JESENIA ARZAGA

What I liked about this chapter was when they talked about the collapse of Empires. It caught my eye because of the heading stated with "Collapse" I thought this section of the chapter would be interest to blog bout. Empires rise, and then, with one apparent regularity, they fall, and in doing so, they provide historians with one of their most intriguing questions: what caused the collapse? In China, the Han Dynasty empire came to a end in 220 C.E. the traditional date for the final disintegration of the Roman Empire is 476 C.E although a process of decline had been under way for several centuries.  In the Romans case, only the western half of the empire collapsed, while the eastern part, subsequently, known as the Byzantine Empire, maintained the traditional of imperial Rome for another thousand years. I thought this chapter was interesting to read about these empires and how they collapsed.

What I thought was most interesting about this chapter was the Along the Niger River: Cities without States. The middle stretches of the Niger River in West Africa witnessed the emergence of a remarkable urbanization. A prolonged dry period during the five centuries which brought growing numbers of people from the southern Sahara into the fertile floodplain of the middle Niger in search of more reliable access to water. Accompanying them were their ironworking technology. Over many years people of this religion created distinctive city based civilization. The most fully studied of the Urban clusters that grew up along the middle Niger River was the City of Jenne - jeno, which at its high point probably housed more than 40,000 people. I thought that was pretty crazy how many people it housed. Niger urban centers were not encompassed within some larger imperial system. Each city had its own centralized political structure, embodied in a monarch and his accompanying bureaucracy. They were...

In this chapter the Peasants section caught my attention the most. I thought it was inserting to red about how the vast majority of China's civilization population consisted of peasants, living in salt households representing two or three generations. Some owned enough land to support their families and perhaps even sell something on the local market. Many others could barely survive. Nature, the state, and landlords combine to make the life of most peasants extremely vulnerable. Which I thought was very sad to take advantage of those vulnerable people. Famines, floods, droughts, hail, and pets could wreak havoc without warning. Which would be really hard for those people who would go through those hard wreaks. State authorities required the payment of taxes, demanded about a month's labor every year on various public projects, and conscripted young men for military service. During the Handynasty, growing numbers of improverished and desperate peasants had to sell out large lan...

What I found most Interesting in this chapter was the greek way of knowing. The foundations of this greek rationalism emerged in the three centuries between 600 and  300 B.C.E. coinciding with the flourishing of greek city states, especially Athens, and with the growth of its artistic, literary, and theatrical traditions. There way of thinking lay not so much in the answers it provided to life's great issues, for the Greeks seldom agreed with one another, but rather in its way of asking questions. Their emphasis on argument, logic, and relentless questioning of received wisdom, their  confidence I human reason, their enthusiasm for puzzling out the world without much reference to the gods, these were the definition characteristics of major Greek thinkers. If you think about it its kinds cool how they thought about thinks so differently then others. It relates the link I read about when you think how can you help. Everyone thinks a different type of way on everything. When you...

What I found interesting in this chapter was the Hierarchies of class.  Beside the occupational specialization of the first civilization lay their vast inequalities in wealth, status, and power. It was interesting to read how as ingenuity and technology created more productive economies, the greater weather now available was everywhere piled up other than spread out. There were signs of erosion of equality were evident in the more settled and complex gathering and hunting societies and in agriculture chiefdoms, but the advent of urban based civilizations multiplied and magnified these inequalities many more times over. It was a transition that represented one of the major turning point in the social history in humankind. When the first civilization took shape inequality and hierarchy soon came to be regarded as normal and natural. The upper class enjoyed great wealth in land or salaries and were able to avoid physical labor and they had the finest of everything and had the top posi...

       What I found interesting in this chapter was how in the book it said "Among the most revolutionary aspects of the agriculture was a new relationship between humankind and other things".  Men and Women changed nature based off of their actions. Its funny when you think about it, that we change nature from our actions. Like we have control of the way nature reacts towards our actions. Farms transformed corn from a plant with a cob of an inch or so to measuring about six inches by 1500. Even later they expanded and stamper the landscape with a human imprint in the forms of fields with boundaries, terraced hillside, irrigation ditches, and canals. The animals started to transform because they were selected to breed to produce sheep that grew more wool. cows that gave more milk, and chickens that laid more eggs then their wild counterparts. I thought that this was very interning to read about because how smart these people were to think of doing this to help t...

WW Prologue, Intro to Part One, AND… Chapter 1 (First Peoples), Sections: Out of Africa & The Ways We Were.  The prologue was interesting to read about. I thought it was pretty cool when they said "historical accounts take place within some larger context, as stories within stories unfold". I didn't know that nations often find a place in some more encompassing civilization such as the Islamic world of the west or in a regional or continental context such as Southwest Asia, Latin America, or Africa. And those civilizations are regional histories in turn take on richer meaning when they are understood within the even broader story of world history, which embraces humankind as a whole. I also thought it was interesting when they talked about how recent decades world historians have begun to situate that remarkable story of the human journey in the much larger framework of both cosmic and planetary history, an...