w. 43 + 45

Animated Atlas of African History 1879-2002

I found a new website that shows political change, conflicts, and demographics in Africa:http://www.brown.edu/Research/AAAH/map.htm



Here's a look at 1994:

 w. 45
Monday - list of sources turned in.
I will provide you feedback on these by Friday.

On Friday we will discuss films and imperialism as a way of trying to better understand how imperialism has been presented through cultural media.

w. 43
We spent week 44 working on the papers.

w. 43

We spent the week working on the paper. We agreed that because of the Nov. 17 trip to Gbg. and a sense of more time needed for the film that

- the film seminar will be Friday week 45 -- instead of Monday
- the last class to work on the paper will be Tuesday week 48. Note though: This now means that the Sh3 and Hi2 papers are due at essentially the same time. I think that you should definitely shoot to turn in your history paper earlier. So I'd like to discuss this in class. I don't think that turning these two assignments in at the same time is going to be helpful.

The Harvard Implicit tests
On Friday I mentioned a site where you can test your subconscious preferences: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html. When you get to the site, you have these  fourteen choices for tests. The tests try to help measure automatic preferences for one group over another - male vs. female, fat vs. thin, white American vs. Native American, dark skin vs. light skin . . .

I definitely think you'll find the test interesting.

w. 42

Tuesday, 13 October + Friday 16 October

The classes were spent getting started on your papers.

I am reading a book that I will bring into class this coming week: The Easten Origins of Western Civilisation, by John M. Hobson.

One of the more simple issues he takes up is the manner in which the world is presented in the Mercator maps and many other maps, where lands in the north are presented as larger and more central than those in the southern hemisphere.

Mercatur map

Hobson notes that "the actual landmass of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the northern hemisphere. And yet on the Mercator, the landmass of the North occupies two-thirds of the map while the landmass of the South represents only a third. Thus while Scandinavia is about a third the size of India, they are accorded the same amount of space on the map. Moreover, on the Mercator, Greenland appears almost twice the size of China even though the latter is almost four times the size of the former.”

The Peters project map helps to present a more faithful representation of the world:

This debate was introduced to me many years ago via the TV show West Wing. This entertaining clip has the benefit of not only presenting basic land-mass arguments, it explain how maps can be connected to attitudes of superiority. In this scene, the fictional Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality try to explain the importance of maps in education:

w. 41

Friday, 9 October

We started the lesson with the paragraph exercise that we didn’t have time to finish on Tuesday. This exercise was harder than the outlining one.

Things to keep in mind:

-       Go from the general to the more specific.

-       Group together information related to a specific topic.

-       Use chronological order whenever possible.

Finding a clear organization for your material is very hard. It requires a lot of thinking. Part of the problem is that while our brains can comprehend a lot of information in complex constellations (like an elaborate mind-map), writing is linear – it goes in one direction. You have to present material in sentences and paragraphs, one following the next. It is very hard to figure out a coherent way to present this web of information in a long string of writing. But using these tools/skills for organization will help you.

We then looked at the difference between narrative and analytical writing. You read a paragraph connected to the bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. Part of the point was to see that in history we regularly alternate between the presentation of factual material and some sort of analysis or explanation. The writer must constantly let the reader know what significance or relevance information has, and constantly connect the information to the larger thesis/point of the text.

Remember that as the writer, you are in charge of the information. You are the one that brings relevance to the facts.

The rest of the class was spent working on finding a topic.

I have a number of books, and I note the SVT series Världens konflikter – 28 (?) 30-minutes shows that focus on the political history of many of the major areas of conflict from the past fifty years.

(You will find all the exercises on Vklass under Writing Skills.)

Tuesday, 6 October

We spent the first the first half of the lesson laying out the Imperialism assignment, connecting it with Core Contents and Knowledge Requirements for the course.

We then did an exercise to help you think about how to order material in a paper. (You can find this exercise on Vklass – it’s called Outlining Exercise, and it’s under Writing Skills.)

When writing, you want to go from the general to the specific. In organizing, information, you want to have a main idea for the entire paper under which all the sub-points fall. Each sub-point relates to the main idea and also helps to organize the specific points that fall under it.

 After doing the outlining exercise, we started with ordering a specific paragraph.

w. 40

Friday, 2 October

We started with a list of issues that certain scholars have compiled regarding the legacy of European (and specifically British) imperialism. We then discussed alternate perspectives or related issues that could be connected to the items in this list. In this manner, we attempted to address the complicated legacy of imperialism.

The issue discussed the most was globalization. Since this is a topic that has been discussed from different angles in both social studies and geography, it seems that it’s the one you all are best equipped so far to see in a complex manner. Thus, I think that this program would fit well with what you know but also aid you in considering further issues:

Also, go to this webpage and look at the text. You'll see that the added material here highlights parallels between what's going on in places like Bangladesh in the 21st century and what was going on in the U.S. and Europe a century earlier: http://apps.npr.org/tshirt/#/people

I also played a short clip from the news this morning on P1: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt?programid=1650

We looked some at global maps from the 1400s forward.

We then discussed which topics and areas everyone would like to work with.

On Tuesday we’ll start our projects on Imperialism and Migration.

 
Tuesday, 29 September

We continued watching elements from the BBC documentary Racism: A History. We saw a little more about India and then about Namibia. 

We read Niall Ferguson’s article “Let’s Stop Saying Sorry for the Empire” (BBC History Magazine, February 2003, pp. 34-36). We discussed issues that Ferguson stresses in his assessment of the consequences of British imperialism.

w. 39

Friday, 25 September

We had only one class this week. There we discussed section 5 of chapter 27.

We watched part of the BBC documentary Racism: A History. We watched the segment in part 2 regarding the natives of Tasmania, and we also began watching the segment about India -- which also included a discussion of the importance of social Darwinism as a rationale for the mistreatment or lack of aid for people.

Here are some terms that were used in the film that I thought might be new for most of you:

-heathens - someone who doesn't believe in a monotheistic God -- and for the British, this meant essentially non-Christians.

- underpin - provide a support - ideas that underpin imperialism

- indelible - permanent, something that can't be removed - an indelible stain

- lure  - tempt, trap someone - they were lured to Flinders Island

- succumb - unable to overcome, not able to resist -- succumb to the pressures

- winnow - weed out, reduce the numbers of some group

- parsimony  - not willing to spend money

- cash crops - crops grown specifically for commerical gain -- rather than for the nutritional or other needs of the farmer/owner.

 

w. 38

Tuesday, 15 September

We worked with sections 3 and 4 of chapter 27. There were particular terms we focused, including

faction
geopolitics
concession
maharahjah
Mogul/Mughal
sepoy
jute
Raj

It is important that you work actively with the historical terms used in your book. It's not always enough to understand the overall meaning of a sentence. You want to feel that you could use a term in your own work -- and your work even includes discussions in class.

We discussed examples of geopolitics (e.g., Russia and its interest in expanding into areas of the Ottoman Empire).

We spent some time looking at chapter 27, including the images, and thinking about what the book focuses on. On Friday we'll compare our book with the file I have given you on Vklass of pages from a Swedish history book from the 1970s.

By reflecting on how Imperialism is presented in these books, this forces us to think about the process in which history is written: Which sources are used? Which issues are focused on? What is prioritized?

We discussed different approaches to history, which can be seen as different theories:

the Great Men apprach: History is understood to be a series of events driven by the personalities and achievements of powerful men.

Feminist theory: Gender is brought into an analysis of history. This can encompass many different approaches, including a focus on the systems and institutions at work in the societies under review, the sources that are utilized, and the assumptions historians employ.

Imperialism as modernism: This approach interprets the political, economic, and cultural domination of lands in the 19th and 20th centuries by European countries and the U.S. to ultimately be a matter of modernization -- which is perceived to be an overall positive development.

Postimperialism or a revisionist view of imperialism: Here the focus is on consequences of Imperialism from the perspective of those peoples and areas controlled by Europe or the U.S. This can encompass many different perspectives, and thus is quite broad.