Finally... Done...

In all honesty, I thought that the test was relatively easy. I thought there were some questions that were hard, but overall, the multiple choice I considered broad and general, and I could fake my way through the essays if need be. I felt the best preparation was class itself. And if I could go back in time, I'd tell my stuff not to study the specifics of each chapter, but the overall view, because there was nothing specific about the test itself. I wasn't there for one day of the review, due to strep, but like I said, much of the test was focused on the broader image of things, studying specifics is a waste of time. The piece of advice I'd give next year's juniors is to not study the morning of the exam. Get it ALL done by the night of the exam, and then just relax. I saw juniors left and right being stress puppies studying their notes. Thank you so much, Mr. Whitten, for all the preparation all year you had us do, because that was the best possible studying.

Does Karl Meet His Marx?

Pros:

1. The period of exploration opened up new opportunities for the bourgeoisie to make a profit and exploit the average worker and his fellow man to oppressions of working in the new industrial era.
2. Each major step that the bourgeoisie took throughout history required that the class move up politically (monarchs, emperors, etc.)
3. The industrial revolution, when it came to the work place, abolished any distinction between sex and age. If you were a worker, you were expected to do your task regardless of whether or not you were small, big, pregnant, sick, fit, etc.
4. Communism isn't doing away with property. It's taking bourgeoisie's property and distributing it equally among the proletariat, which sounds reasonable and like a fair deal for everybody, which is communism.

Cons:

1. Marx makes it sound like the bourgeoisie were already in place when it came time for the industrial revolution. They weren't. They were average men who maybe had a little bit of extra money, invested it in the correct industries of the time, and made their profit that way. Feudal lords didn't just become the bourgeoisie over night.
2. Marx made it sound like the bourgeoisie was the cause of supply and demand in the market. No. Regular people, who saw something they liked and wanted to buy, were the cause of supply and demand. It requires everybody. Not just one class.
3. Marx believes that the proletariat struggles represent communism, when in fact, they represent socialism. The workers like their new industrial jobs more than their previous ones, so they don't want to do away with them. They just want the jobs to be under better conditions with better wages, which is ultimately government regulation, which is socialism, not communism.
4. To go along with the previous point, the proletariat don't want to overthrow the government. They want better wages for themselves and better conditions. If there's still a government there, then there wouldn't be communism.

The Liberator Heroes

First off, what I notice about all the liberator heroes is they have a proud nature to their characters. George is standing upright with a sword; Marat, thought injured, is smiling, as showing his sense of pride and accomplishment of what he's done; Toussaint is in uniform with sword in hand, as if gloating of his recent victory; and finally Bolivar is in uniform, in a formal pose, sword in hand, as if he just won a great victory as well.

The heroes are portrayed as proud to show future generations the heroism behind the men who liberated their countries from previous oppressors, and to help to carry on that pride.

These revolutions needed Heroic Figures as front runners, because they were the driving force behind the revolutions themselves. They were the ones who reminded all the revolutionaries what they were fighting for. George Washington had to encourage his troops through 7 desperately cold winters, otherwise the British might have retaken the colonies. Marat had to encourage the people of France to topple a few century long-standing empire, which could not have been done without inspiration. Toussaint had to encourage Africans, one of the most put-down races in history, to rise up and defeat their white owners. And finally Bolivar was faced with the difficult task of creating a rebellion in one of the newest and most uninhabitable places on earth, and continually had to encourage them! This is why heroes are needed: so humans remember the cause they're fighting for.

Rise to power: A Global Hokey Pokey

Firs off, Niall reminds me so much of you Mr. Whitten lol.

Secondly, I agree with what Niall has to say. The East is definitely going to rise to power, and as much as I hate to admit it, America's short, though influential, run as the major power in the 20th-21st century, is soon to come to an end because of the consistant arguing between our politicians. I also agree that Africa and China, though following many of the 6 deadly apps, are not following all of them, which is the reason America was able to rise to such a power. I believe if China does rise up, it will become an extraordinarily powerful nation, but the government and people are going to disagree too much, and that country will tear itself apart, and then my guess is Japan after that and History will play its course from there.

But like I said, I agree with what Niall said, and believe that his eery predictions are more than likely to come true.

Worldly Interactions

1) I think that the authors decided to put the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals together all in chapter 28 for one main reason: They're Islamic empires. And they were around the same time period. I think when the textbook was being constructed they saw the three empires, said "Islamic Empires during the Origins of Global Interdependence", and decided they would be well off in a chapter together. It also probs helped to keep the chapter count to a nice neat 40 ;)

2) I think there were very good ups and very bad downs of this period.

The goods include a new found sense of cultural exchange, and discovery of the rest of the unknown world by literate societies at that point. This period was the push-off required to start the next 500 years of history.

The bads include an increased tension between Christianity and Islam, and the development of slavery in the New World. The tensions still continue to this day, and slavery was one of human kind's darkest hours, causing a sense of arrogance amongst some races of people and detracting from the betterment of other races.

Overall I feel this period hurt human relations and human thought more than helped. It is what I consider to be a period of newfound hatred towards other men.

Christianity: The Peaceful Religion That's Always at War

Fabian Fucan attacked Christianity in multiple ways after he left the religion, such as:

• Religiously- He claimed that the Christian God, Deus, was very clever in the presentation of his teachings, but offered little truth, basically claiming he was an evil God.
• Culturally- Claims that their God and the Jesuits are attempting to overthrow the very tradition of Japanese culture.
• Historically- Claims that since the very beginning, the leaders of Japan had been chosen by Japanese gods, and that Deus is planning to subvert that tradition.
• Politically- The institution of Christianity would overthrow the lineage of emperors, as explained in the historical aspect of his attack.
• Socially- The Japanese people would not be weak like those of Mexico and the Philippines, and would hold true to their traditions and not fall to Christianity.

Sorry it's a little late to be put up on the blog!

Slave trade show me
Hi Mr. Whitten, just a note, I forgot to post this on my blog, but if you notice I sent it to your whitten@bpsk12 account on Sunday night, so I was hoping you could please accept this as an on time assignment. Thank you so much!

Capitalism: Refined

After doing the reading, my idea of capitalism has changed slightly. I now see that at it's roots, it is private companies deciding large scale economic decisions, not the government. So my definition of it being elected representatives making decisions is nothing close to what it actually is. I also see that it works under the forces of supply and demand. This is where my part about great opportunity for businesses comes into play, because if you have something of great demand, you're going to have a lot of people buying your product, and therefore you have tremendous opportunity to get rich. But if you have a product of no demand, you have the ability to get very poor as well. Also, capitalism helped bring about the rise of stocks and banks, two of the industries that our modern world couldn't live without.

Capitalism for Dummies

Capitalism is one of man kind's best inventions. It allows for great opportunity among every person. It allows the poorest of the poor to rise up and become the richest of the rich. Capitalism, or at least American capitalism, is having elected representatives of different political parties and beliefs to argue their view points in what they would think would be best for the state. Of course, in this system of government, not everybody is gonna be happy all the time, because not everybody is going to get their hopes to come true. But on the opposite ends of the spectrum are Communism and Facism, one a complete dictorship by definition and the other a complete equality of people by definition. The beauty of capitalism is that it allows voices to be heard, whereas in other forms of government voices are either totally suppressed or blended together.

Christendom, What happened to you?

Over the course of 1500 years, from the death of Jesus to the era of exploration and Martin Luther, the basic values of Christendom changed tremendously. I believe that Jesus was just a man who preached "be good people", which was absolutely a righteous cause. But I believe that human's are also selfish, and when Christianity rose as the major religious power in Europe, those selfish humans saw the ability to bend it to their will to accomplish personal goals. For instance, European monarchs would use the "because god said I was king" excuse to uphold their power. And because there was no way to prove or disprove this, the peasants believed it. This allowed monarchs to raise money to build armies to conquer. This is where Luther had the same problem as me, and so he attempted to bring Christianity back to the more traditional message of "be good people". Of course, this problem is still existant today by politicians and heads of churches, using the bible and Jesus to prevent the development of society as a whole for their own selfish purposes.

The Griots, not bigots

Pros-

• Transmitted from a primary source
• Easily spread, and spread faster than a textbook
• A form of entertainment in the spread of the stories

Cons-

• More room for variability in the transmission of the history
• More of a possibility of losing the history forever if it's not appealing to the public audience

I think that although more entertaining than textbook  history, the Griots are a worse form of the transmission of history. The only definitive way of having the history as it actually happened is for it to be written down. The transfer of history through word of mouth only defiles the story as it gets passed along, because everybody adds their own little thing to it. However, if history is written down originally, that exact same story can be copied word for word, and there's way less of possibility that the history will be defiled.

In conclusion: Textbooks.

Mongol Blogol

The trial may have been my favorite thing we've done so far in AP World. Everybody got so into it, and it was exciting debating this because as the saying goes "The victor writes history". The mongols were never tried for their crimes before because nobody was powerful enough to put them on trial, but now that they were, it's interesting to see what modern day crimes they would be committed of! Plus it was relatively easy to prep for, which makes a fun assignment even more fun!
As for myself, I thought I did a good job portraying Guillaume Boucher. I thought my feelings of being kidnapped from Europe and brought back to Karakorum were realistic and helped my team to win the case in kidnapping.
I thought that Genghis Khan himself was admirable. He had a goal and he set out to achieve it, which he did. And the fact that he had standards of "No harming women or children" showed that he had compassion in that mean persona somewhere. The mongols as a whole on the other hand I do not appreciate in the slightest. It seems that even though they were good fighters, they were ruthless and didn't follow humanitarian orders in the slightest. Only to kill and ravage whoever they defeated.
For the counts of guilty or not guilty, I say

• Kidnapping: Totally and utterly 100% guilty
• Terrorism: Guilty
• Genocide: Not guilty, because they did not target a specific group of people, but persons of many different ethnicities and beliefs, which defies the definition of "genocide".

How Muslims viewed the Crusades: Update The Final part 2

Almost forgot the bibliography!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/142Pv9qF89wfitMxea1Bs-ys1w6WwAZbaUPoS7GEbTTE/edit?hl=en_US

How Muslims viewed the Crusades: Update The Final

So! Futaba, Giovanna and I stayed after until 5 today (along with Melanie Canales) to film the view points of Muslims during the first, second and third crusades. Futaba was wonderful enough to post the videos to her youtube page here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/FutabaShioda


I have to still help another person out by sharing with them this amazing link I found to help with the 3rd crusade.

I think what I'll take from this project is I'll be more inclined to search Bing now. Google's great but I liked the research websites I found on Bing.

I believe that the video was the best choice for a project because it was a ton of fun. I haven't had so much fun doing a school project since middle school. I wish we could have had an outtakes real to show the class.

How Muslims viewed the Crusades: Update 2

So, 2 days before the project is due and everything is planned out. Giovanna, Futaba and I are staying after musical rehearsal tomorrow and filming a summary (/mainly view point of Muslims) of the first 3 crusades. We'll be using props, shirts, accents, going full out! Probably the most fun I'll ever have with a high school project.

For research I used mainly Bing and also Jon Dirusso for the websites I found, posted here:

http://www.shadowedrealm.com/articles/exclusive/richard_saladin_warriors_third_crusade

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/144695/Crusades/25611/The-Third-Crusade

Tomorrow should be enjoyable!

How Muslims viewed the Crusades: Update 1

Soooo, ya. Today I did what I consider to be the most important part of my project: picked the crusades. I have decided to do the 1st, 2nd and 3rd (easy enough to remember, plus they're the ones that would arouse the most anger in the Muslim world at the time I figure). I'm planning on doing a majority of my project using yahoo, and am partnering up with Jon Dirusso right now for help with 1 and 3. Still need to find a person doing 2. Absolutely no idea how I'm going to present my understanding: not enough time after school to try and make a movie, want to be more creative than a power point, though it is not beneath me. Fun. Week. Ahead.

Fiesta Tradiciones! El segundo pilar del Islam

The second of the 5 pillars of Islam requires prayer 5 times a day, or salat. The prayer requires every Muslim to bow down and pray towards Mekkah, specifically toward the Kabba in the center of the city. These pictures shown from Holiday Traditions exemplify this prayer, toward the center of the city.