Chapter 3 - Our Collective Story: Human Commonalities

This chapter examines our universal human behaviors that are organized into five comparative patterns or currents that form core human connections linking our past, present, and future. The currents are drawn from an interdisciplinary perspective and integrated within a historical framework. The five currents – Relationship to Nature: Ecosystem Currents; Ways of Living: Techno-Economic Currents; Human Networks: Social Currents; Establishing Order: Political Currents; and Human Expressions: Cultural Currents – each contain different content but are repeated in each wave.

On the right are links to 10 categories of teacher resources.
Most are in PDF format (requires Adobe Reader)

Author's Comments

Here is another chapter that I debated about including since it doesn't fit into a traditional world history framework. But, as you can imagine, I had what I thought were good reasons for its inclusion. First, I wanted to highlight the fact that there are many remarkable similarities in the way humans have constructed their culture and society. I wanted to examine more thoroughly these commonalities through history rather than over-emphasize the differences. Students like to examine things we share and this chapter can point them in that direction.