Archive for the ‘History Class’ Category

History for History Haters

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

This pretty much sums it all up. Is it true, as optimists say, that every mushroom cloud has a silver lining?

“Perhaps no one has changed the course of history as much as historians” — Franklin P. Jones

“History, n. an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools” — Ambrose Bierce, the Devil’s Dictionary

As a history major, I hear it all the time: history equals dead white men plus boring dates and far-off events, sprinkled liberally with a large dose of irrelevance. Yet by some twist of fate or by some sleight of hand by your advisor, you may end up in a history class someday. So here’s how to make it bearable and maybe even fun.

Watch a documentary. This is the easy and passive way to study history. And you can watch dozens of fantastic documentaries for free on PBS’s website. They have documentaries on everything from hippies to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Make timelines. This is the best way to learn dates. Draw out a line and then mark off and label all the major events. I find that the best time to do this is the morning of the exam because the dates are still fresh in your memory when you slump down into that chair.

Focus on what interests you. In any history class there is always something that even the most hardened history-hater finds interesting. For example, a guy might take a World War I class and hate everything except the flame-throwers. Then study flame-throwers. Study how they were used. You may discover that during World War I they would sometimes mercy-shoot enemies who were on fire; but when not in such a generous mood, they forbade mercy-shooting. So study the facts that you need to know, but focus on the cool stuff.

Figure out how these seemingly irrelevant historical event have effected your life. Here are some examples. It is because the pant-wearing, grizzly Germanic barbarians won the battle of Adrianople that you and I call the days of the week “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.”; if the Romans had won, we would be using the Latin names. It is because the U.S. government was paranoid about communism and the Soviet Sputnik satellite that you are consuming the internet right now: the fear of Soviet space tech prompted the military to create a network which later became the internet. This is the way to look at history.

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Mastering the Map Quiz

Monday, October 25th, 2010

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” — Ambrose Bierce

Towards the beginning of the semester, history and geography classes often have a map quiz. These test your ability to associate names with places. For example, I took a Modern East Asia history class which had a map quiz; we had to know where Beijing, Tokyo, the Huang-He River (and so forth) go on a map.

Here are some helpers:

1. Try drawing a map. For visual learners, this can be a relatively fun, hands-on way of learning where in the world stuff is. You could copy and/or trace the shape of the region and then dot the map with all the cities and rivers you need to know.

2. Create Mnemonics. For each place create some link between the name and where it’s found on a map. For example, supposed you had to remember that Tokyo is located on the central east coast of Honshu, in Japan; you could remember this by saying to yourself, “Tokyo is the capital of Japan, so of course its located in the middle of Japan’s largest island; and it is located on the east coast because it is the capital of the land of the rising sun, and the sun rises in the east.” This may seem cludgy, but it works wonders.

3. Create a matching game. You could write down the names of the places in one column and their location in another column, randomizing the order of both columns. Then you could draw a line between each place-name and its location.

4. Grab a globe. You could practice finding the places on a globe. You could even turn this into a game by timing yourself.

5. Play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. You could dust off that old bondi blue iMac, crank up good ‘ole Mac OS 8, and plug in your old external floppy disk drive for hours of gumshoe goodness. Or maybe not.

Posted in Geography Class, History Class | 2 Comments »