Course Description and Objectives
Within undergraduate education at UB, World Civilizations is considered part of the “core” of the General education program. The purpose of "core courses" in a university curriculum is to be certain that every student who earns a baccalaureate shares (with all others who earn their degree) a common base of knowledge. Without this common frame of reference, people could be educated into narrow specializations, but would lose the ability to integrate ideas across different areas of knowledge. As the catalog states, the courses in World Civilizations are "about the peoples, forces and ideas that have shaped the way individuals have experienced (and still do experience) the world….[Accordingly, our subject matter is…] the origins and development, geographical context, and interactions of world cultures."
To bring such a wide-ranging subject matter into clearer focus, in this lecture section we will use the city as our lens. Why the city? If you were to look it up in a collegiate dictionary, you would see that the word "civilization" is characterized as "a relatively high level of cultural and technological development"—the very stuff in which we’re interested. The word shares a Latin root with "civil" and "civic." (To appreciate fully the subtleties of meaning among these words, look them up and read the complete definitions!) Our modern word "city" derives from the Middle Latin word "civitas," which itself is derived from the Latin word for "citizenship." One of the arguments to be advanced in this course is that the nature of our common life as human beings is literally embodied in the public realms which we construct. Cities, as you will come to see through the slides used to illustrate many lectures, are the largest and most complex artifacts of human creation. The provision of, and the design quality of, the public space of the city is itself a principal expression of civilization.
Put simply, the objective of my lecture section of this course is to familiarize undergraduate students with the historic social, cultural, economic and political forces which have shaped the city, from the dawn of recorded human history up to 1500 CE. In the Spring semester a companion course-- UGC 112-- will complete this investigation, examining the forces which configured the modern city and which influence the changing physical composition of contemporary metropolitan regions around the globe.
Because cities did not come into being instantaneously, but, rather, evolved over some 5,500 years (for which we have some form of reliable record), the presentation of the lectures follows a rough chronological sequence. At the same time, recognizing that human cultures vary around the globe, we will undertake selected cross-cultural explorations, seeking to compare and contrast human experiences. In each instance, we will examine the tangible physical evidence of The City to facilitate our understanding.
Students will find a great deal of useful information at two websites that have been prepared by university staff to assist students enrolled in the World Civilizations course sequence:
http://gened.buffalo.edu/toolsforteaching/libraries.html AND http://wings.buffalo.edu/cas/world-civ/
The first site describes services available through The Libraries at UB. The second is tailored to the needs and interests of students registered in World Civilizations.