I recommend this book review from the Atlantic - Human History Gets a Rewrite
A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.By William Deresiewicz published Oct 18, 2021
I had an AHA! Moment understanding the term Sovereignty, a difficult concept to explain to students. Here is the excerpt from the Article.
What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics)
The OER Project has devoted an article to understanding the term Sovereignty. Here is the link https://www.oerproject.com/OER-Materials/OER-Media/PDFs/1750/Unit2/Sovereignty
This year, I am going to have students grapple with both the Atlantic Magazine article and the OER Project essay and then follow up with a Harkness discussion.
I wonder if this definition of Sovereignty rings true for you? And, do you have other interesting ways to make that term meaningful for students?