Part Two of the text was incredibly interesting in the way it took segments of time and compared and contrasted civilizations within that time. Doing it this way helped me to see the history as the progression of human kind around the world, and not just the progression of one group of people. In this way, you can evaluate a civilizations progress compared to itself and its past history in the time it existed, and not compare it to a group of people that have existed in their culture for longer, and therefore seem to have accomplished and progressed more.
Chinese history always seems so long and dense, I have never really taken the time to try and parse it out and understand it, but breaking it up into the various causes and effects of smaller time periods helped immensely. The same with Indian history, but even more so for the history of the Americas. Knowing a tiny bit about the Incas and the Mayans, I was surprised to learn about the peoples that lived around them and their societies, gods, and economies. Evaluating the differences in how cultures develop based on what kind of large animals they have available to domesticate was interesting and seems to make a huge difference in civilization development.
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