Introduction

//Welcome World History I students.//

Our class this year will, not surprisingly, study the world and its history.

But did you know that "historia" means "to learn by inquiry" in Greek?

Imagine that -- history is also a verb. It's something you DO.

Do you remember when you were little? You asked all sorts of questions... you were a budding historian!

Why is the sky blue? Where do babies come from? Why are some people mean? Why did the U.S. send troops to Iraq? Why doesn't the U.S. do more to stop the [|genocide in Darfur]? Has there ever been a nation as [|on-the-rise] as China is today? //(did you know that about 250 million Chinese people have migrated from China's rural areas to its cities in the past 20 years? That might be the single largest migration in world history. What's up?)// What would it be like to [|visit Ethiopia]? Or [|Kenya]?

In this course, we will aim to ask lots and lots (and lots) of questions about human beings and how we -- the human race -- got to be where we are today. The picture in the upper left corner of this web page is from a place called Project Mercy near [|Butajera], Ethiopia. It was taken by Mr. Goldberg in the summer of 2006. Look at the picture more closely below... what do you notice? What **questions** do you have?



You have surely noticed that our course is called "World History I" and that suggests that next year you will take -- drum roll please -- "World History II". The world is a big place and has been around for a long while, so we spend two years getting some sense of the world and how it got to be the way it is today. In this class, we will focus on the world from the dawn of the first cities (roughly 10,000 years ago) up to about the year 1500 CE.

//By the way, what does "1500" mean, and why do we in the West tend to measure dates that way? [|How do other cultures measure dates?] Have you ever seen someone refer to this year as [|02007]?//

//Oh, and in World History I and II, those are **Roman** Numerals, right?

What are the numbers we use today called -- [|numbers like 1, 2, 3] -- where did they come from?//

Next year, in 10th grade (Xth grade?), you will focus on the world from 1500 to the present, or 02009.

You folks are the class of 02011, or MMXI...

Oh, and what's today's date? [|August] 16, 2007.

As we study the past, it also makes good sense to learn as much as we can about our world today -- perhaps we can make some meaningful connections between past and present. After all, if we don't know anything at all about the present, what would spark our curiosity about the past?

[I will show you one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes Cartoon in class that makes this very point. I can't reproduce it here because the holder of the Copyright does not permit online use of Calvin and Hobbes. Yes, I actually checked.]

So let's find out a few things about our world today. To put it in terms of the Calvin cartoon I'll show you, let's gain some **context**. Once we get some sense of how things are today, we might -- as curious individuals -- start to wonder how things got to be this way. And as thoughtful people become curious about the past, they tend to start asking questions -- or, to use the Greek, they start to **//historia//**.

Let's start with people... [|How many people are there in the world?] And how does that compare with the 300,000,000 (or so) people in the United States? Some quick math will tell you that the United States represents **only 4.5% of the world**. What's going on everywhere else? In China, and India, and Nigeria, and Ethiopia, and Indonesia, and Brazil, and the Persian Gulf? (did you know that [|Iran] is the modern name for Persia?)



And how much do you know about [|the three billion people who live on less than $2 per day?] Do they matter?

[|Bill Gates recently spoke about how important it is to know about those who are less well off in the world.] The preceding link is a 6-minute interview he gave in May of 2007 at Harvard University. Why was he at Harvard, you might ask... Well, he was visiting Harvard to deliver a speech and receive an honorary degree, even though he was a Harvard drop-out (did you know Bill Gates was a college drop-out?)

You know Bill Gates from Microsoft, but did you also know that he recently [|set up a charitable foundation] that is now worth about 60 billion dollars? When he asks questions -- //**historia**// -- about how he can best help the world, his questions (and the answers his foundation comes up with) can have a very powerful impact on the world.

But you, as a high school student, can also ask powerful questions. And __**you can make a difference**__.

As an example of just how powerful the right question can be, when it's posed at the right time by someone who is prepared, check out [|this amazing clip], from a Q&A session at NYU with singer/songwriter Billy Joel.

That Q&A session took place in 1998, and it shows what can happen when a student finds the courage to **//historia//**, or ask a question...

Some high school students from Connecticut asked a simple, powerful question:

what can we do to help stop the genocide going on Darfur?
But they didn't stop there. [|They made an 8-minute video] to publicize the genocide, and in part because of the video they made, the state of Connecticut divested (that's the opposite of INvesting -- it's when you take your money OUT of a company) its multi-billion dollar state pension fund from any companies that do business with the government of Sudan. That's pretty huge...

Let's take a look at their [|video].

So high school students __**can**__ make a difference...

And you are high school students...

Hmmmm....

Let's use our time in this course to [|learn as much as we can about the world] (see highlight #5) and how it got to be the way it is today. But let's also be sure to use the amazing resources we have here at Cary Academy to communicate with the world -- through writing and videos and web pages and podcasts and other real-life projects -- and make the world a better place. Maybe we can help others learn about world religions, for instance. Or maybe we can choose an issue going on today and find a way to make a difference -- just like those Connecticut students.

[[|MLK speech addition] by Mr. G]

So I have a question to start with: //why does ancient history matter?// Why are we learning about people who have been dead for thousands of years? Does it matter that the Spanish Conquistadors took over an amazing island city called [|Tenochtitlan] in the early 1500s? Would it matter more if the city the Spanish built over Tenochtitlan became the [|second largest city] in the world today?

And who really cares about [|Hammurabi and his code]? Or [|Charlemagne]?

Your summer reading book -- Brave New World by [|Aldous Huxley] even claimed, in the immortal words of Henry Ford, that "history is bunk".



So why bother with bunk? Shouldn't we focus more on NOW? What possible relevance can people from the distant past have for our lives?

There are many reasons to learn about the past. It's generally a good thing to know where you came from. Some of you -- but not all of you -- come from Cary. I live in Carrboro, but I originally came from a place called Newton, MA (home of the Fig Newton).

But where did our parents come from? And their parents? And so on...

If the theory of evolution is correct, we all came out of Africa, didn't we?

Maybe we should start thinking about where humans come from by studying [|Lucy]. (see p. 7 of your text)

Another reason to learn about the past is that some of the people in the past -- Socrates, Plato, Confucius -- were pretty smart... and they might have a few things to teach us about the human condition. There have also been some important movements over time that it would be good to know about. Who were the Mongols? Who were the Muslims? Why did the Islamic religion spread so rapidly in the first centuries after its founding? Who were the Christians? Why did Christianity also spread so quickly and so far? What happened when those two religions -- Christianity and Islam -- ran into each other?

And on a somewhat random tangent, what was the deal with [|Persia's Royal Road], and how does that connect with -- of all things -- the creed of mailmen today?

Maybe one reason to study the past is to gain an appreciation that humans have not changed all that much in 10,000 years when we first settled down and stopped hunter-gathering (well, most of us, anyway).

Our technology is more sophisticated, and our life spans are longer, but the basic questions of humanity seem reasonably constant.

What is the meaning of life? Is it possible to extend one'e lifespan? [|Gilgamesh] (circa 2600 BCE) tried, but learned that it was not possible... and the Chinese Emperor [|Wuzong] (840-846) learned the same thing nearly 3500 years later.

People in the Middle Ages didn't have iPhones, but then again, they knew everyone in their neighborhood and had no need to text people who were far away. They saw the most important people in their lives every day. Can we say the same thing? Who had it better? Did they or did we? What do you imagine their [|suicide rates] were?

Here's a small example of how the past might have some meaning for us today. Consider the Chinese scholar Confucius -- many of his teachings are collected in a book called the Analects. Here's [|a selection].

That sounds a bit like a fortune cookie, doesn't it?

Well, compare what Confucius wrote 2500 years ago -- around 500 BC -- with this [|Five For Fighting song]...

Oh, and as for that reference to 500 BC -- who was [|C]? What's [|B.C.E.]?

Can we gain some guidance from religion? Here's a quick overview of the [|spread of the world's religions]. Can the great religions help us figure out the meaning of life? Or, as Karl Marx wrote, is religion just the "[|opiate of the masses]"? We will likely do a group project looking at the world's major religions in the second and third trimesters.

[|Gilgamesh] might be a good person (or demi-god) to think about as well when we consider the meaning of life -- after all, as he realized more than 4600 years ago (!), that you can't live forever... And where does your soul go when you die? What did the [|Egyptians] think about that one? Do people even have souls? What would a Buddhist say? What about a Daoist?

What language do we speak? [|Where did English come from]? (and [|can you trust a source from Wikipedia?])

The [|Cary Academy campus] is designed [|in the model of the University of Virginia] with the quad centered on the library -- but where did Thomas Jefferson get his ideas? What does it mean to have "Classical" architecture?

So many questions... and so little time...

(you can stop exploring the web site here -- now go write those two paragraphs!)

The material below is just some...

Cool things that have not been organized yet:
[|China's "Mona Lisa"]

A [|presentation about world poverty with an INCREDIBLE ending] that challenges us to believe that...

**the seemingly impossible is possible**... we can have a good world.
And just in case, here's [|an alternate link to the video].

And here's [|another video by Hans Rosling].

As we ask more and more questions, I hope we can be as creative as possible.

Some schools can actually //kill// students' creativity. Some schools cut the arts and focus only on math and reading. Now math and reading matter, of course -- but you could argue (and the speaker in the video link coming right up does argue) that dance and the arts are as important as math and science. He contends that by not offering dance as a required class that's important for all students -- just like math -- American schools do their students a disservice ... at least in terms of learning to be creative. For more about the topic of whether schools kill creativity, check out this [|20 minute video by Sir Ken Robinson] (it's one of the more entertaining videos ever I've seen -- I laughed out loud a lot while watching it, and it makes some very good points).

Here's a great use of video: [|The Play (Cal v. Stanford 1982)]

Now that's pretty cool. But "The Play" is even better than that once you put it in -- there's that word again -- [|CONTEXT].

For further context, consider that on the west coast, Cal-Stanford is a rivalry much like Duke-UNC.

Do nations have "rivals"? Are China and Japan rivals? What about Germany and France?

What have been the [|most populous nations through time]?

Looking ahead, here's a timetable for the [|2008 Presidential Election].

Here's an [|article about Mumbai], India that led me to this [|video of what Mumbai looks like from the air].

Here's a good video about India and China -- [|The Elephant and the Dragon].

For when we get to ancient Egypt, here's a neat posting about [|baking bricks on the Blue Nile] in what is today Sudan.

Did Gutenberg "invent" the printing press? Or did someone else beat him to it?? Check out [|this artifact] from Minoan Crete in 1700 BC.

For Hinduism -- here's the [|largest gathering of human beings ever] -- 70 million people!!!

These are 78 pictures of candidates for [|Wonders of the World].


 * Here are some Iraq Maps:**

[|Population distribution]



And this [|2-minute feature of murals in Baghdad] does a nice job of previewing some of the early Mesopotamian civilizations we will study.

Here's a neat [|China feature] from the Washington Post.

And this is a wonderful short story by O. Henry called [|The Last Leaf]. It has nothing to do with the history we'll study this year, per se, but it's one of my favorite stories. And it gives me an excuse to show off some pictures I took of some colorful leaves:



And now, in the spirit of this web site, here's the **context** for those leaves -- first, the whole tree:

and then the "forest" ...

These pictures were taken on a seasonable November day at The Potomac School, in McLean, VA.