History Week One Review

Assignment: Write a 1-2 page paper about one of the places we learned about this week

The first and last two weeks of this history course will be what Mr. Fish calls a “world tour”. No, a world tour is not physically touring around the world, (which is what I first thought of when he said that) it is where we study what smaller things were going on in parts of the world while we were focussing on more major things that happened in other parts of the world.

For most of the year, we will focus mostly on Europe, but like I said in the above paragraph, Mr. Fish wanted to catch us up on the things going on in the rest of the world. This history year will cover the years 1750 all the way up to current times, so for our first week of the world tour, we studied from 500 AD to 1750 AD.

This week we learned about the events that happened with the Middle East, Africa, and Oceania/South East Asia from 500 AD to 1750 AD. I chose to write about the Middle East because I found it the most interesting out of what we learned about this week.

Before 500 AD, the Middle East saw the rise and fall of five major empires: Babylon, Persia, Alexander the Great, Parthia, and Rome.

After the fall of Rome, the Middle East picked up the religion Islam. This was around 700 AD. Muslim caliphates began spreading and eroding by the time the Byzantine empire came around, but the Muslims were eventually united again when the Ottoman Empire started in 1453.

Looking ahead in history, in the 1750’s, the Middle East is still under the Ottoman’s control, and the region of Iran changed hands many times the last thousand years as empires came and went.

While we’re looking at other places throughout the year, the Middle East will dramatically change. The Ottoman Empire will brake up into multiple smaller countries, there will be more people settling there, and a lot of other things will be going on, too. People from all over the world will recognize the oil reserves in the Middle East, and realize that that gives the land an important trade asset and a lot of wealth.

At the end of the lesson, we also looked at some artifacts that can still be seen today. I found them to be really cool and interesting. I would link the pictures here, but I don’t know how to do that, so sorry.

Thank you for reading this essay! I enjoyed writing it, and I hope that you enjoyed reading it. Have an amazing day!