Final thoughts

I think I enjoyed reading chapter 10 and starting to learn the beginnings of the classical era the most out of the semester. In my Religion class today we talked about the classical era and christendom being accepted by the Roman Empire as the official religion in 313 and I liked already knowing the backstory and history that lead to this event. Also I thought it was interesting about heretics and how in small private communities someone who didn't agree with the group was automatically outcasted as a heretic. If that was the case today I don't think anyone would have any friends or family at all. Another thing that I found interesting in this chapter was the split in the Roman Empire.

I have a hard time remembering which states and countries are involved with the East and West because I get my directions messed up like my left and rights. However I did find it interesting to learn about the nitty gritty details of each directions path after the split of the roman empire. In the East, Constantinople was where the new capital was moved to and the Byzantium and orthodox christians were on the rise. I always get confused between the Orthodox Christians and Greeks and the Ottoman Empire I think that their names sound similar to me so I was a little lost during this part of the class however I still enjoyed learning about the differences between them and the catholic church. Another thing that I found interesting in the split of the empire was how big of a role science played in forcing this split to be even greater and greater. Science created a large split between the empires and excommunication because of christendom.

In chapter 8 and 9 I enjoyed learning about the routes of trade through Europe and Asia as well as the tribute system in theory and in practice in China. I thought that the influence that these trade routes and tribute systems left on these continents was an important part of the building blocks to how they interact and exists as continents today. I feel like today with the United States offshoring technology and work into China it resembles a similar past that the chinese faced with the Mongols and tribute system. A type of system where one party is taking advantage of the other which ended in death and conquering. Hopefully nothing bad comes from America offshoring work to China and surrounding countries.

All in all I enjoyed the way in which Strayer presented his textbook for the most part which I think is hard for historical writers, especially textbook writers, to keep the attention of those who don't initially have any interest in history of the world. The only thing that I didn't enjoy about Strayers text was that I felt most chapters dragged on in the examples of many different aspects to whatever that chapters topic was. I feel like when studying this book in one semester there is so much material to cover and when reading about things that are not discussed in class it is sometimes a struggle to pick out the important points of information that should be remembered compared to the less important forgettable information.