How The West Won By Rodney Stark Chapter Summary

The third part of the book, How the West Won, by Rodney Stark, continues to discuss the ways that the middle ages are different from the way we understand them. They were a time of great innovation and change. So much of culture was formed during these times. Many historians and history teachers just brush over these stories and facts, if not completely ignore them. Stark attempts to show how western culture was developed during times of great change. I know before I read chapter seven I had never heard about how the climate changed during medieval times. I had heard about the ice age and other dramatic times like that, but I had never heard anything about climate, and how it has affected culture, in more recent history. I had learned about …show more content…
The Europeans were on explorations and found innovation. Then they brought it back to Europe, but they were not ahead of everyone else until very modern history. Stark does admit that trade was much more abundant in the east, but the goods in Europe were much more refined and advanced. Stark argues that Europe has always been ahead of all other cultures when it came to industry but the industrial revolution just pushed them further ahead where no one could argue otherwise. Stark says that the military is a great example of how advanced Europe was. No one else had an army or a navy with so much technology and organization. Their advances in the military helped Europe stay ahead in almost every respect. The Age of Exploration is one of the most famous times in all of history. Even in the way that we understand history, we can see the significance. There was completely new land discovered and the world grew in a way no one had expected. We might understand the implications that these discoveries had, but the discoverers did not. Almost all of the explorers that were looking for the West Indies stubbornly believed that America was Asia even though the evidence proved otherwise. It is interesting to note that some of the greatest discoveries were not comprehended at the