Show:
WIRED WORLD
MEDICINE
THE PLANET
GLOBAL ECONOMY
RIGHTS & REACTION
100
Network of linked computers that made instant global communication ordinary.
What is the Internet? — MC TIP: Information moves at no cost and no delay. That reorganizes everything else.
100
Substance that trains the immune system to resist a disease.
What is a vaccine? — MC TIP: Falling death rates drive the twentieth-century population explosion.
100
Rise in global temperatures driven by greenhouse gas emissions.
What is climate change? — MC TIP: Industrialization's long bill, coming due globally.
100
Economic theory favoring free markets, privatization, and a reduced government role.
What is neoliberalism? — MC TIP: Thatcher and Reagan. It reverses the mid-century trend toward state control.
100
1948 UN document setting out rights belonging to all people.
What is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? — MC TIP: Rights become an international standard states can be held to publicly.
200
Engine technology that made mass long-distance air travel affordable.
What is the jet engine? — MC TIP: People and perishable goods now move in hours, not weeks.
200
Disease declared eradicated in 1980 after a global vaccination campaign.
What is smallpox? — MC TIP: The only human disease ever fully eradicated. A WHO success story.
200
Coal, oil, and natural gas, formed from ancient organisms.
What are fossil fuels? — MC TIP: The energy source behind both industrialization and the climate problem.
200
Moving production to countries with cheaper labor.
What is outsourcing? — MC TIP: Lower prices for consumers, lost manufacturing jobs in wealthy states.
200
Organization founded in 1945 to keep international peace.
What is the United Nations? — MC TIP: Built to fix the League's enforcement problem.
300
Standardized steel boxes that slashed the cost of moving goods by sea.
What is containerization? — MC TIP: The least glamorous and most important technology in the unit.
300
Drugs beginning with penicillin that made bacterial infections survivable.
What are antibiotics? — MC TIP: Combined with sanitation, they transform life expectancy.
300
Rachel Carson book that launched the modern environmental movement.
What is Silent Spring? — MC TIP: 1962. Pesticides, and the birth of environmental politics.
300
Companies operating across many countries, sometimes richer than their host states.
What are multinational corporations? — MC TIP: Power that is not territorial. A genuinely new development.
300
Religious or political movement rejecting secular modernity and demanding a return to tradition.
What is fundamentalism? — MC TIP: A reaction to globalization, not a holdover from before it.
400
Orbiting technology enabling global broadcasting, navigation, and weather tracking.
What are satellites? — MC TIP: A Cold War spinoff that became civilian infrastructure.
400
Pandemic identified in the 1980s that reshaped public health and activism worldwide.
What is HIV/AIDS? — MC TIP: Access to treatment exposed global inequality in stark terms.
400
1997 international agreement committing industrialized nations to cut emissions.
What is the Kyoto Protocol? — MC TIP: Who cuts and who pays is the fight. That is why agreement is hard.
400
Lending institutions that attached policy conditions to loans for developing nations.
What are the IMF and the World Bank? — MC TIP: Structural adjustment. Influence exercised through debt.
400
1979 revolution that replaced a Western-backed monarchy with an Islamic republic.
What is the Iranian Revolution? — MC TIP: The clearest case of religious resistance to Western-aligned modernization.
500
1970s advances in seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation that sharply raised yields in Asia and Latin America.
What is the Green Revolution? — MC TIP: It averted predicted famines but raised debt, inequality, and environmental costs.
500
Conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer that rose as infectious deaths fell.
What are non-communicable or lifestyle diseases? — MC TIP: The epidemiological transition. Longer lives bring different killers.
500
Atmospheric damage from CFCs over Antarctica, addressed by the 1987 Montreal Protocol.
What is ozone depletion? — MC TIP: The rare case where global agreement actually worked. Good contrast with climate.
500
Economy where value comes from information, services, and technology rather than manufacturing.
What is a knowledge economy? — MC TIP: The shift wealthy nations made as factories moved abroad.
500
2010 to 2011 wave of uprisings across the Arab world, organized substantially through social media.
What is the Arab Spring? — MC TIP: Technology as an organizing tool. Note how few produced stable democracies.