Cookie Policy

Our website uses cookies to understand content and feature usage to drive site improvements over time. To learn more, review our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Unit 9 Overview: Acceleration

Unit 9 Overview: Acceleration

How has the world changed so dramatically in the past 250 years? The answer has a lot to do with our use of fossil fuels and global interconnections.

Key Ideas

As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.

Think about the following questions as you watch the video


  1. What is the Anthropocene?
  2. How did travelers and merchants in the Islamic world and Indian Ocean like Ibn Mājid help later European explorers?
  3. How did collective learning increase after the Columbian Exchange?
  4. What are the ingredients and Goldilocks Conditions for our last threshold of increasingly complexity—the Modern Revolution?
  5. How did industrialization and the use of fossil fuels lead to social and economic changes?
  6. <em>Homo sapiens</em> (humans) have been around for about 250,000 to 300,000 years, but what two revolutions led our species to experience the most change in the past 11,000 years?