Great Books of the Western World

Munck, Ronaldo (2007) Globalization and Contestation: The New Great Counter-movement, London: Routledge, pg 75-93. For this week’s reading I read Chapter 5 “Transnational political fora: actors, issues, and prospects,” from Ronaldo Munck’s book Globalization and Contestation: The New Great Counter-movement. This chapter focused on the idea of transnationalism, along with many different movements, specifically human rights, also the issue of “…whether the humanist universalism implicit in all…

Rachel Carson had many great reasons for writing the book Silent Spring. The main theme of the book was to prove the effects of the careless spraying and dusting of people, crops, fields, and forests with harmful chemicals in the mid 1900s. This book was published in 1962, so a lot of the “new” advancements and findings are outdated as of 2015, however this book marks the important history of what happened when humans interfered with nature by using chemicals, and how that affected the…

you want.” In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book The Russian Revolution she traces three broad themes through the course of the revolution that existed before 1917 and would continue until about the time of 1934. She examines the class struggle that was an important part of the revolution as well as the leadership that lead the Russian citizens through these tumuloous decades and she also examines the modernization that Russia experienced. Fitzpatrick breaks her book down in a chronological order in…

History has dubbed Alexander III of Macedonia, or more commonly known as Alexander the Great, the most successful military genius and commander in ancient history and a legend in his own time. The son of King Phillip II of Macedonia and Epirus princess Olympias, Alexander is forever remembered as the legendary hero who was responsible for campaigning and successfully conquering most of the known world, never once losing a battle, before his death in Babylon from a mysterious illness at the young…

Comparing All Quiet on the Western Front to Actualities in World War One The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the twenty-eighth of June, 1914, in Bosnia sparked the Great War. Later known as World War One, it was fought between the Allied Powers, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, and the Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungry, Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. Many novels and movies have been made featuring this monstrosity. One such novel is the classic All Quiet on the…

Just how significant has technology been throughout the history of western society? I would argue that technology has had a highly significant role in the evolution of western society. There is no doubt that western society as we know it would hardly resemble itself without the many technological advances it went through. Most of these advances made life much easier on the people of the west and the world. That’s not to say that there were no downsides to any of these technological advances.…

Thomas G. Andrews book, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, merges labor and environmental history in an breakdown of the half century leading up to the most fierce and violent labor unrest of the post civil war era, which is the Colorado coal-miner strike of 1913-1914, the Ludlow battle/massacre and Ten Day Coalfield War. Thomas Andrews argues in his book that these incidents cannot be seen in isolation or as separate events, but as the climax of half a century of struggle within…

Since the professionalization of world history the lens that historians would look through was supremely Eurocentric. The other parts of the world had their accomplishments and contributed to the world as a whole, but Europe was usually the protagonist in the stories told. More recently world historians have been viewing the world through what Ross Dunn describes as the “Different Cultures Model,” which looks at the past from the opposite perspective. The modern historians Lynda Shaffer, Xinru…

because the government is outraged by another country. Even though, the country claims they are fighting for their fatherland. It is really just a political game in which they care nothing about. They also believe there is fame to be claimed for history books. On scouting day, Paul looses his sense of direction and gets lost in the trenches therefore, ending up on the enemy line. He runs trench to trench during the night until he stumbles upon Kat and Albert. He feels as though his comrades are…

would the world be like if we were never provided with the water we need to survive? What would happen if we could never tell time using calendars or read stories written in the bound books? Luckily, we don't need to worry because, thanks to the Romans, we are fortunate not to have these situations today. Romans had the greatest impact on the world due to their knowledge in the fields of engineering, math, and literature. Not only that but the Romans’ culture very much influenced the western…