It’s hard to imagine Italy as anything other than the heart of the Latin world, the origin point of Roman civilization, which has so greatly influenced the society we live in today. However, it was not always this way. Stretching from the Po Valley to the Tiber River, the Etruscan civilization thrived for centuries before […]
Denmark and Sweden have a weird relationship between them. The two have fought at least 15 wars between them, and yet today they couldn’t be any closer to each-other. Today if you want to go between them it takes less than an hour to cross the strait between the Danish capital Copenhagen and the Swedish […]
By the early 8th century the Maya civilization was at its zenith. Building and maintaining cities of such scale that future explorers hypothesized that they must have been built by lost tribes of Israel or the Phoenicians. But only 150 years later the flourishing Classic Maya civilization had crumbled, undergoing one of the most devastating […]
As anyone who knows anything about Britain knows, the United Kingdom uses a currency known as the Great British Pound. Also, look at that empire they once used to control. Impressive, right? Well, what about some of their former colonies? Do they use pounds? Well, Egypt does, but what about the others? Well, obviously America […]
Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History and today we’re going to return to medieval times. Mr. Green? Mr. Green? Finally, we get to watch jousting and eat with our hands and root for the Blue Knight. Yeah, No, Me from the Past, for starters, Medieval Times doesn’t closely reflect Europe in […]
In our previous video we discussed the rise of the Third Dynasty of Ur and its collapse at the hands of Amorite invaders from the west. The subsequent period of political fragmentation was one of regional conflict – with the Amorite Shamshi-Adad and his dynasty ruling in the north, while the Eshnunna dominated central Mesopotamia […]
Two thousand years ago, ancient civilisations such as the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Dynasty in the East had risen to prominence. In the modern Middle East, the Parthian Empire ruled ancient Persia and the surrounding regions from their main capital at Ctesiphon. These cultures are known to us as being almost […]
Hi, I’m John Green, and this is Crash Course World History. Let’s begin today with a question. Why am I alive? Also, why don’t I have any eyes? Ah, That’s better. The way we answer that question ends up organizing all kinds of other thoughts, like what we should value, and how we should behave, […]
NARRATOR: Humans civilizations have been wonderfully diverse with an amazing variety of unique customs, religious practices, social structures and technologies. These differences are fascinating, but Big History teaches us to look at the past differently, to seek out commonalities and identify patterns that unite seemingly unrelated phenomena. Often this produces insights that are even more […]