Hi. Make yourself comfortable. My name is Philip Zelikow. I'm a professor of history at the University of Virginia. You're joining me for a course on the modern world, global history since 1760. That's the last 250 years of world history. We're going to cover a huge amount of ground. But the way we're going to do that, is we're just going to do this in a series of conversations, with media images, slides, a lot of things. But really just a series of conversations, in which we're going to talk about this course. One to one. True, it's a lot of conversations to have with a professor, and you don't get to talk back directly. But on the plus side, you get to stop, pause, fast forward, rewind, or if you get tired of the professor, just turn him off. So, welcome to the modern world. As a subject for our first conversation today, I just want to talk a little bit about the study of history. Okay, history. We would think about the study of history as, well what happened in the past? What happened? Well, finding out what happened just, kind of what happened in the past, is often extremely hard. I've served in the government in a number of different jobs over the last 30 years. One of those jobs in 2003 and 2004 was to manage a small government agency called the 9/11 Commission. Our job was to look into the facts of what happened on the morning of 9/11, and why it happened. It turned out to be extremely difficult just to untangle the story of what happened on the morning of 9/11. In fact, our commission discovered that the United States Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration, had tangled up a lot of the critical details about where aircraft were, which aircraft was being dispatched to go where, and so on. So, literally it took our commission years after the fact of this enormously important event, just to get down to the truth of what happened on the morning of 9/11. And that's just one illustration. So for a lot of historians and a lot of history readers, just reading about what happened is enough. But a lot of this course is not going to just be about what happened. A lot of this course is going to be about why. Why things happened the way they did. I think these why questions are really important, but they're also really interesting, but they're often not addressed very well. So take a step back, and the big point I'm just trying to make here is, these why questions are actually really, really important, and this course is going to spend a lot of time on why questions. Well, when you ask those why questions, what your answers will be are sometimes they'll just be circumstances. But a lot of it, especially cause we're dealing with history, is going to be about choices. Choices made by human beings. Circumstances: that kind of falls into the category of, stuff happens, all right. Here's a picture of a volcano. A volcano is caused by geological circumstances. No human being made a decision that was going to produce the eruption of a volcano. The American Civil War, not like a volcano. This is not just well the lava just happened to erupt in 1861 because that was its time. No. Human beings made choices. They made a series of choices. That's actually what makes the story so interesting. Is to understand those choices. How did they make them, why did they make them? If you set up the why problems as choices, you can see how interesting this gets. Because then all of a sudden you see, history could have taken a different path. It's the things that did not happen that actually make it interesting to study the things that did happen. Because you unpack choices people like you made, long ago, that could've steered history in a totally different place. When you examine those sorts of choices, what you'll find is a cycle that looks something like this. Here are people, they look at a situation. They see a problem, or, maybe they see an opportunity. They come up with some sort of solution to the problem, from a menu of things that they see in front of them. Maybe they're not the things you would have seen, but you want to understand, what did they think their solutions were? Maybe, you would have come up with a different solution, but you're interested in figuring out what they thought their options were. Then after they take action, and do stuff, hah, a new situation appears, and the cycle goes on. But this cycle I've just described here, that's a story, that's a narrative. So, if you unpack the choices underneath the why questions, what you've done is you've unpacked really interesting stories. Stories about choices that determine history going down one pathway, instead of down another. Okay. Enough about the general study of history. The next thing we'll talk about is to just get some sense of what a huge divide there was between the traditional world and the modern world we're going to study in this course. I look forward to seeing you then. Welcome. [BLANK_AUDIO]
