HIST 100: Engineering The Past

Hagia Sophia

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The Hagia Sophia is a large place of worship. This place was full of religious items that surrounded a giant wall called an iconostasis. An Iconostasis is described as a wall of religious icons, separating the nave (the main body of the church) from the sanctuary. The relics are usually made up of tombs or tangible items that show how the person was alive. Relics important in every religion including Christianity, Hinduism, ect. Catholic’s however don’t worship any sacred relics, they practice that the only thing/person to be worshiped is God. When this first began, no one could varify if the relics were authentic or not, so many fraudulent relics began to appear. After this became a little out-of-hand, the church decided to “authenticate” the relics as they came. The Hagia has since displayed some amazing artifacts, including the nails from the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Competing Interpretations of the First Thanksgiving

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1.

“The Pilgrims and America’s First Thanksgiving” was the basic elementary school lesson according to most of the “My First Thanksgiving” posts that I have read. The basic understanding that for a brief moment in history, all was well between the pilgrims and Native Americans. There is a lot of factual information in this but there is also lots of facts missing.

2.

I think that it would be hard to not find the differences in how the articles were written interesting. People these days usually thrive on drama and this is a very dramatic argument even in today’s politics. However I find that with reading upon any topic it is important to check other sources and try to weed out the hard facts and create your own opinion on the topic.

3.

I find these articles much more interesting than those in part 2. They provide a first person feeling to the story. I can remember sitting down next to my great grandfather and listening to his story about WW2. Now his opinion played a huge part in these stories so not everything that he said about the European countries can be taken for the truth, but it sure helps you build a good idea of what happened in the eyes of someone that was there for the event.

4.

I think that it would be hard not for a historian to create an opinion on the “First Thanksgiving”. That is how our minds work as people. The trick is to put your opinion aside and search for the truthful facts. I think that it easy to see that historians have changed the common persons knowledge of the past. They are the ones writing school books and when they leave parts of history out or only telling part of the story, it is equivalent to being completely biased. There are countless historic events that are left out of school books. And the youth learning from these books have no idea of the full story.

Week 4 updates

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I have three short videos for you today.

WordPress: Adding links and images

 

Assessing your work in this course

Here’s a quick overview of what I’m assessing/grading in this course. One thing I forgot to mention in the video, but which is mentioned in the syllabus: Rather than being graded individually—which would be crazy-making for both you and me—I assess your blog posts and comments collectively. I’ll let you know soon (and throughout the course) if your posts aren’t meeting my expectations for this course, or if you’re doing a really great job.

The visualization activity in Module 4.2

Honestly, it’s going to be difficult to mess up this assignment. It needs to be thoughtful and legible, but other than that, there’s no single correct way to respond to this assignment. In the video, I give you one example of a way to organize a response, but it’s certainly not the best possible way. I encourage you to be creative with your response.