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.