CLIL-DNL History

This video offers some good perspective on the competing historical visions that help to shape the tension between the United States and Cuba.  I enjoyed this one because it explicitly states during what many refer to as the age of imperialism.

Questions to Ponder:  How would you feel about the normalizing of political and economic relations between the United States and Cuba if you grew up in Cuba?  What if you were from a Cuban-American family that fled Castro's regime?   

Tags: Cuba, historical, conflict, political, geopolitics, colonialism, video.

A little history here, What we call the GDP is not really scientific #GDP #NationalIncome  #indicator #health

Seth Dixon has it right. 

The parameters of the measure of the economy are so broad that the numbers don't really mean anything. Each country counts different things. The GDP of the US cannot be compared to the GDP of other countries because the cost of living in each place is so wildly different. When compared to Japan our economies are close but compared to any country in Africa they are completely different. Measurement of the economy is not an overly useful number.

The Stanford History Education Group has amassed some great resources for social studies teachers.  Their chief resources is a program called Reading Like a Historian.  The program has 71 stand-alone lessons for U.S. History organized within 11 units. These lessons span colonial to Cold War America and cover a range of political, social, economic, and cultural topics. They are continuing to expand the Reading Like a Historian program to World History.  Currently there are 15 lessons from across the world history sequence with more lesson plans under development that will be released in the next few months.

Tags: historical, teacher training.

I love animation maps.  Great for getting students interested in learning.

This video does a fantastic job of showing how the United States has expanded and grown since its original 13 colonies. While many today might imagine that our nation was simply always this size in fact over many years of colonization, land purchases and land grabs America has eventually become what it is today.

This article was very interesting to look at. I had knowledge that the majority of the immigrant population came from Mexico but it gave a different perspective to see it on a map. The one aspect that caught my attention was how the map of the United States looked like in 1910. The majority of the immigrants back then came from Europe, mainly Germany. Germany was the top country birth among U.S. immigrants because it was very dominating. 

Many people in 2015 feel that immigration-reform is an absolute must for America.  They usually use words like, "illegal", "terrorists", or "welfare-recipients" to try and scare the rest of the country into thinking immigration has spiraled out of control.  Immigration definitely has a different make-up from a hundred years ago, but that doesn't equate to it being a problem.

An article like this puts much into perspective.  What most naive and ignorant immigration-reformers might not now before reading this article is that the proportion of our current population has a fewer percentage of immigrants than back in 1910.  This fact is totally opposite from the picture that some critics try to draw, essentially, comparing immigration to millions of fire-ants invading our country.

Most immigrants now come from Latin America, whereas, in 1910 they came from Germany.  By reading the article, common sense will tell you that there might be more of a "racism" problem than an "immigration" problem in America.

Its interesting to me how the primary source of immigrants only shifts from Germany to Mexico in the 1990's, as opposed to when the country was cut in half in the fifties or during WWII. I had always thought that those events would limit German immigration more, however it appears that the primary reason for the shift is more due to the recent (relatively) drug war which erupted in Mexico.

This pirate excursion map is so cool and gives a great look at the travels of different pirates.  As we get farther away from these time periods, it seems like the idea of these Caribbean pirates are fictional.  To hear true historical events about these individual pirates is very interesting.  I would  love to take a time machine back to Port Royal during these times to experience that madness.

Imagine the horror a native of the Caribbean must have felt when white men came into their scenic lands and pillaged their villages and plundered their treasuries? Blackbeard otherwise known as Edward Teach, would light slow burning cannon fuses and place them in his beard to create an aura about him as he fought and raided these port of call. Calico Jack Rackham, a great pirate name if there ever was one, was best known for having  a pair of female pirates aboard. Instantly becomes one of my heroes! Then you have William Parker who was actually an opportunist backed by England who plundered Spanish treasures throughout Central America. Here is my favorite pirate joke; what is a pirate's favorite letter? "R" you say? No, it's the letter "C", pirates love the sea....

very interesting interactive map

Afghanistan's current borders are the result of political maneuvering between empires. Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor is a result of this political maneuvering. The corridor was created in order to prevent the Russian Empire and British India from sharing a common border. While many afghans may decry the notion, Afghanistan has been shaped by foreign influence. The same can be said for almost every other nation on the globe. Almost all borders are determined by some from of political maneuvering. Our borders with Mexico and Canada have been determined through treaties and wars.

As I have learned more about the world, it's been interesting to see how arbitrary national borders can sometimes be. I think we are taught in school to associate "nations" with "nationalism," and although that is generally the case for most industrialized nations (whose citizens generally feel they are "nationals" within their own borders), it is not always true for the rest of the world. We see this in the numerous ethnic disputes in African nations, in the violent Yugoslav wars in Europe, and today with the Kurd uprising in Syria and Iraq- we see ill-defined borders that do not meet the needs of their peoples, nations that do not encompass the same sentiments of nationalism. As a result, we see indifference between these various peoples at best, or open conflict between varying ethnic and ideological groups at worst. Afghanistan as we know it today is not the result of self-determination or a sense of nationalism, but geopolitical jockeying between Russia and the United Kingdom. It is not a nation, but a political buffer.

As a result, Afghanistan does not act as a single nation- it may have a central government, but that government is incredibly weak, and people in remote areas often do not even know of its existence. Afghanistan is a series of small city-states and even more isolated settlements clumped together behind arbitrarily drawn lines, living their lives in much the same manner their ancestors did 1,000 years ago. This has made the mountainous, isolated regions of the nation a haven for terrorists and religious extremism, posing a serious issue in the region that, despite billions of dollars and a decade of fighting, the US has been unable to find a solution for. Divided amongst itself, Afghanistan is a nation in name only, something that the West likes to place on the map because of a dispute between two global powers nearly 2 centuries ago.