2020. What do you notice?
4. What is the current rate of decline in the biodiversity of all sectors of the planet?
5. What do Three Mile Island (US), Chernobyl (Ukraine), and Fukushima (Japan) have in common?
6. According to the article, how long do many scientists believe we have left to address global climate change? How might we correct our ongoing impact on the environment?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. Using evidence from this article, explain the causes and effects of environmental changes in the period from 1900 to the present.
2. Based on this article, brainstorm how environmental changes in the last century have changed the way we live. Also, consider how continued environmental challenges may change human society in the future.

Humanity has faced many diseases throughout history. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people looked to history for lessons about how to end—and prevent—pandemics. There are few better lessons than those learned from the eradication of smallpox. The worst disease that has ever afflicted humanity, smallpox is also the only one we’ve ever eradicated. Dr. Larry Brilliant lived this history as part of the global campaign to end smallpox. In this video, he tells the long history of humanity’s battle against smallpox and how the world finally found the will to defeat its old foe at the end of the twentieth century.

This video will help you understand how diseases like smallpox spread as humans became more interconnected. But you will also learn that humanity spread knowledge about how to fight this disease through those same connections. The information in this video will provide you with evidence to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of globalization. It also provides evidence about how technology and innovations change and how those changes reshape the world.

Think about the following question as you watch the video: To what extent does this video explain how environmental factors along with new technologies affected human populations from 1900 to the present? You will be asked to respond to this question again at the end of the video.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. According to Dr. Larry Brilliant, what made smallpox the worst disease in history?
2. What is variolation?
3. Who created the first smallpox vaccine? According to Dr. Larry, how did that person discover and test vaccines?
4. What was ring vaccination?
5. According to Dr. Larry, what was the most important factor in eradicating smallpox?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. To what extent does this video explain how environmental factors along with new technologies affected human populations from 1900 to the present?
2. After watching this video, what do you think is the single most important step that humanity could take to prevent another pandemic?

Human populations and the environment are connected in many complex ways. After growing relatively slowly for millennia, the human population exploded in the last two hundred years, beginning with the Industrial Revolution. Searching for jobs, people increasingly moved to cities. Life expectancy also grew, due to new medicine and advances in sanitation. Yet the growing population and our increased production also produced higher levels of pollution, a problem that affects us more than ever today.

Today, there are more human individuals than ever before, and yet our lives are more intertwined than ever. This article can guide you to consider the issues facing us in terms of population growth and environmental trends, including climate change. You can use this evidence to respond to the Unit Problem which asks both how life has changed over the past century and whether those changes have been the same for everyone or different for various communities and regions.

Think about the following question as you read the article: To what extent does this article explain the causes and effects of environmental changes in the period from 1900 to the present? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2 – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What have been the general trends in global population over the long span of human history?
2. What has been the trend in the past two hundred years in terms of the percentage of people living in cities?
3. How has industrialization changed atmospheric CO2 levels, and why does that matter?
4. What have been some health effects of fossil fuel use?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. To what extent does this article explain the causes and effects of environmental changes in the period from 1900 to the present?
2. Does this article provide more evidence for a view of globalization as flattening (creating more connections and equality) or as spiky or lumpy (creating different experiences for different people)?
3. Given the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution, do you think this was overall a positive transformation in production and distribution, or negative? Provide evidence for your position.

This activity asks you to practice your claim- and counterclaim-making skills. This will help you evaluate your ability to make strong, evidence-backed claims, and will also give you an idea of how well you understand globalization.

In this activity, you will write two claims and one counterclaim about the environmental impact of globalization.

Take out the Making Claims – Globalization worksheet, and either individually or in pairs, write two claims about the environmental impact of globalization. For each claim, find two pieces of evidence to support the claim, using course materials or Internet research. Once you’ve written your two claims and provided supporting evidence, write one counterclaim that relates to one of claims. You should also provide two pieces of evidence to back up your counterclaim.

Be prepared to share your claims at the end of the class and see if you can figure out what types of claims everyone made (that is, causal, comparative, or those related to CCOT).

The benefits of the Industrial Revolution came at a high cost to the environment. In response to increased pollution, lowered life expectancy, and the influence of romanticism, the modern environmental movement was born. Since then, a key conflict has dominated environmentalism: conservation versus preservation, mixed use versus full protection. This article explores the important trends, debates, and people involved in the environmental movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As human societies have grown more resource intensive and interconnected, our impact on the environment has grown more significant. But people have also noticed and acted to address threats to the environment. This article provides evidence for how people across the world have responded to environmental damage during the last two centuries. This evidence will help you respond to the Unit Problem by raising the question: who is most affected by environmental degradation?

Think about the following question as you read the article: Using evidence from this article, explain the causes and effects of environmental changes in the period from 1900 to the present. Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2 – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. What intellectual and artistic movement rejected the Enlightenment idea that humans could control nature?
2. Give at least two examples of environmental destruction and/or poor living conditions during the Industrial Revolution.
3. Explain the difference between preservation and conservation.
4. What is the EPA and why has it been the subject of debate?
5. What is the Greenbelt Movement?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. Using evidence from this article, explain the causes and effects of environmental changes in the period from 1900 to the present.
2. Take some time to consider the “pop quiz” from the beginning of the article. Choose an answer. What evidence from this article challenges or supports your answer? Is your answer different after reading the article?
3. We all live in the same world and breathe the same air. So, is environmental degradation evidence for a “flat” world? Is there anyone who is hurt more by or benefits more from the exploitation of the environment? Who?

In this video, scholar Eman M. Elshaikh introduces the Green Revolution, which refers to agricultural technology transfers aimed at reducing world hunger, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. The set of policies and aid initiatives also had a political element within the context of the Cold War. Aid from the US was linked to the belief that extreme poverty and hunger might turn populations to communist political movements. Debate continues over the benefits and costs of the programs, based on disagreements about sustainability, US corporate benefits, and whether the Green Revolution actually made things measurably better in the long run.

This video will give you a clear sense of the aims, specific policies, and some of the results of the Green Revolution. The analysis by Eman M. Elshaikh is especially relevant to considering both how the world has changed over the last century, and the question of how that change has been shared in different regions of the world. The video should help you consider the themes of economic systems and innovation in the context of what Elshaikh introduces as the political side of food.

Think about the following question as you watch the video: Using evidence from this article, explain how the development of new technologies changed the world from 1900 to the present. You will be asked to respond to this question again at the end of the video.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. Why did the US State Department official William Gaud coin the term “Green Revolution” in 1968, and what was he contrasting it to?
2. Eman M. Elshaikh refers to a common saying in the US State Department in the Cold War: “Where hunger goes, communism follows.” What does this mean, and how did this concern help launch the Green Revolution?
3. How did the Green Revolution differ in different regions in its adaptation and its results?
4. What were some of the methods and results of the Green Revolution?
5. What are some of the critiques of the Green Revolution?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. Using evidence from this article, explain how the development of new technologies changed the world from 1900 to the present.
2. Why is it important to consider the Green Revolution when answering the question “Explain the extent to which new global connections and innovations brought change in different parts of the world from c. 1900 to today”?
3. There is still ongoing debate about the policies and the legacy of the Green Revolution, and some new policies and technologies have continued to emerge in ways that are similar to the Green Revolution. Based on the video and your understanding of geopolitics in the Cold War and today, how do you think we can best measure whether it was a success?

In this essay, author Jeff Spoden demonstrates the ways in which control over natural resources has continued to fuel violent conflict in the twentieth century and into the current era. World Wars I and II are both connected to resource control, as are the conflicts related to decolonization. Spoden also explains how wealthy countries, including former colonialist powers, can continue to dictate policies to former colonies that are extractive, which is sometimes referred to as “neocolonialism.”

This article on the control and conflict over natural resources completes our focus on environmental change over the last century. The essay should help you address the Unit Problem by addressing the historical roots of conflicts that have led to divergent experiences in different regions over the past century.

Think about the following question as you read the article: Use evidence from this article to explain the causes and effects of environmental changes from 1900 to present. Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1 – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2 – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Why, according to the author, do some scholars believe that future wars may be fought over access to water?
2. According to Spoden, how were the two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century related to resource control?
3. How did resource access and control make the decolonization process violent as well?
4. Although direct colonial rule largely ended in the decades after World War II, how have former colonial powers continued to influence and control resources and economies of former colonies?
5. What are some more recent examples that Spoden uses to illustrate direct military intervention in the name of resource control?

Read 3 – Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following question:

1. Use evidence from this article to explain the causes and effects of environmental change from 1900 to present.
2. Do you think conflicts over natural resources will become more or less frequent and violent in years to come? What are some aspects of the globalization process that might make these conflicts more common and more violent? What are some factors that could potentially help prevent or reduce the violence of conflict over natural resources?
3. How is the information in this article useful for responding to the question: “Explain the extent to which new global connections and innovations brought change in different parts of the world from c. 1900 to today.”

Historical events and processes are usually complicated and rarely have one cause. In fact, they often have multiple causes, some of which occurred long before the event while others happened right before the event took place. Understanding how these causes relate to the historical event or process being studied is central to analyzing change over time, and perhaps even helpful in predicting what might come next. In this activity, you will analyze how environmental change came about and then write a causal essay describing what you think are the biggest causes of environmental change over time. Given the current state of our globe’s climate, this is a timely and relevant topic for everyone to consider.

In this activity, you will review what you’ve learned about environmental change in this lesson, complete the Causation Tool, and write a five- to six-paragraph essay in response to this prompt:

Develop an argument that evaluates the two most significant causes AND the two most significant effects of environmental change from 1900 to the present.

Feel free to use resources from the course and conduct your own research as needed. Review the WHP LEQ Writing Rubric before you write your essay so that you are sure to incorporate all the elements of good writing you’ve been learning about throughout the course. Remember that historians always contextualize for the reader. Additionally, historians source the documents they use and support their claims (and counterclaims) with solid reasoning and evidence.

Your teacher will collect your worksheets and essays at the end of class to assess your understanding of this content and the historical reasoning process of causation.