Sep 11, · Voyages of Christopher Columbus is one of the most critical events in history before While the discovery of the New World had an enormous influence on the colonization era, Columbus’s legacy remains controversial. Or you can write an essay on Hernán Cortés, a pivotal figure in the colonization of South America May 01, · A Special Moment in History. The fate of our planet will be determined in the next few decades, through our technological, lifestyle, and population choices. Bill blogger.comted Reading Time: 7 mins Sep 15, · A Moment in Time. I was asked to capture a special time in my life and reflect on it, as I look back on my life, the one I hold dear to me is when I was a child. I guess I was about ten years old. I came from a family of ten. Being from a large family it was always something going on in our house
Interesting History Essay Topics and Events to Write about
BEWARE of people preaching that we live in special times. People have preached that message before, and those who listened sold their furniture and climbed up on rooftops to await ascension, or built boats to float out the coming flood, or laced up their Nikes and poisoned themselves in some California subdivision.
These prophets are the ones with visions of the seven-headed beast, with a taste for the hair shirt and the scourge, a moment in history essay, with twirling eyes. No, better by far to listen to Ecclesiastes, the original wise preacher, jaded after a thousand messiahs and a thousand revivals.
And yet, for all that, we may live in a special time. We may live in the strangest, most thoroughly different moment since human beings took up farming, 10, years ago, and time more or less commenced, a moment in history essay. Since then time has flowed in one direction -- toward more, which we have taken to be progress. At first the momentum was gradual, almost imperceptible, checked by wars and the Dark Ages and plagues and taboos; but in recent centuries it has accelerated, the curve of every graph steepening like the Himalayas rising from the Asian steppe.
We have climbed quite high. Of course, a moment in history essay, fifty years ago one could have said the same thing, and fifty years before that, and fifty years before that. But in each case it would have been premature.
We've increased the population fourfold in that years; the amount of food we grow has gone up faster still; the size of our economy has quite simply exploded. But a moment in history essay -- now may be the special time. So special that in the Western world we might each of us consider, among many other things, having only one child -- that is, a moment in history essay, reproducing at a rate as low as that at which human beings have ever voluntarily reproduced.
Is this really necessary? Are we finally running up against some limits? To try to answer this question, we need to ask another: How many of us will there be in the near future? Here is a piece of news that may alter the way we see the planet -- an indication that we live at a special moment.
At least at first blush the news is hopeful. New demographic evidence shows that it is at least possible that a child born today will live long enough to see the peak of human population. Around the world people are choosing to have fewer and fewer children -- not just in China, where the government forces it on them, but in almost every nation outside the poorest parts of Africa.
Population growth rates are lower than they have been at any time since the Second World War. In the past three decades the average woman in the developing world, excluding China, has gone from bearing six children to bearing four.
Even in Bangladesh the average has fallen from six to fewer than four; even in the mullahs' Iran it has dropped by four children. If this keeps up, the population of the world will not quite double again; United Nations analysts offer as their mid-range projection that it will top out at 10 to 11 billion, up from a moment in history essay under six billion at the moment.
The world a moment in history essay still growing, at nearly a record pace -- we add a New York City every month, a moment in history essay, almost a Mexico every year, almost an India every decade. But the rate of growth is slowing; it is no longer "exponential," "unstoppable," "inexorable," "unchecked," "cancerous, a moment in history essay.
And that will be none too soon. There is no way we could keep going as we have been. The increase in human population in the s has exceeded the total population in The population has grown more since than it did during the previous four million years. The reasons for a moment in history essay recent rapid growth are pretty clear. Although the Industrial Revolution speeded historical growth rates considerably, it was really the public-health revolution, and its spread to the Third World at the end of the Second World War, that set us galloping.
Vaccines and antibiotics came all at once, and right behind came population. In Sri Lanka in the late s life expectancy was rising at least a year every twelve months. How much difference did this make? Consider the United States: if people died throughout this century at the same rate as they did at its beginning, America's population would be million, not million, a moment in history essay.
If it is relatively easy to explain why populations grew so fast after the Second World War, it is much harder to explain why the growth is now slowing. Experts confidently supply answers, some of them contradictory: "Development is the best contraceptive" -- or education, or the empowerment of women, or hard times that force families to postpone having children.
For each example there is a counterexample. Ninety-seven percent of women in the Arab sheikhdom of Oman know about contraception, and yet they average more than six children apiece. Turks have used contraception at about the same rate as the Japanese, but their birth rate is twice as high. And so on. It is not AIDS that will slow population growth, except in a few African countries. It is not horrors like the civil war in Rwanda, which claimed half a million lives -- a loss the planet can make up for in two days.
All that matters is how often individual men and women decide that they want to reproduce. Will the drop continue? It had better, a moment in history essay. UN mid-range projections assume that women in the developing world will soon average two children apiece -- the rate at which population growth stabilizes.
If fertility remained at current levels, the population would reach the absurd figure of billion in just years. Even if it dropped to 2. But let's trust that this time the demographers have got it right. Let's trust that we have rounded the turn and we're in the home stretch.
Let's trust that the planet's population really will double only one more time, a moment in history essay. Even so, this is a case of good news, bad news.
The good news is that we won't grow forever. The bad news is that there are six billion of us already, a number the world strains to support. One more near-doubling -- four or five billion more people -- will nearly double that strain. Will these be the five billion straws that break the camel's back? WE'VE answered the question How many of us will there be? But to figure out how near we are to any limits, we need to ask something else: How big are we?
This is not so simple. Not only do we vary greatly in how much food and energy and water and minerals a moment in history essay consume, but each of us varies over time. William Catton, who was a sociologist at Washington State University before his retirement, once tried to a moment in history essay the amount a moment in history essay energy human beings use each day.
In hunter-gatherer times it was about 2, calories, all of it food. That is the daily energy intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31, calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel.
That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that -- as much as a sperm whale. We have become, in other words, different from the people we used to be. Not kinder or unkinder, not deeper or stupider -- our natures seem to have changed little since Homer. We've just gotten bigger.
We appear to be the same species, with stomachs of the same size, but we aren't. It's as if each of us were trailing a big Macy's-parade balloon around, feeding it constantly. So it doesn't do much good to stare idly out the window of your as you fly from New York to Los Angeles and see that there's plenty of empty space down there, a moment in history essay. Sure enough, a moment in history essay, you could crowd lots more people into the nation or onto the planet.
The entire a moment in history essay population could fit into Texas, a moment in history essay, and each person could have an area equal to the floor space of a typical U.
If people were willing to stand, everyone on earth could fit comfortably into half of Rhode Island. Holland is crowded and is doing just fine.
But this ignores the balloons above our heads, our hungry shadow selves, our sperm-whale appetites. As soon as we started farming, we started setting aside extra land to support ourselves. Now each of us needs not only a little plot of cropland and a little pasture for the meat we eat but also a little forest for timber and paper, a little mine, a little oil well.
Giants have big feet. Some scientists in Vancouver tried to calculate one such "footprint" and found that although 1. People in Manhattan are as dependent on faraway resources as people on the Mir space station. Those balloons above our heads can shrink or grow, depending on how we choose to live. All over the earth people who were once tiny are suddenly growing like Alice when she ate the cake. In China per capita income has doubled since the early s.
People there, though still Lilliputian in comparison with us, are twice their former size. They eat much higher on the food chain, understandably, than they used to: China slaughters more pigs than any other nation, and it takes four pounds of grain to produce one pound of pork. When, a decade ago, the United Nations examined sustainable development, it issued a report saying that the economies of the developing countries needed to be five to ten times as large to move poor people to an acceptable standard of living -- with all that this would mean in terms of demands on oil wells and forests.
That sounds almost impossible. For the moment, though, let's not pass judgment. We're still just doing math. There are going to be lots of us. We're going to be big. But lots of us in relation to what? Big in relation to what? It could be that compared with the world we inhabit, we're still scarce and small.
How to Write a History Essay
, time: 7:43A Special Moment in History - The Atlantic
Defining Moments in American History Essay Describing Canada. Canada: The Defining Moments of a Nation A defining moment is the point at which, a situation is Sports: Sports And Sports. Fans will laugh and cry when they watch the HBO Documentary “Sport in America” because they Hbo: Sports Sep 15, · A Moment in Time. I was asked to capture a special time in my life and reflect on it, as I look back on my life, the one I hold dear to me is when I was a child. I guess I was about ten years old. I came from a family of ten. Being from a large family it was always something going on in our house Sep 11, · Voyages of Christopher Columbus is one of the most critical events in history before While the discovery of the New World had an enormous influence on the colonization era, Columbus’s legacy remains controversial. Or you can write an essay on Hernán Cortés, a pivotal figure in the colonization of South America
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