So, we began the class with a wonderfully academic discussion about Youtube, which, might I add, brought up some very funny videos which I have now enjoyed. Afterwards, getting serious, we discussed the first developments of three major parts of human society: the ability to adapt to new situations, beginning specialization, and the start of culture. Beginning from before the ice age, and ending after the ice was retreating, we discussed how people lived their lives according to these intense changes in their environment. Generally, when climate changes, people’s way of life changes because they need to find new food sources. Unlike what is generally perceived about the ice age about it only bringing hardships to the people of the time period, we noticed how the Ice Age was actually a very productive – concerning obtaining food and developing culture – time period. This tells us how the people after the Ice Age began to think more and more about culture and their roles in it. Focusing not only on food gathering allowed new roles in society to arise.
One thing that we discussed briefly in class that interested me is that our first notion when we think about people in previous time periods is how much worse their lives must have been without the aspects of culture that we have now. It’s very hard to believe that because they didn’t know of things we have now, they were perfectly content with what they had then. It’s very surreal to me to not even be able to conceive of everyday items that we have now and noticing how the measurement of wealth changes over time because of new advances.
The blog for the World History AP course is designed to supplement the main blog for the World History course. We will only be using this blog to record summaries of the discussions we have in class on Thursday.
The first class was on Wednesday, 12 September. During this class we discussed Alfred Crosby’s The Children of the Sun. In this book, Crosby argues how human history can be understood by the changing relationship between humans the energy produced by the sun. Since the beginning of human history, humans have been dependent on the suns. Major shifts have occurred in human society based on the different ways in which humans have managed to exploit the energy of the sun. With each new method, the demand for energy has increased, and humans have needed to search for new ways to get access to solar energy. The book concludes with the recent experiments with fission and fusion that are would provide humans with a new and important source of energy. Some of the interesting points raised in the discussion was how Crosby seems to assume that technology is the answer to humans’ problems. He does not consider the alternative of trying to conserve energy and finding more ways to maximize what energy we do use.
