IHSS Blog 2018-2019

Adrian Perez U.S/Mexico Border  First of all, I would like to say that I very much enjoyed the whole "slideshow" that came with the presentation. I thought it was very well constructed and I did in fact learn some things I never knew just with my knowledge. I only knew about ten percent that was on that slideshow. Now to my argument, I believe that building anytime of barrier or wall that would block all illegal immigrants from getting into the country is a terrible idea. I feel that for one, it will be a huge waste of money, and we currently have the allowance to be able to build any type of barrier. For the next reason, there really is just no point, there are not that many people that are going to do any harm in the U.S. Many of the police officers are pro wall, which is not understandable. If you are having problems with illegal immigrants and them bringing drugs into the country, instead of sending them back, take them in and make them have a pat down, to see i...

Henry Quillin Mr. Roddy IHSS 11-30-18           There are around 700 miles of wall/fence that cover the 2000 United States Mexican border. President Trump wants to expand that wall over the whole border. I argue that this is not a good idea at all, and it will negatively impact our economy, environment,  and foreign relations. First, let's talk about how much the wall will cost. According to Trumps own Homeland Security, the wall will cost around 9 billion dollars for the concrete alone. This is not accounting for the labor, metal, security, and countless other factors, though it is estimated that it could cost up to 20 to 40 billion dollars. Since Mexico is not paying for the wall, the funding for it will most likely come out of our taxes.  Trump claims that the border is very dangerous and we should keep the Mexicans out, but according to an analysis by the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center,  "The cri...

Stories Can Give Us an Incorrect View of History The article I read was an interview about how narratives that are used to talk about history can give us incorrect information, and lead us to thinking something that is untrue. When I first glanced at this article, I disagreed with what the person being interviewed was saying. Once I read it, however, it made sense and I realized that I did agree with what he was saying. I believe that when history is put into the form of a story, it can give us incorrect information and leave out important parts of the event.  In the article, the interviewer asked Alex Rosenbeurg, who is a Duke University philosophy professor, how narratives messed up the facts of history. Rosenbeurg replies by saying that while stories make you think that you have a good understanding of hwat happened during a particular event, both you and hte author of the story are really just guessing at the thoughts and motives of the people in the story. I agree with ...

Asher Forman Mr. Roddy IHSS 29 November 2018 My Argument is that Every Vote Matters     I very much agree with the article that every vote matters. If someone were to think to themselves, "My vote won't make a real difference. I don't think that I should vote." Then that someone is very wrong. This idea is very common among many people who don't realize the value of their vote. If every person were to say that their vote didn't matter. Imagine how many people that were to think the same thing, that their vote doesn't matter. Now millions of people haven't voted because of thinking that their single vote doesn't matter. In the 2016 presidential election, there were around 114 million people that ended up not voting. This is around 50% percent of eligible voters that had the opportunity to vote in the presidential election in 2016 but didn't. This election was between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. If the other millions of people that di...

Andreas Cantu Mr. Roddy IHSS 29 November 2018 \ My Argument    I will be creating a new position for this topic and that is that every vote does not matter in certain elections. The elections that I am talking about are particularly are Presidential elections. My reasoning for this is there are millions and I mean millions of votes that come in during this time so, to think that if just one person choose for whatever reason to not vote it will cause a loss to either side. For some evidence I am choosing to look at the last few presidential races. Presidential Election ,  November 8, 2016 Detailed Results 100% Reporting   Electoral Votes: 9 Polls Closing: 7:00 PM ET Electoral Votes R   Winner  D. Trump 62.9% 1,306,925 9 D  H. Clinton 34.6% 718,084 I  G. Johnson 2.1% 43,869 I  J. Stein 0.4% 9,287 So as you can see by this graph, if one person chose not to vote for say Clinton it would ha...

Justin Patera Mr. Roddy IHSS November 29th, 2018 Indigenous Life For the most part I agree with the article. I feel as though the Native American population is somewhat underrepresented within America. If they are however, they can often be stereotypical. A prime example of this is seen with the Cleveland Indians. Although Native Americans are represented they aren’t necessarily presented in the right way. In the article they talk about red face and this is a perfect example of that being that Cleveland’s baseball mascot  is essentially a red, characterized Native American. The mascot has the stereotypical feather in addition to being a bright red color. Of course this is not the only example of stereotyping Native Americans, we also see it in movies, as she said with red face, but also in the form of their presentation. Depending on how you are taught you could quite possibly see them as for what they are not. You may have been given this false image of what a Native A...

The Columbian Exchange was one of the most prominent, important times in human history. It helped to grow and expand populations in Europe, as well as diminish most of the population in the Americas. The Columbian Exchange was not just an exchange of food, a valuable asset to all, but also an exchange of dangerous germs. These foreign germs had devastating effects on Native American population at the time, as their immune systems were not set up to deal with these new elements. As a result by the end of the exchange 95% percent of the Native Americans had died, and their population suffered greatly. Besides all that bad stuff, many good things came along with the Columbian Exchange. Potatoes were an important new aspect of European life, and became a staple in their diets. The diverse, ground rooting plant produced bulbs even in the coldest of climates, which was of use to Northern countries. It helped to increase population because of its resilience to the weather, and the pack of nu...

In this article is talks about how all the predictions made about climate change have been becoming a reality recently. This is very bad for humans because of the damage it is already causing and will continue to cause. In the article is talks about some cities trying to adapt and change to protect against flooding or fires or other disasters caused by climate change. Why not all? Leaders of countries should all be trying to build precautions for disasters caused by climate change. "High tide flooding is now posing daily risks to businesses, neighborhoods, infrastructure, transportation and ecosystems in the Southeast." Climate change is causing very big problems and in the article the reporter agrees that communities and countries need to start taking precautions but only a few are. Unfortunately, it would cost a lot of money for any country to build protection for all the cities but they need to try. They should really be worried and protecting the people should be the fi...

I am extremely interested in the idea that geography is power. In his book, Jared Diamond argues that geography prompted the way history has unfolded across the world. He asks, "why did history unfold differently on different continents? Why has one culture, namely that of Western Europe, dominated the development of the modern world?" He goes on to say that the reason different societies developed at different rates, over a period of many years, is because of location. It is due to the difference in plant and animal species, that was made suitable to the domestication of the continents. Technology and empires all came later when economies were starting to produce and grow in size. Empires began to grow in size due to their location and access to agriculture, making them able to support all within their region. While on the other hand, more hunter-gatherer societies were unable to support their extra people. I found this to be an extremely interesting idea ...

Charlie McGill Dr. Roddy IHSS 11.16.18 How Horses Helped Advance Civilization     In Guns Germs and Steel, Diamond talks a lot about how the domestication of large mammals helped advance human society and helped with food production, warfare, and even in building immunities to germs. The domestication of the horse was a major advancement in many societies around Eurasia, and eventually helped them take control of many civilizations in the America’s, making it one of the most important developments in modern history. Because of this, and just how cool I think the actual animal is, I decided to make my Guns Germs and Steel blog on it.     The first major way the horse made an impact on civilization is in transport and communication. The horse’s speed made it a lot easier to travel great distances, and a lot easier to get messages around in larger civilizations, such as China during the dynasty times. This led to an increase in collective learning...

I have decided to write my topic on China. First of all, china in general is just hella dope. It’s one of the most advanced current societies, and has a rich and long culture that I find fascinating. One thing that I’ve always been particularly interested in was how homogenous and monocultural it was, especially for such a large country. I also found the Chinese government fascinating, it being such a powerful empire, as well as extremely advanced. After reading the China chapter I was really interested in how China developed so much differently in the beginning from other places. It seems that it was largely due to the interaction among different subgroups / ethnic groups in China such as competition and sharing of technology that was really facilitated by their environment in a way that was much more substantial than in Europe. I think one thing that added to the eventual unification was that China was so varied, but still had the groups close to each other, so that rather than vary ...

The comparison between China and the other five countries of the six most populous nations was interesting. With so many people in such a large region, there are probably many different cultures and especially languages that are involved in their 'melting pot.' Diamond says that China is the exception with its unified political, linguistic, and cultural environment. Even though this is debatable, Diamond makes several points to support the idea of China being a unified nation. He mentions that China could probably be advancing more quickly than the other nations by unifying their political, linguistically, and cultural environment. There's plenty of evidence that it used to be a very diverse place, but it was just unified much earlier. Then Diamond goes against this point by saying that there are differences, even physical differences, between north and south China. He could have gone further by explaining that their are differences in dialect, food, and other cultural as...

So far in Guns Germs and Steel, It has interested me how much more advanced Eurasia was than Australia. They had different stone tools, and more advanced tools for hunting and gathering food and such. They were also very advanced in general. Another thing that interested me was what the author says about the different continents axes and how those play a roll in the different societies.

Izabella Curtis Mr. Roddy IHSS 14 November 2018 The Domestication of Plants and Animals         I am going to start by talking about the Giants in this blog, I found the Giants very interesting. On chanter one, page 43 Dimond mentions The Giants being extinct in every habitat without exception. He goes on saying humans indeed exterminate the giants. Humans did both, killed the Giants for food, or for survival. I found this very interesting because if you read the whole paragraph Diamond talks about the popular idea is that the ice age killed the giants when it was actually us! In chapter 10 Diamond talks about the preemptive domestication. He explains that if a crop grows slow that means that the crop would be domesticated once but shown to have spread. Specific crops have a higher rate which it spreads. I think this is very interesting because its hard to think about giant sloths or kangaroos running around. It's just very weird to think about, I also woul...

Diamond makes a statement in chapter one, pages 45 to 46, that about 15,000 years ago large mammals such as mammoths, giant sloths, elephants and more, roamed the Americas. He was attempting to find the cause for the mass extinction of these creatures. The first theory he had was that climate change led to their extinction. It’s possible that the end of the ice age happened too suddenly and they were unable to adjust. He then goes on to say that he doesn’t believe this was the case as these animals had gone through many ice ages. He determines that humans were most likely a large contributor to this mass extinction. He believes that these animals were not used to seeing humans, so when people migrated to the Americas, these animals didn’t recognize them as a threat. This made them easy targets and they were quickly exterminated. I thought this was a very interesting section because I had always heard that climate change was the cause for this mass extinction. I l...

Jack Gross So far in Guns, Germs, and Steel there has been one main point that I really liked, I really liked how on page 18 that author talks about how he doesn’t assume that industrialized states are “better” than hunter-gatherer tribes, or that the shift from one to the other represents progress or increased happiness. I really liked this point because it made me think about what I thought was the “Best” type of society and I realized how subjective the word best is, a type of society that is best for some people could be horrible for others, and that our change towards our types of government hasn’t been all good (which is the way that we make it seem) and that other systems are much better at other things but worse at some parts, we have all been striving to create the perfect system that everybody likes, but that is just impossible. It made me think about how so many systems of government sound great in theory but they aren’t as good as they could be because o...

Ren Shimada Mr. Roddy IHSS 15 November 2018 Development of Militaries and Political Parties GGS (IHSS) As we all know Europe’s ability to conquest, large militaries, and political parties were a key factor in their dominance in the world. Neil Diamond talks about many of the factors and possibilities that determined why countries like Spain had the resources (guns, steel, horses, armies) In chapter four Diamond relates food production and agriculture to the ability to raise an army. Since Spain was in the proximity of many other societies and countries, they were able to advance both technologically and in the development of agriculture and food. With developments in food and surpluses in food, they were able to support a bigger population as well as an army. This also seems to be true for the development of political organizations. They also provided a stronger structure which made the country stronger. As far as technology’s role in the conquest of the Incas, Spain had guns and...

The Incas were a small tribe that lived in the highlands of Peru. They were known for their beautiful civilization, and their ugly downfall. The Incas were brilliant in their ingenuity, government and engineering flourished underneath their rule, and the civilization flourished. Government in the Inca nation was far more advanced than many others at the time. There was an organized ruling system, including and Emperor and Nobles. Language was another major part of the Inca civilization, and there was a common widespread language that was spoken. The incas lived in small villages, and even their capitol was smaller than many present day cities. Spanish explores report it being a glorious place. But unfortunately the Spaniards were the ones that brought the Incas to their end, as they took claim of North America. Political unrest within the Incan's society had also caused unstable positions within the cities, making it even easier for the Spaniards to conquer the great nation.

One topic that interested me in Guns, Germs, and Steel was how some societies advanced faster and further than other societies today. For example, in New Guinea, where the native peoples living there had crops that were hard to harvest and were low in nutrition, and their animals could no longer help them in farming either because they couldn’t plow. They then relied on only hunter gathering, which means it used all of their manpower, and there were no people to invent and innovate, so their civilization could not grow and advance as much as maybe the others around them. Jared Diamond believed that the cause of the contrast between New Guinea and maybe Europe was because of where geography left you early on in human civilization. For example, a region called the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East was where civilization thrives because geography left them with the best crops and animals, fertile land, meat, leather, etc. These advantages also provided surpluses, which allowed them to m...

In chapter 10 of Guns, Germs, and steel, Diamond introduces the topic of preemptive domestication, which describes the ease at which crops evolve in independent places around the globe. He further explains how if a crop was identified to be domesticated in more than one place around the world, it means that the spread of that crop was slow. If a crop was only domesticated once but shown to have spread, it means that specific crop has a higher rate at which it spreads. I found this pretty interesting because one can learn a lot just from which crops were domesticated several times in the world versus the ones that were only domesticated once. I wondered what the effect the environment and surrounding environment has on the spread of a crop. In the case of Southwest Asia’s crops, they all preempted the domestication of any of their close relatives in western Eurasia. In addition, we can look specifically to the Fertile Crescent and observe the same pattern of not being domesticated after...

Clark May II Mr. Roddy IHSS November 8 2018 Technology’s Role In The Overthrow Of The Inca’s     There were many different factors in the downfall of the Incas fall but I believe that their technological deficiencies were the main reason for it. The Incas were by no means undeveloped, but they lacked advanced weaponry such as steel swords, guns and horses that the Spaniards had. Not only did the Incas not have these things, they had never seen guns or horses which definitely had an effect on them the first time they saw them. When they first saw them, they panicked as evidenced by the quote on page 70 which said, “The booming of the guns, the blowing of the trumpets, and the rattles on the horses threw the Indians into panicked confusion”. This technology didn’t only put fear in the Incas, it also gave the Spaniards a huge upper hand.     Steel swords are much more powerful and durable than what the Incas and but the Spaniards horses were a huge help to them. H...

Luke Kirchner                                                          Guns, Germs and Steel       So far I have been enjoying the book, and I think that domestication is interesting. The thought of the development of agriculture and domestication seems varied but also incredibly difficult.       First of all, location is a large variable. Certain plants and animals just don't exist in some places in the world, and won't be able to survive. Also, each species has different variables for reproductions and sustainability. During my Seminar, I raised the question that had to do with the linear growth through different civilizations. It basically asked if different people from all around the globe (with no preexisting knowledge on domestication) were brought together with the same resources and environment, woul...

Domestication of wild plants and animals is extremely important to developing the Americas and other societies the way they are today. Because of the ability for people to begin to grow and domesticate their own plants and tribes that had previously been hunter-gatherers became sedentary. Farming arose and a wider variety of crops became available for people to grow and eat. People became more and more self-sustaining all over the world (not all at the same time of course) and as a result, began to grow more advanced societies. It was a little while after this farming and agriculture had become a little more developed, that these plants began to move location and spread further across the Americas. This was good for the plants to be able to spread, but it also had some downsides based on the climate in different parts of the continent. When plants from the far south would travel or be planted up in the north they would sprout at the time they normally would've only to find a differ...

Tyler Holland Mr. Roddy IHSS 14 November 2018 Agricultural Societies In the past, countries that are typically more technologically advanced have a history of coming from a society that was more agriculturally advanced. not only agriculturally, but also the whole scope of what is discussed in Guns, Germs, and Steel including; the domestication of animals, strong irrigation systems, and obviously "geographical luck." some easy ways to tell this are, if we are talking about the domestication of animals, you can see that in most societies the first domesticated animals were goats sheep and chickens; used for mainly food and clothing purposes, allowing societies to settle down and be less worried about food in the Winter. On that topic, we discussed in seminar about how societies in colder climates might have more indoor time to think and create, we can see that in Winter times that people obviously did  have more indoors time if they were able to have a constant food s...

Cro - Magnon Art The Cro - Magnon had many artifacts that were conserved,  but the most famous is the art. The art of these people includes artifacts  like cave paintings. The Cro - Magnon people were European, and many of their cave paintings have been discovered in France and Spain.  The art that the Cro - Magnon people  created was intentional, and they used lines that were already in the stone to make things like necks or legs. It has been speculated that the people who  created the cave art were socrerers who were attempting to conjure spirits of the animals they drew. These cave paintings were initially discovered in the 1800's, and the people who discovered them thought that the artists who  created the cave paintings drew the animals that they saw in everyday life. They realized that in actuallity, they were simply drawing stick figures that had exagerrated features.  There are many famous caves throughout Europe that contain Cro - M...

During the book, Diamond talks a lot about farming and how the early humans ate, how they got places and how they farmed. I am interested in how plants and animals get domesticated anyway so I went into a little bit of research and found out these following facts. Domestication of animals first took place over 12,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. The early humans first began to tame animals in order to get their meat and hides. The hides were used for shelter and clothing. Goats were most likely the first animals to be domesticated, which were followed closely by sheep. 10,000 years ago, chickens were domesticated in now South East Asia. Later on, people began domesticating larger animals, such as horses and ox, for the primary use of plowing and transportation. Because herbivores that graze are easy to tame considering they don't need humans to kill their food for them and their food isn't a special item. Grass was easy to obtain and get, so oxen, horses, and cows, were easy to t...

Adrian Perez Mr. Roddy IHSS 13 November 18 Farm Power Now what I mean by farm power is not necessarily about the farms, It also incorporates many different factors like agriculture, agriculture societies, military advantages and how that in turn affected different societies and how they used it. For one military advantages only arise because that society is descended from agricultural society. The one chapter that particularly talks about what I'm saying is Farm Power. In it they talked about somethings I would like to address. One of them is they way they settlement of the places and agriculture. So they position that they settle is totally random and based on guess. There are certain calculations that go into the where is the best parts for farming. In the different continents there are sweetsops, usually more toward the center. Since they didn't really have the technology to know that, so it was more difficult to find them.(Tec...

John Mazziotti Nov 14th, 2018 IHSS Mr. Roddy IHSS Blog - What Interests You in GGS? Technology In my opinion, the most interesting topic inside of the book is technology. Technology gives civilizations power and a general advancement over other societies. A good example of this could be easily found in “Yali’s Question”. He talks about how European civilizations evolved into modern technology, and are more advanced than civilizations closer towards the equator. He focuses on the country New Guinea, which succeeds in everyday life without any of the modern amenities that Europe has. An important thing that Diamond leaves out, is how these technologies are discovered and eventually modernized. Overall, he does a great job explaining how these technologies impact a civilization, and how they have caused these civilizations to be more predominant. Something that I feel like Yali’s Question left out, was how neighboring civilizations with modern technology, can positively influenc...

Brooks Farish IHSS Blog - QWERTY When reading Guns Germs and Steel I stumbled upon page 423 talking about QWERTY. QWERTY is referring to the type of keyboard that is most common around the world and is the one probably right in front of you. This topic was so interesting and very relevant in my life so that's why I decided to do some research into it. During around 1840-1890 many people were attempting to create the best keyboard along with a typewriter. This lead to many different types of keyboard designs coming about. One of them being QWERTY designed by Christopher Sholes. You must keep in mind that this is in a time where people were using typewriters. Because of this fact, some say QWERTY came about to space out common letters and slow writers down so they would jam the typewriters. Later down the road Remington, the gun company got into the typewriter business and started producing models with QWERTY. It was a huge success! Because of this success, all other typewriter co...

So far in the book, what has interested me was the evolution of humans. It was brought up in chapter one, on page 36. I find this really interesting because that's how we are the way we are right now. All of us belong to the same species, and started from the same place. Scientists think that was some place in Africa. The word humans came from the scientific term genus homo. The first breed of human evolved 200,000 years ago. As you've probably heard before, we evolved from apes. The anatomy is very similar, but they technically we're not money then man. Charles Darwin's theory was how they come from the same origin. Primates. The great apes live in rainforests, but scientists think when some lived in the savannah, evolution started. The apes that lived in the savannah started walking on 2 legs, and had a more developed brain. They grew bigger causing them to get smarter. For exmple, they started making their own tools. This took place around 5 million years ago. The h...

Justin Patera Mr. Roddy IHSS November 14th, 2018 The Effects of Disease on Past Societies Throughout the book, we see how diseases, such as the black plague, play roles in the development of our societies from around the world. Although this is not Diamonds main topic within the book it certainly plays a large role in the overall development of independent societies especially as those societies began to collide and interact with each other. A prime example of a disease’s role in history is that of the bubonic plagues. It not only killed close to 80% of those infected but also wiped out close to 20 million people across Europe, this was roughly ⅔ of their population at the time. This now only led to a time of depression and morning, but in turn, slowed down urbanization, industrialization and economic growth. (Whittaker) In addition to this, medicine, death, and disease have seemed to fascinate, us as humans, for a very long time. With the first proof of this being from ...

Perjhing Mardani 11/14/18 IHSS Guns, Germs, And Steel Research             Were sweet potato, taro, bananas, yams, sugarcane and edible grass stems ancestors of Southeast Asia or New Guinea? The misconception is that all of these foods were from Southeast Asian ancestors. Although, this is incorrect. Most of these foods are New Guinean species. Starch grains, plant crystals, and pollen were found in Kuk Swamp, a mountain valley in central New Guinea. The discovery was that this was evidence for planting and domestication for taro and banana. The evidence proving this theory is starch grains found on the edges of stone tools which were used by New Guineans. As for the bananas, banana microcrystals were found in grassland sediments and are a theory for deliberate planting. Research studies show that only until 3,500 years ago had domesticated plants from Southeast Asia entered New Guinea. Dr. Neumann, writing in scienc...

Throughout the book, it talks a lot about how human history unfolded differently in different places and why that happened. For example, why did Europe advance at such a faster rate than a place such as Africa? After doing a bit of research, I have reached a conclusion that I think answers the question in part. The first thing which I think causes societies to not advance as quickly is a countries climate, which leads to a necessity for change, and also brings a societies location into question. In the prologue, it talks a little bit about how climate affects how a society develops, but I think he could have elaborated upon it. Diamond talked about how it colder places like Scandinavia were forced to quickly advance just to survive and keep themselves warm, while people in warmer climates didn't have to worry about freezing to death so they didn't develop as quickly. However, this still doesn't answer how other groups of people living in cold climates, such as the Inuit pe...