Historical Ponderings

Thoughts I’ve had as I study for my AP World History test:

~ I blithely study tragedies, such as the Irish Potato Famine. I analyze the data and discuss the effects of the event. But I forget the agony and the intense sacrifice involved. The Irish Potato Famine covered only a few short years in the span of history, but during that time, thousands of dramas and heroic acts, each a story worthy of retelling, must have taken place. These unsung stories of self-sacrifice could fill volumes.

~ Victor Hugo’s (Les Miserables) intensely humane and involved portrayal of France in the middle 1800s, is startlingly different from the smooth, analytical, timeline view of my AP history book.

~ Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”

~ To be a head of state or military commander, means sending men to their deaths – what responsibility; how terrible.

~ Magical phrases: Tournament of Shadow, Great Game. They make my spinal region tingle.

~ For millennia, the Middle East possessed vast oil fields, sources of untold wealth, but they lay dormant for years. No one knew about them. Once awakened, these oil fields wreaked more havoc than the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Volcanoes have nothing on oil wells in terms of destruction.

~ Aside from World War II, the war that killed the most people (the Taiping Rebellion in China) was started by a man who thought he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother.

~ Exploit is a filthy word; so many horrible connotations. It actually reminds me of the squished frog in Brother, Where Art Thou?

~ Beneath the waters of the Atlantic, hundreds of miles off the American coast, lie the bones of hundreds, probably thousands, of Africans who died during the Middle Passage - after losing their liberty, but before profiting their exploiters. They say you shiver if someone walks over your grave; I would shiver if I sailed over theirs.

~ “The increased importance of gunpowder weaponry mean that, from this time forward, technological aptitude and military strength would be intimately connected.”

In the past, highly advanced cultures which were not warlike have been destroyed by “barbaric,” but savage, cultures. Is this a danger that no longer exists? Are cultural and technological advancement connected? Will the warlike cultures also be the most culturally and technologically advanced?

~ Two hundred years ago, scholars had an easier job of studying history. There’s so much more of it now!

~ If Europeans had known that their exploration of the Americas would lead to epidemics of disease that would kill 25% of the native population, would the knowledge have deterred them?

~ The Enlightenment is a very conceited name for an age of thought. Perhaps the connotation/meaning of the word has changed since the 1700s and 1800s.

~ Gun control is far from being a new government policy. In Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate maintained a policy of rigid social stratification. Ordinary citizens were forbidden to own weapons because the government wanted to maintain a monopoly on gunpowder technology.

~ Why is “Philippines” spelled with two “p’s,” while Filipino has only one? (Not to mention the whole “Ph” versus “F’ thing…)