World History Summer 2020

This New York Times was more than a little eye opening. I believe the downfall of the Ugarit and Mycenae societies absolutely depicts what happens when the elites or 1% get greedy and force their will upon the common citizens. For example, the article refers to "forced labor". That is slavery, plain and simple. When the article discusses how kings essentially made the lower class feel their wrath during tough times, it does kind of remind me of the world we are in today.  Unfortunately we are in not only a pandemic, but an era in which African Americans and other minorities are racially profiled and murdered in cold blood by "police officers". Now I know there are good cops out there who try and do their best, but clearly there are also bad cops who don't deserve a badge, power and firearm. The young man who was just killed via an officers knee to his neck is an example of this injustice. When will enough be enough? The article states that it is very possible th...

Q: How did Africa’s proximity to Eurasia shape its history? And how did America’s separation from the Eastern Hemisphere affect its development? First off in comparison to an African society, the Eurasian societies were much different. This had to do with size of these city-states versus the societies in Africa not having the city-state style civilization. This factor alone made the make up of society just different than those of Eurasia. I always did find it very interesting that humankind is thought to first be found in Africa, but the Empires of Rome, China. Persia, Egypt and others always kind of blanketed anything we heard about Africa. Dating back before the Empire days, we learn in our textbook that Africa indeed actually helped shape Eurasia. Africa was one of the continents that led the charge for the Agricultural Revolution. As discussed before, the Agricultural Revolution was the turning point for societies. This revolution was almost the kick start to building an actual civ...

Q: Why do you think slavery was so much more prominent in Greco-Roman civilization than in India or China? Slavery was prominent from the beginning of time. I was shocked to learn in this class that slavery began during that Paleolithic era, and continued throughout history. This chapter in the book suggest the domestication of animals implemented the idea of slavery. I unfortunately kind of agree with that statement. As it does kind of give a template for slavery, domesticated animals do not resemble humans nor do they portray that humans too can be "domesticated animals".  I believe social inequalities played a huge role in the progression of slavery. For example, Emperor Wu Di of China, established the academy that was used into the 20th century to teach and educate the young men of China during that time. Although this academy was really for those families who could afford an education for their son, it was possible to be sponsored and attend the academy. This opened many...

Q: How would you define the appeal of the religious/cultural traditions discussed in this chapter? To what groups were they attractive, and why? Personally I am Catholic but I am not sure that any religion appeals to me. For the sake of the blog I will do the best I can describing what I find as "appealing" in the chapter. I do want to start by saying that I do believe in God being a higher power, but I do not believe in symbolism worship. I worship the most high, not material things or material symbols. This is where I believe some issues within religions arise. Christians seemed to be the most unorganized religion discussed in this chapter. Due to geography and doctrinal differences, this actually makes sense to me. I do think the geography and subtle differences allow Christianity to be more attractive or appealing. For those who can become a part of a Christian Church, location is key and it seemed like Christians covered a lot of ground for their followers. We also learn...

Q: Are you more impressed with the “greatness” of empires or with their destructive and oppressive features? Why? On page 105 of our textbook, the topic of United States essentially being the modern day Rome is the main topic. This page discusses how the Roman Empire eventually became overextended and corrupt due to too much power and reach across the globe. As sad as it makes me to admit this, I would agree this is where the United States is headed. The United States has embassies all over the world and things like the United States stock exchange influence not only our countries economy, but all other major countries economy too. I do not want to get too much into corruption, but based off the Roman's history and the United State's history, it is pretty easy to see they both dealt with corruption. From Julius Caesar being murdered by the senate to Russian scandal's with BOTH United States political parties, both empires have the corruption box checked for sure. That being...

What surprised me most from this weeks readings, was the passage at the end of chapter 2 (pages 91-95), which described the lives and history of the Indus Valley Civilization. The first thing that surprised me, was the existence of this civilization. I was very surprised to learn that the Indus Valley Civilization was actually much larger than those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Our textbook states the best times for the Indus Valley Civilization was around 2000 B.C. About 300 years later in 1700 BC, the Indus Valley Civilization began to see a serious decline as they migrated more east toward the plains of the Ganges River. Luckily for us historians, plenty of archaeological evidence exists and most of it was pretty impressive in my opinion.  Indus Valley Civilizations were able to build cities using a grid pattern and lots of planning. It was super interesting to read about how the people of this civilization were able to orchestrate large markets, houses and public buildings within ...

What was most saddening to read about, was the erosion of equality readings, which eventually led to the talks of slavery in chapter 2 of our textbook(pages 70-76). Reading about different heirarchies for different aspects of society makes it easy to see how the world and economy run itself to this very day. Hunting societies and agricultural chiefdoms were able to sustain a high amount of products for people which led to the wealth piling up with them, rather than being spread around equally. That is something that still happens to this day in all kinds of different businesses. As the text goes on a social pyramid is almost is what comes to play and on all those pyramids is a base of slaves. Often when we think of slavery we think of the American Civil War. Before any of that was even relevant in the world, there seems to be evidence which points to the earliest hunter and agricultural societies having slaves do their work. This is obviously very saddening and infuriating. At a time w...

The start of chapter one is what I really found most interesting about the reading. I wasn't ever well versed in the earliest history of mankind, and our textbook did a fantastic job of the break downs. I knew that we today are homo sapiens or we at least closest resemble homo sapiens. It was interesting to learn that there were twenty or thirty different species but all resembled hominid family. It makes sense that the main factor which related all the species was the fact they all featured bipedalism. It was amazing to Google Mark Leaky's discovery of the foot prints preserved by volcanic ash. To put a visual to the reading was very helpful to imagine what species existed during this era. When doing my research online for the first blog post, I learned about early species making tools and in the reading it was nice to learn it was specifically the homo habilis. I find it so fascinating that early humans were able to do things like create tools and create ways of communication...

While researching the topic of the timeline of the early human era's, I came across a cool website which gave brief breakdowns some of the major era's. This was nice to give some more insight to these era's before diving into the three additional eras. The paleolithic era was also known as the "old stone age". During this era there was evidence of the first signs of technology, stone tools. This then led into the neolithic era which is referred to as the "new stone age". Getting into the end of the paleolithic era and the beginning of the neolithic era brought along things like agriculture and domestication of animals. It seemed to me this site had listed the antiquity era as the ancient era. During the ancient era, this is when Roman civilization saw many changes. Rome went from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire after Julius Caesar's murder. Earlier in the ancient era Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, along with a number of other provinces. It seem...

Human civilization is something that I remember learning about in both grammar school and high school, but I can't remember these lessons really sticking out in my head and grabbing my attention. After doing some research, (  https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/world-history-beginnings/origin-humans-early-societies/a/where-did-humans-come-from  ) stated that the earliest human species were the homo sapiens, who walked the earth about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. I would say this is probably very consistent with what I had learned in prior schooling. One thing that I definitely did not recall, was that just 50,000 years ago, the homo sapiens developed the capacity for a language. I find this pretty astonishing. It is so intriguing to learn about how the earliest civilization was able to something like create a base language. Events like this affect us to this very day and I find those events truly fascinating.  According to (  https://www.britannica....

"Big History" was not a term I was familiar with. Before researching online what Big History is, I brain stormed what I thought it might be. My main thought was that Big History has something to do with big events throughout the history of the world, which shaped or changed our world in an innovative way. I quickly learned although this is not incorrect, it's not exactly correct either. The main website which caught my attention was;  https://www.bighistoryproject.com/home The Big History Project describes itself as examining our past, explaining our present, and imagining our future. This approach allows the Big History Project to go beyond specialized historical studies, and rather see how all of the world's and universe's histories intertwined and related. The website claimed this project is for mainly high school students who are interested in learning the history of the universe, but is not limited to just high school students, but rather anyone seeking infor...

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! My name is Tony Oropeza. I am 29 years old and was born and raised in the Bay Area. I currently reside in San Bruno, California. History has always been one of my favorite subjects dating back to grammar school and I am excited to see what we will learn in this course. I have done some of my own research on the history of the Roman Empire and Italy because of my Italian heritage. I am eager to learn about the history of different regions in the World. One thing I always keep in the back of my mind when researching history, is that history can indeed by sculpted by whoever is relaying or writing down the historical context. That being said I find it important to do some background investigating on the sources from which we get our historical context from. I think with today's current pandemic, we have seen some true colors of the media in terms of censorship, information manipulation and propaganda. These things can rewrite history for those wh...