Crash Course Office Hours: World History

watch our videos and review your learning with the crash course app supplemental content is now available for these courses [Music] i am joined today i don't know if you know this about me but i am not uh an expert in world history or indeed in anything other than signing your name over and over again so i am joined by an actual expert who knows a lot about world history kathy keller hello kathy hi everyone i'm kathy keller i'm a history teacher and i was a consultant on the crash course european history series and we are so grateful to you for doing it thanks thank you so here's how the study session is going to go we are going to uh ask questions that you have sent in many of you have sent in questions ahead of time um so we're going to get to those most pressing questions uh we'll go through some of those and then uh we will provide a few tips on studying world history and maybe even a little bit of uh test taking advice and we will end with answering some questions from the chat so questions uh if you're watching at youtube.com crash course right now questions that you can ask us and we will be answering those as well so before we get to the first questions we want to start a little bit by talking about our partner for office towers flipgrid is the free video discussion app from microsoft with a mission to make learning fun and empowering and accessible for all it's been used in the classroom for nearly a decade my kids use it i was going to say your kids probably use it but if you're studying for a world history test you may not have kids but lots of kids use it as we talk about preparing for exam slip grip is a convenient way to host study groups without having to coordinate around class schedules for after school commitments you can create a group start a topic and send the link to anyone who wants to join you can record video or audio responses discuss specific concepts in detail quiz each other prep for group presentations it's really flexible we hear from crash course viewers all the time about how helpful video is as a learning tool and it is one of the reasons of course why we make a crash course but connecting with peers and learning in groups with your peers in community is a wonderful and really powerful thing that flipgrid helps make happen we use flipgrid to collect some of your questions for these live streams okay so we're gonna get to that now all right so kathy before we answer any of these questions can i ask you a broad question sure because when i'm studying for a test i personally find it helpful to have a sense of why i'm studying for the test why the test exists why i'm studying this at all so why do you study history why do you teach history why do you think it's important to learn history i mean i so i was an english and history double major in college and i think that those two go so well together in part just because i love stories like one of the things that first the probably the two things that first really hooked me on history were the assassination of abraham lincoln and um the russian revolution i don't know why those two things but i just found the stories and the people so interesting and i think we can learn so much about the present by studying the past now i don't really think that we learn from the past to avoid making the same mistakes i think we're actually pretty bad at that but i feel like understanding how people have done things in the past can make us make better decisions now if we're paying attention um unfortunately i think that a lot of people just assume history is a bunch of memorizing names and dates and i think that it's much more about like big connections about how people work about how societies work about how we make decisions what works what doesn't work and i just think it's informed so much about how i think about the present that i find it just endlessly fascinating and also people are weird they do they do really bizarre things [Music] and and that never fails to entertain me yeah i feel the same way like there's something wonderful about knowing that a lot of our problems aren't new and about knowing that a lot of the challenges we face aren't new and also there's something wonderful for me and knowing that a lot of the challenges that we used to face that seemed completely unsolvable and unaddressable in their time got solved uh and got addressed and and for me like that's a real that's a real encouragement there's some hope for me in history yes it is the story of people making the same mistakes over and over again but it is also a story of um of real lasting change like life today is different from what it was like during the russian revolution and it is certainly different than what it was like uh in the 1200s and the story of how we went on the journey that we've gone on in these last 800 years or 10 000 years however long you want to define history is really really interesting so i agree above all else for me it is a fascinating story that helps me understand how we got to now and why now looks the way it does which also makes me think about how now might look different with a little hindsight yeah yeah it like gives you a little bit of an ability to see your historical moment um in a greater context which for me anyway makes my historical moment slightly less terrifying only slightly but it does help um so we're going to actually start with the russian revolution we're going to start with your favorite or the or what got you hooked on history the causes and effects of the russian revolution uh so get grover and i apologize if i mispronounced any of your names or indeed if i mispronounce the names of major historical figures i'll remind you that mispronouncing things is my thing he asked they asked what uh can we talk about the background events that triggered the russian revolution and dineo asked why rasputin was so important to the royal family and i want to add a ps there kathy was rasputin so important to the royal family i mean i think that he was in the sense that they had this desperately ill child who they were hoping to cure and there was no cure for hemophilia at the time i think it's been overplayed in part because he's such a fascinating character and so i mean the pictures of him are just so he's a great nobody nobody looks like russell no i mean they're they just they seem over the top really um and i mean he was over the top his personality was huge you know i mean i think he was kind of a party animal um but so that was just helping part of though a larger destabilization of russia at the time right and so just to kind of give some context for russia in 1917 for a lot of the 19th century russia was pretty reactionary and slow to modernize they weren't really industrializing very quickly there were some exceptions like alexander ii who was um the czar freed the serfs in 1861 and banned corporal punishment in the army but he was assassinated in 1881 and when nicholas became zara in 1894 he was never very popular um he supported some of the attempts by his advisers to re reform and modernize but he really only agreed to the creation of the duma or the parliament because of a revolution in 1905 right so once world war one starts or once the archduke is assassinated nicholas supported serbia after his assassination and then russia's involvement in world war one was i think really the death blow to the russian monarchy um nicholas didn't really create any kind of administrative machine to support the war effort with things that were important in war like guns and bullets and uniforms and medicine and food um so they're just consistently trounced by the germans on the eastern front which was absolutely brutal um this is going to cause all sorts of war wearing war weariness mutinies and and general strikes that make it even harder to continue fighting and producing the goods that they needed to fight the war um rasputin is just going to help to delegitimize the czar um i think you know one of the reasons that rasputin looked to have so much power is probably just he didn't touch uh alexis and that probably helped prevent the forming of clots that might have been forming there's some other theories about why that could have been but hemophilia was untreatable and you know here's this kind of creepy guy in tight with the royal family that was just further delegitimizing him um but to look at 1917 specifically there's actually two revolutions in russia russia in 1917 so the first starts in february which is on the old russian calendar so sometimes the dates are a little funky when we get to the russian revolution in petrograd which we now call st petersburg which they had previously called st petersburg but we'll say petrograd for now um so on interwash international women's day uh women's had this parade and started protesting food scarcity and casualties and all these kinds of things and the protests spread or the parade i guess becomes a protest it spreads and then soldiers rebelled they joined and nicholas is forced to abdicate so that's kind of the beginning of the first revolution in the meantime the duma that parliament declared itself a provisional government and they had all sorts of political parties in there represented um alexander karensky kind of leads to the front of that he was a moderate socialist that came to lead the provisional government and tried to revive the russian war effort and meanwhile the petrograd soviet which was a workers council of workers in petrograd was also claiming to be the government and issuing its own decrees so that was destabilizing and then in april the germans put lenin who was a radical bolshevik intent on overthrowing the whole system on a train gave him money and sent him to petrograd so lenin starts making all these speeches about peace land and bread and that all sounded pretty good to people who were war weary landless and hungry so that's yeah i bet that sounded good but so a couple just to stop you and and reinforce a couple things so we we generally refer to this uh revolution as the february revolution even though the the the dates are a little weird um and so but but but we think of it we generally talk about it as the february revolution right and that lenin uh vladimir lenin had been in exile in germany um and then he was in switzerland yeah but the german eggs islands in switzerland and then the germans basically funded his uh journey to russia correct me if i'm wrong here in an attempt to further the destabilization of the russian government to weaken its ability to fight world war one against germany right which was a pretty brilliant move right and the british did it to the ottoman empire too with uh lawrence of arabia so they weren't the only ones doing it but i always thought that was pretty smart um so when lennon gets there he's giving all these speeches and rallying all the support but we've got these two governments kind of rallying for uh control and lenin just stages a coup in october of 1917 basically taking over the government buildings and then they hold an election the bolsheviks lose so they just dismissed the assembly in 1918 they signed the treaty of breslau toss with germany which gives up most of their western holdings and gets russia out of the war and then basically immediately become entrenched in a civil war with the whites who was basically everyone who wasn't a bolshevik um that goes on for a while until about 1922 when the bolsheviks just declare victory rename the country the soviet union and then we start talking about soviet history and not russian history because we've got to change that name too and that is that revolution is the october revolution right so that's right in october um there's this second revolution where lenin leads this coup they hold an election they don't like the results of the election because it was too uh fair i guess you might say and i mean they didn't win right right yeah so they lost the election which is a real bummer to them so they dismissed the duma um and then end the war with germany which of course makes sense because that's how part of how lenin got uh got to russia in the first place and was in the position that he was in um and then focus on uh the civil war against the whites and and how to form a new uh communist uh country or or at least uh this this particular bolshevik version of communism country um and then by 1922 that country exists uh and we now know it as the soviet union and that is the same soviet union that existed until 1991 right yep exactly that was a big moment in history um one that some would argue continues to reverberate right now yes very much right now um the history of the soviet union and the relationship between the uh ssrs of the ussr the soviet socialist republics of the ussr is of course right now at the center of conversations about ukraine and and uh at the center of putin's argument that uh ukraine is not a legitimate nation so um that's just one example of how history from 100 years ago that feels very distant um continues to shape the world we live in yeah next we have a couple questions about my favorite of the major uh world history empires the mongol empire the truly exceptional mongol empire different in so many important ways from uh the the uh the empires that uh have traditionally been the focus of um history classes in the us so who was genghis khan and why was he able to get so much territory in so little time which to be fair is it is a tough question to answer and one that is still debated right and i think that we'll find that with a lot of these questions it's not like historians can always put their answer in a nice little box they're continuing to debate these things new information comes out um history is kind of constantly evolving so um changus khan who before he was known as changus khan was known as temujin came from a pastoral group or a herding group of these feuding mongol clans and tribes during the 12th century and he supposedly had a pretty magnetic personality which helps him to build up a following of friends and he forges all of these alliances with more powerful leaders he wins a series of victories and he was known for being pretty ruthless to his enemies but pretty generous to his friends he also would incorporate a lot of the warriors from the defeated tribes into his own forces and so then he's renamed i guess or becomes known as changus khan which was the supreme leader of what was now unified is the great mongol nation um the army was pretty well organized and disciplined which allowed the mongols to eventually take over most of asia or much of asia and eastern europe kind of capitalizing on some weaknesses there the abbasid caliphate and divided china which eventually results in the largest land-based empire in all of human history so even though they don't have a huge lasting cultural impact on the areas they conquered in terms of bringing like a new language or religion to the area it facilitated all of this afro-eurasian trade and communication and then it their their collapse i guess will leave this big power vacuum that will be filled by the ming dynasty in china the ottoman and the safavid empires in the middle east and then the russian state in eastern europe and um i just thought it was interesting too that apparently climate change might have actually benefited them there was a particularly kind of wet warm period in central asia that led to this boom in grass growth and thereby livestock and horsepower which is part of what they relied on so wow that is really interesting um a reminder that like human history is also the story of other um species whether that species be um you know the the uh infectious agents that cause bubonic plague or uh something like uh warm wet weather that allows grass to grow to feed lots of horses and have a little more horsepower yeah i think it's really interesting though that that you know this this gets to something really important in history that's that's you know one of the great questions does does history make the man or does man make history is the way that it was phrased when i was a kid hopefully it's phrased in a slightly more inclusive way these days what is the relationship between individuals and systems and when we talk about shingis khan we have to focus on these systems that were that were falling apart at the time that he rose to power uh in in china that the dynasty was falling apart that the abbasid empire which had been a really powerful um the caliphate there which had been a really really powerful and and super culturally and historically important uh empire um you know spreading uh uh spreading islam and and uh and and really shifting a lot of things that those were both so weak that this left a power vacuum left an opportunity uh for the for the mongol empire to come and i think it's also really important to i really like how you focused in that answer um on it while acknowledging that it's it's not like uh you know all of these areas after after the relatively brief mongol empire were speaking a different language or were engaging in different religious practices necessarily but by connecting those places it did lead to a lasting shift in afro-eurasian trade which had a huge impact on the history of the world yeah totally and you see like a upswing in the silk road trade for instance during that period which is really important yeah like at the center of how you know all of afro-eurasian history went really um so yeah i think that it's um you know we often uh there's uh there's one of my favorite books i want to make sure i get the title right of one of my favorite books of history is called the uh the calamitous 14th century oh yeah the uh barbara tuchman yeah yeah yeah that barbara tuchman book and um it you know if it hadn't been for the growth of this afro-eurasian trade the growth of the silk road um you know these these much deeper connections among uh that ranged all the way from from japan to to portugal and and to central and southern africa it hadn't been for all of those connections we might not have had the black death or certainly might not have had the black death in the same way we ended up having it um we also wouldn't have had a huge explosion huge explosion in the distribution of knowledge in that period so what a what a fascinating uh so in that sense like uh the you know the the what chingas khan left behind was super important to the rest of human history okay there were a bunch of questions about the cold war as well i feel like sasha maybe put it best uh asking how did the cold war start i feel like the beginning is so muddy like the end of world war ii everybody's happy about winning and then boom mortal enemies measuring each other and the amount of weapons able to exterminate the human species it does it does feel like a little bit of a dramatic escalation i agree also vivi wants to know uh how to understand uh i don't know is it com con and common form i've only ever seen these words written yeah i think it's comic-con and common form and now that you say that i'm not 100 sure either because i mostly see them written so i hope you're right yeah but to be fair on your test you'll probably see them written as well sure um so talk to us about the cold war so i mean this is com i feel like it's always complicated right it's always complicated but there's you know there's all this debate amongst historians on the causes of the cold war and it shifted so much over time based on kind of current political uh climate so was it an ideological struggle or was it one based on geopolitical power after world war ii and in the 1950s in the west a lot of historians post or you know kind of pointed to that deep ideological divide and stalin and the soviet union's aggressive expansion after world war ii in europe and asia and this was called like an orthodox interpretation and just basically showed america is making uh reacting to soviet aggression then revisionists would point to american economic expansion in europe and even going back to like the open door policy of protecting american markets that went back to like the 1890s but starting in the 1970s the post-revisionist historians so this all gets a little ridiculous i think with the names but uh people like john lewis gattis had the benefit of hindsight and daytona was going on and some new archival material though i want to point out not the soviet archives yet and the post revisionist argued for more of a middle ground kind of pointing to the allies delay in opening a second front in world war ii which left the soviets fighting basically alone in europe uh truman's atomic diplomacy washington's refusal to recognize the soviet sphere of influence in eastern europe and they look at more kind of complex social political and economic causes of the cold war and when the soviet union collapsed in 1991 the soviet archives open up which leaves historians with all this new information gaddis for instance is going to take a much more negative view of stalin others start focusing again on these ideological struggles um and people like myself who went through school in the cold war and i think you too basically learned that communists were evil and trying to destroy the world and i think it's important to think about our own subjectivity when thinking about the cold war like how much is that impacting how i view different primary sources right um so if we look at kind of more modern interpretations and we look at like the marshall plan is offering all this american aid to help rebuild europe after world war ii to strengthen it against soviet influence and attempting to contain the spread of communism so containment's a big idea there um stalin balked at eastern european countries accepting the marshall plan because he saw that as american expansionism and so he created comic-con to prevent eastern european countries from aligning themselves with the west so providing that aid himself common form to answer kind of the second half of that question was the international communist organization led by the soviet union to organize communist parties across europe but as chinese communism became stronger and made that less relevant it was just kind of dissolved as part of the destalinization that happened after stalin's death yeah yeah so just to go through a couple things um a couple important points there i think um so maybe at the very beginning you know we were taught that it was i mean i was certainly taught that it was an ideological struggle a purely ideological struggle between on the one hand an ideology that focused on individualism and individual freedoms and on the other hand an ideology that focused on um the overall average communal good even to the point of terrific uh astonishing oppression terrific being i don't mean like in the good way uh astonishing oppression of individual expression and that was sort of like the way i learned it in high school i don't know if that's the way you learned it but that's kind of the way that i was taught about it yeah i mean a lot of and and obviously right the oppression is a huge deal and economically they weren't able to produce the kind of consumer goods that were in demand um right there were all sorts of flaws in the soviet system i think though that looking at the soviet union as this kind of monolith gets problematic as any kind of monolith does with people right because we never agree on anything right yeah and and over time there were different soviet unions like the stalin stop soviet even early stalin style and soviet union was very different from late stalin in the soviet union you know 1938 was vastly different from 1951 and so that's that's definitely part of it but the the understanding the relationship i don't know how important it is to the test you might you probably will but understanding the relationship between those initial ways of thinking about the cold war um that these were just like an ideological disagreement about what the human social orders should be with both sides but at least from our perspective when i was a kid especially the communists trying to impose their world view in the so-called third world the third world being the first world being the us and its allies the second world being the soviets and its allies in the third world being like the world that we were all fighting over to decide what the future of humanity would be um that this was sort of a purely ideological struggle and then along come the revisionists and say well actually i think it's a it's a lot more uh complicated than that and and that maybe we shouldn't only be looking at the way communism is trying to expand its influence but also look at the way the u.s is trying to expand its influence in the west is and then the post revisionists argue for just to restate it i'm asking you oh just i guess kind of a middle ground like trying to which is you know they asked for simplification of how did it start and i was like well it's pretty hard yeah it's not simple right i don't think you need to name these schools of thought necessarily on the ap exam but understanding that there's different perspectives on this i think is important and i would say that the post revisionists were just kind of complicating looking at more social political economic causes and not just that ideological development right okay let's move on to a question from tim ruckel who asks how was uh kwame and kruma and ghana significant in the non-aligned movement african decolonization and more broadly in the cold war itself um yeah so he's i think that whole movement's kind of interesting speaking of kind of a middle ground um the non-aligned movement was the sort of third option during the cold war it started with yugoslavia and its leader tito trying to establish independence from soviet-led communism and it did have some impacts on u.n decision-making during the cold war um kwame nkrumah was a part of the non-aligned movement and thought that capitalism had done a lot of damage to africa envisioning socialism is kind of the best way forward because it had egalitarian goals and he was the leader of the independence movement in ghana against british colonization and was elected as the first president of ghana in 1960 um and he was a pan-africanist which i think was an interesting idea meaning basically he saw africans as sharing a common history and a common destiny whose solidarity and sort of collective self-reliance would empower people of african descent on a global scale so that's even going to have an impact on the american civil rights movement so for instance malcolm x travels to ghana um and and you know they're all kind of talking together so it's interesting again to see that communication right on a on a global scale yeah yeah so it's another example of how we uh we may want to uh put uh histories into continents or in this particular communities but in fact all history is world history on some level and i think i tended to learn more kind of a country at a time yeah and i think world history has been interesting looking at these big global movements right like looking at huge trends and how they affect all these different um different areas of the globe but are interconnected right we can never detach ourselves from that interconnectedness yeah of course decolonization was not only an issue for colonized nations but also for imperialistic ones uh and for ones that claimed not to be imperialistic but still had um uh you know sort of state-sanctioned underclasses and so that that's you know it makes a lot of sense that um malcolm x would be going to ghana and and learning about decolonization there and and trying to bring some of those ideas back to the us here's a question from gabrielle what are the differences between the aztecs the incas and other native american ethnic groups that's that's broad yeah yeah i don't know why we talk so much about the aztec the incas and the maya you know i feel like those are the big three always in the americas but you know obviously there's other groups in the americas by 1200 but those are the big three that i think get brought up a lot in part because they're really big um we could sort of debate other reasons why but i think it's interesting to think about those areas geographically because when you think about the incan empire for instance it stretches largely kind of north south along the coast of you know mostly what's now peru um rather than kind of east west which is like most of europe is kind of in that east-west you know similar latitude so they span a much bigger range of climates not to mention you know the elevation going up and down so i just think that's kind of an interesting thing about and how much that must have impacted um development but uh the aztec and the inca had both forcibly taken over and absorbed other cultures so the aztecs were kind of the last and the largest of these mesoamerican states that emerged before spanish conquest and then grew out of the mexica alliance with these two other states and its power came from conquest which made it a little bit unstable because the areas that they conquered would rebel um and then the areas that they conquered owed payments in the form of labor and materials to uh to know and the city itself was an absolute wonder to europeans i mean they were just in awe of its size of the chinampas or these like floating islands where they um where they grew food that were used for farming um people talk a lot about human sacrifice in at in with the aztecs it did play a role in aztec public life but they weren't alone in that so i wouldn't over emphasize it um and the aztec emperor montezuma was eventually conquered by uh hernan cortez the spaniard now the incan empire was much larger than the aztec state geographically and might have had as many as 10 million subjects these are sort of estimates but they were more bureaucratic than the aztecs probably because of that um they used i think it's pronounced uh keepu's a series of these kind of knotted cores cords to record demographic data and do all this accounting um and they required the people that they conquered to learn uh quechua and to do military service to the empire so state authority kind of permeated much further into inca society than in the aztecs so that might be something i'd say if i were asked to compare and contrast them um in incan society women had matrilineal dissent and worshiped the moon and men worshipped the sun and traced their descent through their fathers um adewalpo was the last emperor after uh the last incan emperor after a civil war caused by the death of his father due to smallpox speaking of like global things impacting history um and he was defeated by pizarro yeah and we should say that smallpox was not uh in the americas before the colombian exchange began in 1492. right and just was so devastating you know some estimates are as much as 90 of the population of the americans yeah this is a particular uh this is like a pet issue of mine kathy but i think that disease is overwhelmingly the most important historical force like it's huge right it completely reshaped i mean it became it was you know uh i think the historian frank snowden describes it as largely incidental although there were uh uh episodes of of what amount to bioterrorism and yeah it had a huge impact obviously i mean 90 of people in the americas died um and you know uh 500 years earlier or 400 years earlier uh probably half of people in eurasia died in a four or five year period uh during the black death these are these are huge huge historical forces that we tend to ignore because war and kings are so much uh more interesting well and i think kovit gives us a much better appreciation of that right like yeah when i think about the 1920s in the us and like jazz clubs and all of that now and like of course they went and partied after the influenza pandemic like they were tired of quarantine right um i feel like it just changed my whole perspective on that yeah me too for sure um all right stan we're going to talk about nation building oh great uh we're going to talk about nation building america's favorite topic mommy wants to know how nation states emerged and uh relatedly adapaan wants to know who mustafa kamal ataturk was yeah so i think this is a fascinating question because you see this in world history this sway between kind of local control and stronger national control like that's an ongoing topic and i suppose empires are the other extreme of local control with countries controlling these large groups of other countries and in the 19th century nationalism led to a specific form of countries kind of driven by this sense of common identity because of language religion ethnicity similarity and cultures um and in italy and germany nations were brought together by these strategic eventually by these strategic limited wars in multi-ethnic empires though like the ottoman empire or the austrian empire a lot of nation states were created in the aftermath of world war one because of what woodrow wilson called self-determination or groups kind of roughly deciding their own boundaries um before you had war to build a nation though there were often these idealistic groups who helped to propel that sense of comet identity or kind of defining who they were so young italy for instance uh created by mazzini gave italians this kind of rosy dream drawing on the glory of ancient rome and the young turks in the ottoman empire forced um abdul hamad ii to restore constitution in 1908 and they're pretty uh the ottoman empire was pretty ethnically diverse arabs albanians jews etc and much more that group was much more about kind of liberal political reform but they eventually would splinter off into groups and one of those groups became more nationalistic creating kind of a single party state that would lead the ottoman empire into world war one and then like so many other empires world war one is just devastating to the ottoman empire so when world war one ends um nationalists led by mustafa kamal ataturk took the turkish empire part of the ottoman empire and they they abandoned the sultanate and the caliphate so they're no longer like the head of of islam in the world and transformed turkey into an independent modern uh secular republic you know kind of thinking as um it was a way to make turkey i don't know bring it into the new age um they did have sort of an enlightened authoritarian rule under ataturk he considered gender equality a mark of modernization so women got the right to vote and hold public office in 1934 polygamy was abolished women were given equal rights and divorce but his program of unification through turkification that's kind of a mouthful emphasized people speaking turkish changing their surnames um if they were ethnic minorities to names that sounded more turkish so you you really get that still like very nationalist bent and that idea of building a nation in part through turkifying it through having one one ethnic identity that stretches from across the entire country no matter what somebody's uh you know uh past might look like or what their own ethnic identity might be to themselves well and that's such an interesting idea right of like how do you define who's us versus who's them and that's i just think a fascinating thing to look at throughout history yes there's so much of um yes and and this is something we talked a lot about in the in the european history thing is that um in the european industry crash course is that the negative integration strategy for forming an idea of a people that people have a shared identity is to say we are not this uh we are not this we hate these people these others um are are the opposite of what we are and we will identify ourselves by being not this and by trying to oppress or marginalize or even destroy them um and then positive integration strategies focus on um on on ways of creating us's without thems which is maybe harder at least according to what we've seen from history but there are some examples of it yeah i mean like a national anthem you need a flag um holiday all of those things help yeah national heroes that you put on your money that can come from maybe come from a variety of ethnic groups or a variety of linguistic backgrounds but but still uh share the national identity all right we've got a question submitted on our flipkart grid group it comes from nia from bulgaria who asks what do you think is a better way to look at history on one hand there's the emotionally detached way of looking at it where you just look at the facts and the figures and you're very objective and sort of looked at it as almost the fiction like it happened to a different species or didn't happen at all you just detach yourself from it or on the other hand you can look at it as fully grasping that every single one of these people was an actual person who actually lived and died just like you will i feel like that's probably the right thing to do because history is most importantly a human story but it's also very emotionally difficult so i'm wondering which you think is the better option yeah so um i kind of had to face this moment in my career when i was looking at different grad school programs i was in a phd program one of the schools that i looked at um had the top holocaust historian in the country christopher browning and i had a long conversation with him about this because i wasn't sure that i could study the holocaust for the rest of my life because it's so emotionally intense so i was asking like how how do you do this how do you do this every day um and he said you know a little bit is compartmentalizing and i think that i have learned to do that you know as i teach the holocaust every year you know maybe three times in a day or something um it's a lot it's intense and sometimes um you have to distance yourself a little bit but sometimes you just have to let yourself feel it too because that was my fear was that i would become numb to it that i would not understand the gravity of it anymore and there's moments where it just hits you like a ton of bricks like i remember you know visiting auschwitz and seeing this they have this room full of of hair and it's just like six million jews killed in the holocaust like that's a number we can't comprehend really um but there's moments like that where it just really really hits you so i think you let you yourself feel it in those moments but not let it paralyze you i guess and try to um kind of move move forward and and i you know i don't know if we can ever be truly objective so i'm not sure that's my goal but to move forward um with what i'm researching or what i'm what i'm talking about without letting it completely overwhelm me yeah i think that's really beautifully put and the only thing that i'd add is that facts and figures in history have to serve human goals um we're not trying to inform artificial intelligences about what we were like we're trying to inform each other and so um you know when we're studying data or or we're studying you know um uh we have to remember that those are that that we're talking about people and we're talking about people to people right all right we're going to transition to some study tips kathy give us some study tips i need i need study tips i i don't know about you or your students or the people watching this but uh the pandemic has not been great for my ability to focus no i i discovered tick tock during the pandemic for that me too because oh it's crazy it's great yeah sorry what was i i forgot what you were saying because i was on tick tock i'm just checking to see how a video is doing i'm sure yeah i'm better than mine oh oh you're on tick tock oh this is very exciting um i mean so i think i i heard actually that you guys have made a series on study skills and i've i've looked at some of those and i think they're great um for the ap exam in particular people who are who are studying for that i think the most as someone who's graded those exams a lot know your rubrics like know how you score the points that you need on the dbq on the leq know what scores on an saq and you know on that note practice by doing what you'll have to do on the exam um so take some practice exams um write a dbq in timed conditions and um you know i think if you're overwhelmed by evidence by names which can be a lot in history um or events look at the college board key concepts and and know the evidence for each of those concepts like kind of think about how if that concept were turned into a question how would you provide evidence for an essay question related to that um and help help them use you to help them use uh what you know and and separate that into what's important from you know this just flood of info because in the end you're going to go in with what's in your brain so you know think about how you can use that evidence in a in an essay so watch crash course study skills which i also recommend um and know your rubrics and take a couple practices you will feel so much more prepared anyway like putting aside everything else it just makes when i would do it anyway when i was a student it would just make me feel going in like well you know my practice sat score might not have been very good but i did do it you did what you can do and like in the end that doesn't define you either you know like yeah i bombed one of my ib exams and i went on to major in that subject um so you know life goes on you'll be okay yeah i think like it's a hard it's that's such a hard thing to manage because you want to tell people like study hard like it can be really hard to focus especially right now i am so i i cannot imagine how difficult it is to be going to school or teaching school right now in this historical moment like it i i am deeply sympathetic to that situation and and so you want to encourage people to like study hard do their best work really hard all that stuff but it is also worth saying that like this is not the defining feature of your life um how you do on an ap test is not how you are going to is not the life you are going to have it is it is one data point out of literally millions in your life yeah yeah for sure i got i did by the way i did not do particularly well on the ap world history test i think i got a three and i'm here you know so you made this series too that was pretty popular so i feel like it worked out okay for you just fail up fail up all right um we're gonna take some questions from uh the chat now stan do we have any questions oh did you already put them in there oh wow this is i mean very very professional um i should say a quick thank you to stan and zueja who are running this uh this behind the scenes and doing an extraordinary job uh again a big thank you to kathy for joining us today what uh what a lovely gift thank you all this is from the internet it doesn't say which person why didn't the silk road stretch all the way across europe did traders just have no interest in going further i don't know the answer to this question i mean i think i think there's a limit i guess to how far you can go i mean let me talk about the silk road a little bit just in general terms so it stretches for like 2 000 years connects china to europe starting around like 200 bce and um you know the caravan sarai where merchants and travelers would rest turned into these major central asian commercial cities like bukhara and um over the millennia it impacted trade but it also spreads you know religions like buddhism which spreads widely from india through central and asia central and east asia changing local religions um and a lot of uh luxury goods obviously are traded that way mostly just luxury goods because transport was so expensive um there were periods of activity that kind of spiked in wayne so you know we talked about the the last big period was the mongol empire kind of revitalizing it i'm thinking that part of why it didn't spread completely and this is not like my biggest area of expertise so this is kind of an educated guess here but you know in 1453 the turks conquered constantinople right which is going to cut off european land access to the silk road and it's part of why europeans improve their naval trade to go in the other direction and i'm thinking about what kind of you know before that i think that a lot of it probably had to do with what countries had the wealth to yeah had the markets for luxury goods yeah yeah and then also like once you hit um constantinople it was easier to put stuff on a ship and then move it via the mediterranean trade than to continue to travel on the silk road um so i'm that would probably be the biggest piece was that you know traveling by land is hard ships can carry a lot more than it can yeah and and in a lot of cases faster too right um so i think i think all that probably went into it but it's also important to acknowledge that uh we don't know everything [Laughter] brady uh brady asks i'm curious what john or kathy's favorite books are for history of any time period that's a big that's a big question it's a tough one do you have one that comes to mind quickly well i just read this book the dawn of everything um that's about pre-history and makes an argument that hunter-gatherer and forging communities were much more multitudinous than we tend to imagine and that had that they had lots of different ways of organizing their social orders sometimes with radical egalitarianism and often often not and that our ideas that like you know before twelve thousand b c e all human life was pretty similar and pretty historically boring are are probably uh probably wrong so i thought that was really interesting book that's interesting um yeah i really like uh i read a lot of gender history so um you know bonnie smith who worked on the european history series i had read her in college and like to be able to work with her was so great um she has a book about it's like the history of 20th century france um as kind of told through the like micro history of the concierge at uh where's where she lived when she was doing her research and that was just kind of fascinating because it's like this you know how all these global things impact this this one you know just average woman um there's another book i really like called the woman beneath the skin which is about the 18th century german doctor um in the german states and and it's like women's testimonies to him about what was going on with their bodies so you get into all this information about like medical history and how they perceive themselves but it's all you know kind of translated through him so there's a lot of good thinking about you know how much can you trust what he said about them and how much of this is there you know or accurate accounts of what they said and um it's it's hard sometimes to get to those records of women and so this was just an interesting avenue oh that sounds like it is absolutely up my alley you can what is what is the title again um the woman beneath the skin it's by barbara duden she has a couple actually i hope i'm not mixing up great titles um that sounds really good i yeah i mean most of what i read is about the history of infectious disease and the history of medicine probably my favorite book about the history of infectious disease which stan gave me um it's this was such a it was such a great gift like it made me feel really known uh stan gave me um this book called the black death by uh is it rosemary horrocks is that her name and she collected and translated first person accounts of the black death now it's it's a little more limited than i want it to be because it's very eurocentric and so many of the important accounts of the black death occurred um in what is you know now known as as the middle east or in north africa or or in central asia but i mean to read these first person you know accounts you know contemporaneous accounts of what this experience was like to live in a time where half or 60 or 70 percent of people in your community were dying in a matter of a few months and to have no idea how to make sense of it and to see all of these societal uh rules break down uh to see over and over again you know people abandoning their families uh you know uh the the kind of horror of of the the death rituals breaking down because it wasn't possible to ring the bells for everybody who died because too many people were dying that that stuff is it's just it's it's really powerful to read and it's i love reading i mean i love reading well well-translated first-person accounts because i'm never going to be somebody who's able to read aramaic or uh you know read moodle english and so if it's really well translated you just you feel the full humanness of that person and you feel the you feel the fear um and hope you know the interracial hope that i find so encouraging in those accounts even though they're obviously it's the worst one of the worst things that's ever happened to humans and yet like one of my favorite ones is uh this irish monk john clin who um wrote an account of the plague and and the account ended here i leave extra parchment in case anyone is left alive to continue the story hmm and then he died and then did anyone continue the story the only the only uh note after that reads here it seems the author died in different handwriting yeah so um but i find it i mean obviously in a kind of dark a rather dark way but i find it hopeful that we would leave that extra parchment you know like we would hold on to that hope that that the story will continue um and that somebody will keep telling telling the stories and our opportunity and responsibility as people is to listen to those stories and to hear them and and to try to make sense of of the past through them uh and kathy i'm so grateful to you for helping me do that uh through crash course european history uh but also through all your work so thank you so much thank you so much for joining us thanks to everybody who wrote in questions and again thank you so much to flipgrid uh for sponsoring this live stream and giving students a really wonderful set of tools to work with we're really grateful to all of you and again to stan and zuwaya as well it's just been uh really wonderful to be able to spend this hour with you good luck on your tests yeah good luck everybody they're coming up in a couple of weeks here and thank you guys for having me this is really fun and i always love to sit around and talk about history so this has been a fun experience yeah let's do it again sometime soon uh this is the last of the office hours live streams for now but let us know what you liked about the series also don't be afraid to let us know what you didn't like because we would like to do more of them and potentially do them more regularly we'll be uploading these live streams on the crash course channel soon so if you missed it live or if you only caught like the last half you can watch the entire video soon so stay tuned for that again uh thank you so much thanks for being here kathy thank you and uh it's been a joy to learn with y'all tonight thanks again bye everybody dftba

Channel: CrashCourse

Views: 138,970

Keywords: John Green, Hank Green, vlogbrothers, Crash Course, crashcourse, education

Id: 3k0v5ZvZrVQ

Length: 57min 51sec (3471 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2022