World History II - Spring 2018

The Great Dying: Like I mentioned in my last blog post, there are many things that happened during The Early Modern Era, but that we don't usually think of when we think of that period in history. The Great Dying is one of those events that we know happened, but we don't talk about much. It's truly sad that it isn't talked about more because it had a HUGE impact on Native American societies. There are many different factors that contributed to this event happening. For one "the lack of most domesticated animals meant the absence of acquired immunities to Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, malaria, and later, yellow fever." The last thing anyone thought would be the huge impact it would have on Native Americans because they had never been exposed to all the things they were suddenly being bombarded with.  When Native American people came into contact with the European and African diseases, they died in appalling numbers, ...

"For the sake of clarity and coherence, historians often characterize a particular period of time in a brief phrase -- the age of First Civilizations, the age of empires, the era of revolutions, and so on. Though useful and even necessary, such capsule descriptions leave a lot out and vastly oversimplify what actually happened. Historical reality is always more messy, more complicated, and more uncertain than any shorthand label can convey." It's interesting to me that the author would start the beginning of chapter 4 with this, because it definitely is true! We like to label certain events, which makes it easy to remember but those labels leave out a lot of information. This is especially true when speaking about The Early Modern World.  The Early Modern Era, was spanning from the years 1450 - 1750. It's during these times that we can find signs of the modern world; "the beginnings of genuine globalization, elements of distinctly modern societies, a...