In this last week of the course, you are studying what I call the contemporary world, or what some historians consider to be the post-modern world--we do not want to get involved in trying to define what "post-modern" means--, a period of time dominated by the ongoing technological revolution. The fact that you are even taking this course in the manner in which you are taking this course, using the technology of the web, the semiconductor, the microprocessor and digital communication, all attest to the impact of the technological revolution on life in the contemporary world. Since the discovery of the transistor in the late 1940s, the creation of the first integrated circuit in the 1950s, the development of the personal computer in the 1970s and the onset of the world wide web after 1995, technology has become an increasingly prominent part of modern society, and it is not only computer technology. There have been major breakthroughs in communications, transportation, entertainment, medicine. Indeed it is difficult for young men and women coming of age in their early 20s to actually even conceptualize what life was like for their parents in the 1960s let alone their grandparents of the 1940s. Color television did not exist until 1953. What was life like without a dishwasher, a microwave, VCR or a cell phone? As you finish this course, if you also completed His 101 then you have covered the whole range of Western history for the last five thousand years. If you are just completing His 102, then you have only covered the last four hundred years. In either case, you might prompt yourself to consider the following questions: What has changed, and what has not changed in the Western world? Have just the material externals of life in the West changed or has there really been fundamental change in the nature of human society and human relationships?