Recent readings and paper

From the readings discussed in class today I thought it was interesting how they related to our research paper due Friday. Before starting my research for the possibility of other migrators who could have settled in America first I always assumed that Native Americans were the original people and never gave much other thought to it. However my opinion has definitely changed and not just because I had to pick a side for our paper to argue. I do believe that it is possible for Coastal peoples to have traveled from East Asia down the coast following kelp forests and eventually settling in America. I also believe that these people could have had some relation to the Chinese and Zhang's exploration missions in the 15th century. I think it's interesting to consider when thinking about the original settlers of certain places of the world and I have learned to think about it differently through an almost outside of the box way from this class. I knew that people had migrated from Africa some thousands of years ago but I never considered or really thought that everyone at one point originated out of Africa. Now that we have come to the end of the semester I can appreciate the migration paths that many of these people had to endure if they wanted to go to a new location.

Another point that I found interesting was the section on the Chinese and how they pulled out of exploring the world through conquests in boats as did the Europeans. I do agree with what the text says that China could have imposed their whole culture on the world if they hadn't withdrawn themselves from these excavations so quickly. I wouldn't go as far to say that it was the Chinese error but I do agree with the text's opinion that it was a mistake that definitely affect people on a global perspective both thousands of years ago as well as today.

Things that lost my attention when I was going through this chapter were the parts about the Ottoman Empire. I feel like whenever I learn about them I find myself forgetting everything about them in the following semester or whatnot. They are the one empire that has never left a lasting mark on me and I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing yet. Civilizations like Mesopotamia and Egypt and other first civilizations will always have an impact but you would think that through the accomplishments and expansion of the Ottoman empire they would too leave an everlasting impact. Maybe I have just shut them out because whenever I seem to be learning about them it is at similar times with Greek and Roman societies and my interests just lay in what those civilizations and empires had to offer over those of the Ottoman empire. Hopefully if I take another History course in the future I can fix this problem with always shutting out the Ottoman empire from staying in my head for more than a few days or week because they did have great accomplishments and conquered and expanded across Europe in a vast way.