The Zephos World Safari Thread

[JERK DISEASE]

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Welcome to the Zephos World Safari thread, wherein you gonna learn something. The focus of course is going to be on world affairs mixed with history. Though a mix of the two is what I'm finding ideal.

Have a part of the world you've always known about? But know nothing about? There will be pointers here.

Have a historical event you only vaguely understand? Well we'll have your back on that shit.

In the form of KICKASS LINKS TO GREAT DOCUMENTARIES.

Also basic posting discussions and Q&A. As with everything involving me, debate is encouraged.

Let's get this show on the road with some cool documentaries.

1. THE DEATH OF YUGOSLAVIA

Question. What the fuck was all that nonsense in the Balkans in the 90's?
Well enlighten yourself with this.

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This comes in four parts. With multiple segments within.
The main chapters are…

1. "Enter Nationalism"
2. "The Road to War"
3. "Wars of Independence"
4. "The Gates of Hell"
5. "A Safe Area"
6. "Pax Americana"

All are up on youtube for viewing, I'll start you off with the above.
What's great about this is that you get the words not from a bias perspective or a pointlessly American-centric view like some other Yugoslav War doc's I've seen. You get words straight from the presidents of the various republic's mouths. That's right! You get Milosevic's own words! And even that guy who was pretending to be a new age healer for years. The only flaw is it doesn't cover the Kosovo war. Otherwise. Superb. And the only good one I've found among a sea of heavy bias (you have to see the revisionist bullshit some Serb and far western-leftist dudes have released ont he subject).

2. Places That Don't Exist

I'm gonna cut to the chase here and get to my favorite guy in modern world affairs. Simon motherfucking Reeve.
This guy creates amazingly informative, evocative, beautiful, funny, distressing, and ultimately very human travelouges to all sorts of places around the world on behalf of the BBC.
These are truly great things, and he purposely goes to places most people know little about.
I picked as my example for one of his series, Places That Don't Exist. Which has Simon traveling to unofficial countries, seseccionist states.
Gets arrested by the Russian Army, becomes the ambassador of Kenya to Somalia, helps clean up land mines, and visits opposite sides of the same exact active battlefield.

His credibility factor? Well he sort of predicted Osama Bin Laden's rise into infamy before 9-11!

While the Taiwan episode is unavailable, the rest are up on the ol' Youtube.

Have at em'.

Transnitria/Transdniester (in Moldova)
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South Ossetia (in Georgia)
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Nagorno-Kharbarakh (in Azerbaijan/Armenia)
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Somaliland (in Somalia)
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If you like these, I HEAVILY reccomend Simon Reeve's other mini-series.
-Meet the Stans
-Tropic of Cancer
-Tropic of Capricorn
-Equator
-Explore! (even I haven't seen this one so good luck finding it)

This dude makes amazing shit and I'm looking forward to what he does next almost as much as what Oda does.

3. China, then and now

This will be in two parts for two different documentaries.
One that follows China from the 1900's when it was still a monarchy under the Qing dynasty, all the way through civil war, then their rocky wacky road through communism, to it's modern economic reforms toward capitalism and unfortunate lack of civil and political reforms.

This is one of the best historical documentaries I've seen as an aspiring History teacher, and it was in part responsible for the amazing display of debate now known infamously around here as the "China Thread".

This is as good as it gets.

China: A Century in Revolution
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4000168643562229901#

This is also in several parts and I've only given you the first segment of the first part.

Here's the list of all chapters.

Part One: China in Revolution 1911–1949 (1989)
Part Two: The Mao Years 1949–1976 (1994)
Part Three: Born Under the Red Flag 1976–1997 (1997)

It's an amazing thing to watch gritty footage of near feudal looking imperial China to watching young Chinese driving around listening to Cyndi Lauper in less then 100 years.
–--
After you've done that, see where China is at now, not through the longscope of history or figures and statistics. Bu through following a number of modern Chinese people in the 00's.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/

[SuperJew]

If you can throw something about Africa in the near future, I'd be grateful.

[Herackles]

very enlightening. I like the picture at the start of the thread

[JERK DISEASE]

@SuperJew:

If you can throw something about Africa in the near future, I'd be grateful.

I'll see if I can find some download links for Simon Reeve's three around the world series (Equator, Capricorn, and Cancer) later.

He goes to Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Gabon, DROC, Uganda, Kenya, Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt in them.

And one of the Places That Don't Exist parts is in Africa, the Somaliland one.

But I'll definitely keep my eyes peeled for some other stuff. I'd like to find a good doc on Zaire/DROC.

[Airflow]

Places That Don't Exist is brilliant, I highly recommend it. Love the one where he's looking at a Russian weapons plant and he just casually mentions that if they were caught 15 years ago they would have been shot as Western Spies. Then he promptly gets caught.

Got anything on 20th century South America? (Brazil, Bolivia, Peru specifically)

[Silverblade]

Do you feed on the respect you receive, Zephos?

Because this is a-mazing stuff.

Yugosalvia series are indeed presented quite interesting. I just begun watching it - and surprisingly it doesn't become a one point of view story.
Have got to continue.

But Reeves is probably who surprised me the most.
Although, his videos suffer a little from denial of access and the like.
Also, is that Abkhazia story made before 2008 little war? Because it looks too much out dated.

@Airflow:

Got anything on 20th century South America? (Brazil, Bolivia, Peru specifically)

I second that. Would seriously want to take a look at the land of cocaine.

[Mugiwara_no_Ice]

A thread that is worth every letter, nice!

I once watched a Simon Reeve doc on tv about a land next to tchechenia - muslim ethnic cleansing is going on there as we speak and we never hear about it in any news whatsoever. Very good docs I'll be watching them when I have more time.

Waiting for the debates and discussions, even though I'm afraid this won't happen seeing how the average intelligence of the forum has been soooo low lately.

[tigerlilly]

Thumbs up on this, I admit that there are big gaps in my knowledge about many countries in eastern europe that I need to fill up.

I have solid knowledge when it comes to the Middle East, Iran, Sudan and even a bit of recent chinese history.
But stuff like Transnitria, Nagorno-Kharbarakh? Never heard of them before..Definitely gonna watch them later today.
About Yugoslavia, I always just knew the general gist of it, with Milosevic going apeshit on the whole region, thanks to stuff I gathered here and there. But the exact happenings and reasons still remained a grey blob in my head. I got more of an overview now, so thanks for the vid.

[JERK DISEASE]

@Silverblade:

But Reeves is probably who surprised me the most.
Although, his videos suffer a little from denial of access and the like.
Also, is that Abkhazia story made before 2008 little war? Because it looks too much out dated.

Yeah it was. And it's Sotuh Ossetia, he didn't get access to Abkhazia (like you kind of mentioned), in his Meet the Stans he also didn't get allowed into Turkmenistan either which sucks.

[Silverblade]

@JERK:

Yeah it was. And it's Sotuh Ossetia, he didn't get access to Abkhazia (like you kind of mentioned), in his Meet the Stans he also didn't get allowed into Turkmenistan either which sucks.

Yeah, I messed up with names.
Well, its definately was partly due to him being a westerner entering from georgian border. Well, duh, prejudice.

I have watched some really interesting documentaries on the region and war, but they were in russian. Now I'm trying to find some of them in english.

And Turkmenistan - I assume he was there at the time of "Great Leader" Niyazov, who had almost a cult of his own, and ruled the country with quite the power. Today it is much easier to visit.

Oh, and about the Somaliland one. I didn't get to watch it yet, but does it cover the northern part of Somali or is it a different part of the so-called-country?

[JERK DISEASE]

It's the part of Somalia proper (are you thinking of Ogaden in Ethiopia?), that was a UK colony, as the rest was Italian. It has it's own government now and is very different then the anarchy rampant rest of the nation.

[Silverblade]

No, that's exactly the part I had in mind.
Recently have seen a short reportage on Kahin, its current leader.
But Reeves presents a wider picture, right?

[JERK DISEASE]

Yeah, he starts in Mogadishu and then goes there to show the contrast in infrastructure.

[Cyan D. Funk]

Got anything on organized crime in Italy or pre-communist Russia?

[Alen]

This looks like a great thread.

[JERK DISEASE]

I may have finally found an honest to goodness extensive and excellent World War 1 doc, stay tuned.

[SuperJew]

Also, I'd highly recommending Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. You'll probably have to watch it in subtitles and is in good, old-fashioned black and white, but I'll be damned if that doesn't capture post WW2 urban warfare.

[Corrado]

I would really like to see something on Lenin regarding his pervading influence in the modern world. He is basically deified by modern British communism, at least as far as the traditional trade unions and old school socialists go, and I would really like to get to the root of that. And it's not just Lenin either, but I've even come across people who exalt Mao, which blows my mind. I mean, for example, there is a cafe/eatery in a trendy part of the city I live where there are giant posters of Mao on display, art deco style, and scenes of bucolic working life in the PRC. I also remember reading an article how the Empire State Building was lit up in the colours of communist China's 60th anniversary.

My student-wage library gleaned from Amazon's budget used bookstore regarding Soviet history from the mid-1800s to the collapse of the Union number about 45 books, and there is a profound dichotomy throughout re the view of Lenin held by the general Russian population who lived under the communist hammer and those in the West who viewed the land beyond the Iron Curtain as a worker's paradise. Over here it's "Stalin perverted Lenin and Marx' vision" whereas the progression to Stalinism is seen almost as an inevitability in the old Soviet states.

One of my university buddies, a Turko-Slav from Kazakhistan, told me about his family history on his maternal side, about how, following the Bolshevik Revolution, democrats were crushed, how Moscow was reduced to 1/3rd of the population as people fled to the countryside, how the workers in the Paradise reduced crop production keeping enough so that they could feed their families alone, how the industrial infrastructure was nearly decimated, how entire classes of people were refused the right to buy food on pain of death or the gulag's precursor.

And then the bloated police state that followed under Stalin, arresting as many as they could for labour (otherwise the state would collapse, productivity was almost rock bottom), they came for his granddad, who slipped out the back door, ending up in provincial Kazakhstan, where he didn't even changed his name, lived there under his real identity and real papers his entire life and was never accosted by the the Blue Caps again.

Without a doubt I would urge anyone to read The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you can pick it up for pennies. He is a simply superb author who writes with complete humanity and conviction, relating his own arrest and time in the gulags as well as his zek comrades, capturing the zeitgeist with razor sharp clarity. A real odyssey if there ever was one.

[Corrado]

@Cyan:

Got anything on organized crime in Italy or pre-communist Russia?

If I can find the time (graduation coming soon, but still a lot of work to be done) I can give you an awesome breakdown of the evolution of the Russian mob's activities pre and post Revolution.

[Mugiwara_no_Ice]

So yesterday was the 50th birthday of the first elections in Congo. Patrice Lumumba won that election, unfortunately he got killed 8 months later.
How would Congo be right now if he had succeeded? We'll never know,…

[Shandian]

I have to say, this is a rather decent thread, though autoplay youtube videos are hell on forums.

Human behavior can be such an enigma sometimes, Mao's radical ideas what he though could benefit the country resulted millions of dying at starvation and caused untold amount of human suffering and economic disaster that lasted for decade.

Yet Mao was revered amongst the chinese, being almost a god-like figure, even today he is still highly regarded on China. Personal cult is great way to unify people and it grants total power over the country but it requires heavy amount of propaganda to make masses believe that leader is benefical.

Splintering nations is also quite strange phenomenom, 'Us and Them' philosophy taken to extreme backed by grudges of past, pushed to the level where people dont want to be in same country with…them anymore. Quest for liberty that shatters entire nations to tiny fragment nations that are irrelevant at global econmic and political matters, well they get their own country but they wont have any real future with that either.

[JERK DISEASE]

@Shandian:

I have to say, this is a rather decent thread, though autoplay youtube videos are hell on forums.

Much like your posting

@Corrado:

I would really like to see something on Lenin regarding his pervading influence in the modern world. He is basically deified by modern British communism, at least as far as the traditional trade unions and old school socialists go, and I would really like to get to the root of that. And it's not just Lenin either, but I've even come across people who exalt Mao, which blows my mind. I mean, for example, there is a cafe/eatery in a trendy part of the city I live where there are giant posters of Mao on display, art deco style, and scenes of bucolic working life in the PRC. I also remember reading an article how the Empire State Building was lit up in the colours of communist China's 60th anniversary.

Blows my mind too.
Lenin kind of gets this pass where people blame Stalin for everything bad about the early Soviet Union and talk Lenin up as the guy who made it work while he was alive. But Lenin did plenty of the same bad stuff. The Red Army was formed for instance largely by peasants being forced at gunpoint to conscript.

Mao thankfully doesn't tend to get this treatment usually, as he was a man who eventually let his taste for power and oppertunism launch the craziness of the Cultural Revolution. He was an idealist whose only talents lay in military leadership and charisma. He was not a statesman, not a pragmaticist, and that's why retarded disasters like the Great Leap Forward got going and took years to stop.

The phenomena of trendy far-left people in the west to idealize them is just that. Silly romanticism, irresponsible intellectually bankrupt idealism, Mao's own flaws. People who will justify pretty much anything with communist prose. "Oh it's for the people so it was alright to slaughter and deport that minority" etc.

I can't stand those people, and as a Social Democrat I'm every bit as bothered by them as I am of the wacky tea party types.

My student-wage library gleaned from Amazon's budget used bookstore regarding Soviet history from the mid-1800s to the collapse of the Union number about 45 books, and there is a profound dichotomy throughout re the view of Lenin held by the general Russian population who lived under the communist hammer and those in the West who viewed the land beyond the Iron Curtain as a worker's paradise. Over here it's "Stalin perverted Lenin and Marx' vision" whereas the progression to Stalinism is seen almost as an inevitability in the old Soviet states.

Stalin is somewhat idealized in Russia today. And in so much as he lead the country to victory against the Nazis I understand that, but otherwise heeyooo.

One of my university buddies, a Turko-Slav from Kazakhistan, told me about his family history on his maternal side, about how, following the Bolshevik Revolution, democrats were crushed, how Moscow was reduced to 1/3rd of the population as people fled to the countryside, how the workers in the Paradise reduced crop production keeping enough so that they could feed their families alone, how the industrial infrastructure was nearly decimated, how entire classes of people were refused the right to buy food on pain of death or the gulag's precursor.

B B B BUT ITS FOR THE GOOD OF THE PROLETERIAT AND THE WEST IS WAY WORSE EVEN NOW!!!!

[Flux]

You're very knowledgable, aren't you?
I liked your previous thread on the differences in quality of living.

[JERK DISEASE]

@Mugiwara:

So yesterday was the 50th birthday of the first elections in Congo. Patrice Lumumba won that election, unfortunately he got killed 8 months later.
How would Congo be right now if he had succeeded? We'll never know,…

Hard to say. If Europe had kept itself completely out I bet military coups would still have happened.
The Katanga wars would still have been an issue. And Mobutu and his oppertunistic power grab weren't created by the West after all, just helped along.

The Great Lakes crisis would probably still have happened in the 90's and made things bad for them regardless of how they handled themselves in the previous 30 years.

You really never know with Africa.

EDIT: There's this documentary about Mobutu and by extension Zaire/DROC, I haven't seen it nor do I think it's available online but it is out there in existence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu,_King_of_Zaire

[m00n]

I'm half way through the Yugoslavia documentary now but, I have to go to bed now

I'll post again once I'm through. So far it's interesting as all the other documentaries I have seen on this topic, faced more on individual fates rather then drawing the whole picture.

[JERK DISEASE]

The documentary makes me really wish Ratko Mladic was caught or confirmed dead.
But Franjo Tudjman should have stood trial too. The Croats got off too easily considering they were involved in some shit just as bad as the Serbs.

[felton]

nice thread. will find time to watch all of this

[m00n]

Yeah Tudjman got higher judged by a higher law of some sort..
I saw all the Reese trips to breakaway states but I can't find his world tours. Do you have a link for them? Can be anything, download too.

[JERK DISEASE]

@m00n:

Yeah Tudjman got higher judged by a higher law of some sort..
I saw all the Reese trips to breakaway states but I can't find his world tours. Do you have a link for them? Can be anything, download too.

You mean the Explore series? Nah, I haven't seen them either, and have desperatly looked to no avail.

I may actually shoot an e-mail to Reeve or his people and ask if they'll put them on dvd like they have with Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. I'd buy that shit straight up.

Or do you mean the three around the world ones? Because I could get you those.

[JERK DISEASE]

Y'know, the more I delve into history the more goddamn shameful it is how clueless people are about Africa. I don't mean Carthage, Egypt, or the Arab/Moorish states. Man I mean black Africa, sub-sahara.
And not just everyday people, but even actual historians often don't know shit about it.

So for this purpose here you guys go.

Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Nubia
tp6P_hBnF1s

Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Ethiopia
vQfhWnPeG8g

Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Benin
xBxlnh4XWyU

May have more later.

[m00n]

The three around the world ones.

[JERK DISEASE]

@m00n:

The three around the world ones.

I can get you those.
I'll post them here in a few days time, I'll be really busy until late Saturday.

[Bucephalus]

Excuse the blatant dicksucking, but this is an excellent thread; it may just be the best this year.

Assuming it'll be updated, I'll be frequenting this thread.

Also, very unrelated, but someone really needs to make a thread about the BP oil spill. I would, but I've got finals to tend to. Unless it's been mentioned in that barren hellhole known as the "random news articles" thread.

[ChesCa]

For what it's worth, I think this thread can only be a good thing.
When I was writing, I often used the History channel and (sometimes) NPR for inspiration.
This could increase the experience ten fold.
Thank you, Zephos.

[Herodadotus]

Well, this takes all I learned in ap world history and puts it in the corner.

This is a thread worth bookmarking!

[masterMD112]

The lost kingdom of Nubia, I shouldn't of click on that or even be on here, got an exam tomorrow. Thanks for the share, I will have to come back at a later time to finish it off. Hopefully see more and more videos later in this thread.

[JERK DISEASE]

@Herodadotus:

Well, this takes all I learned in ap world history and puts it in the corner.

This is a thread worth bookmarking!

It's amazing how quickly (responsible, as in no crack bias sites) independent research demolishes what we get in most american schools. It's also sad.

@masterMD112:

The lost kingdom of Nubia, I shouldn't of click on that or even be on here, got an exam tomorrow. Thanks for the share, I will have to come back at a later time to finish it off. Hopefully see more and more videos later in this thread.

That's the idea, everyone who likes Simon Reeve should stay tuned for the posting of download links to the three around the world series.
Cancer in particular is amazing.

[ChesCa]

I just finished watching Simon Reeve on two of your vids (Trans-Dniester and Nagorno Karabakh).
(hidden for long-windedness)
[hide]I can see why you like him. From what I glimpsed from this thread, I was dreading something like 'look at how tragic everything is' (that's how I tend to view history/world affairs by default), but instead we get a guy who's like my favorite history teachers–they explore other cultures with no other agenda than to show us how neat the world actually is outside our perception of 'Third World=Not Interesting.' (I'm using Third World in the liberal sense here).
To be honest, I don't retain information very well, so I'll forget a lot of stuff that was said, but I don't think I'll forget the schools on the railway tracks (which I found both sad and cool, strange enough), the guy assembling the rifle blindfolded, the Independence Day (I think) celebrations of the former vid, the consequences of that unsecured border near Ukraine, the woman going through the minefield or whole yogurt thing.[/hide]
Inquiries:
[hide]As far as U.S. schools go, how bad are they? I say this because while I didn't learn stuff like that, it wasn't so much because of a lack of interest as much as there was no room for such topics (I've forgotten more about the Revolutionary War and its politics, the Civil War and its politics, the French Revolution and how much of a clusterfuck it was and European colonialism than I care to admit).
Also, as far as history videos go, how would you rate 'World at War?' When my WWII class watched them in my college days, all the students were disappointed when we couldn't get to the end.[/hide]

[JERK DISEASE]

Eh….World War 2 is so overfocused on from everything from movies to games that I don't really bother watching docs for it. So I'm no source for that.

About US Schools, I'm from a state with some of the best education (CT) but even there it was pretty meh.
We covered US history decently, having no more then like 3 fucking years of it in high school alone.
(though it always stopped dead after WW2, which is straight retarded)

But our World History is fucking awful.
Aside from (lol) some stuff in elementary school we had only one year of it in high school. One! And that pretty much only focused on Europe after we reached Rome.
Nothing about Arabia, China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Pre-Colombian America...hell we didn't even really talk about Eastern Europe.

That's alot to expect from one class....but well maybe we shouldn't have one class??
Our US history got redundant even, ugh.

Basically all I know is self-taught.

Oh but I had a cool Foreign Policy class, even though it was an optional higher level thingie. We were Nigeria. And I got in trouble for typing back to the Thailand representatives who were making fun of us on the message board that their nation has a child prostitution epidemic.

[JERK DISEASE]

The irony though is I actually aspire to be a high school teacher (as of a month or two ago after several years of time when I should have known it).
I'm not sure how I'll square against that curriculum.

[ChesCa]

@JERK:

The irony though is I actually aspire to be a high school teacher (as of a month or two ago after several years of time when I should have known it).
I'm not sure how I'll square against that curriculum.

Good luck to you before and after you get your teaching license (my dad's a teacher and…he's got stories to tell).
My World History class was also one year, so we didn't get too much either (aside from the French Revolution, which was the biggest topic). We did get to hear about the opium wars, the ruckus in India where those soldiers found out they were 'eating' pork (we were learning about gandhi), and about the attitude towards black people during the slave trade (I remember this one advertisement concerning soap and teaching the 'negro' to wash himself).

[HaxeyeMihawk]

@JERK:

Eh….World War 2 is so overfocused on from everything from movies to games that I don't really bother watching docs for it. So I'm no source for that.

About US Schools, I'm from a state with some of the best education (CT) but even there it was pretty meh.
We covered US history decently, having no more then like 3 fucking years of it in high school alone.
(though it always stopped dead after WW2, which is straight retarded)

But our World History is fucking awful.
Aside from (lol) some stuff in elementary school we had only one year of it in high school. One! And that pretty much only focused on Europe after we reached Rome.
Nothing about Arabia, China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Pre-Colombian America...hell we didn't even really talk about Eastern Europe.

That's alot to expect from one class....but well maybe we shouldn't have one class??
Our US history got redundant even, ugh.

Basically all I know is self-taught.

Oh but I had a cool Foreign Policy class, even though it was an optional higher level thingie. We were Nigeria. And I got in trouble for typing back to the Thailand representatives who were making fun of us on the message board that their nation has a child prostitution epidemic.

You didn't have a non western civ class in high school (you did one hell of a self teaching job)? Mine covered India, China, Africa with a strong focus on South African apartheid, Australia and aboriginal culture etc, it was a great class which led into my western civ course, I just wish I'd had it later in high school, I'd recall a lot more of it.

[JERK DISEASE]

I recall none. I went to public school btw, if that helps at all.

And yeah, Cuddles, my parents are both teachers. I grew up hearing those stories at every dinner table.

[HaxeyeMihawk]

@JERK:

I recall none. I went to public school btw, if that helps at all.

And yeah, Cuddles, my parents are both teachers. I grew up hearing those stories at every dinner table.

Yeah I went to public too (Illinois but not Chicago schools) but I was lucky in that we had a college prep program which required a Speech/debate class, non western and western civ, american history, etc. The regular high school curriculum was godawful busy work and our ACT average was an abyssmal 16.

[JERK DISEASE]

Alright, I made a huge post with all the Simon Reeve links to Capricorn, Equator, and Cancer. But for whatever reason, now that I'm home in Connecticut, one of the many IP bans is still in effect (the one from Savannah got taken away).

So I was using a proxy begrudgingly, and after I finished the post and hit "post" the damn thing had logged me out or something and the post was completely lost.

I'm trying to get the IP gone so I can make big posts again without them being possibly destroyed.

ASAP I'll get those three amazing shits to yall.

[ChesCa]

I have the same problems with being logged out (whenever I make I big post that takes too long, it times out or something).
You probably already figured this out, but whenever I make big posts, I always copy everything I wrote before submitting, so whenever it doesn't work, I can just log in and paste it.
TBH, I thought everyone had this problem, but maybe it's only certain computers.

[Insider2000]

This is like Dora the Explorer…..only NOT shit!

[fedcom]

Wow…great thread.
I'm about a 1/4 through the Yugoslavia series..its quite informative so far.

[Akumu]

@JERK:

About US Schools, I'm from a state with some of the best education (CT) but even there it was pretty meh.
We covered US history decently, having no more then like 3 fucking years of it in high school alone.
(though it always stopped dead after WW2, which is straight retarded)

What kinda US History did you take? Down here in Texas our APUSH class made it all the way to current times. Literally the last thing we talked about was the election of Obama and what he has to do to be re-elected.

But our World History is fucking awful.
Aside from (lol) some stuff in elementary school we had only one year of it in high school. One! And that pretty much only focused on Europe after we reached Rome.
Nothing about Arabia, China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Pre-Colombian America…hell we didn't even really talk about Eastern Europe.

Once again, what kinda history? We covered everything in my WHAP class evenly. We didn't focus too much on Europe (That's what AP Euro is for according to my teacher). We just jumped from civilization to civilization as they popped up on the timeline.

@JERK:

The irony though is I actually aspire to be a high school teacher (as of a month or two ago after several years of time when I should have known it).
I'm not sure how I'll square against that curriculum.

Same here. I'm very hands on (trips to museums, etc) and the Texas curriculum doesn't really condone that.

Plus, more than anything I'm interested in Military History, which, at the moment, isn't very teachable in schools. I plan on changing that though.

I guess I'll end up teaching WHAP for a while.

By the way, I've been looking all over for Explore. I can't even find a place to buy it. Kind of lame since at this point that's the only one I haven't seen.:getlost:

[GaaraofTheDesert]

I dont have the time to check it right now and when I do truthfully, I ve got doubts, cause you love to see things from your "american" point of view.