CAUSATION OVERVIEW

Was it really the straw that broke the camel’s back? Causation, an essential thinking practice, spirals in complexity throughout this course. After all, central to the work of a historian is determining cause and effect of historical events and processes. Mastering this skill helps you develop evidence-based explanations and arguments in response to the big questions and connections you will explore in this course. So, causation is introduced early and repeated often. As you progress in the course, you will frequently use their causal reasoning skills to analyze events, debate ideas, and write convincing arguments.

Causation Tool

Short term, intermediate term, or long term? Contributing or underlying? Economic or environmental? Causation Tool will help you map causal representations for one very unfortunate camel and many other historical events, at many different scales. The weekly instructions will identify when you need to use this tool.

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Evaluating claims about the causes and consequences of change is not only a historical thinking skill, it’s a life skill.