Other than the use of English, what other features of English economic and social life do you notice in 19th century USA?
In the 19th century, the landscapes of America changed immensely. The Europeans treated the land in a different way. Some of the migrants from Britain and France were eager to have their own land in America. In the prairie grasslands, people from Poland were happy to work. They wanted to buy huge properties at low cost. They cleared land and developed agriculture. They introduced crops which could not grow Europe and therefore, could be sold for the profit. To protect their farms they hunted wild animals. With the invention of barbed wire in 1873 they felt totally secured.
How satisfactory is a museum gallery display in explaining the culture of a people? Give examples from your own experience of a museum.
Imagine an encounter in California in about 1880 between four people: a former African slave, a Chinese labourer, a German who had come out in the Gold Rush, and a native of the Hopi tribe, and narrate their conversation.
Why was the history of the Australian native peoples left out of the history books?
What did the ‘frontier’ mean to the Americans?
Comment on any points of difference between the native peoples of South and North America.
Look at the diagram showing the positive feedback mechanism on page 13. Can you list the inputs that went into tool making? What were the processes that were strengthened by tool making?
Why do we say that it was not natural fertility and high levels of food production that were the causes of early urbanisation?
What were the features of the lives of the Bedouins in the early seventh century?
Why was trade so significant to the Mongols?
Describe two features of early feudal society in France.
Which elements of Greek and Roman culture were revived in the 14th and 15th centuries ?
Compare the civilization of the Aztecs with that of the Mesopotamians.
How did Britain’s involvement in wars from 1793 to 1815 affect British industries?
What were the major developments before the Meiji restoration that made it possible for Japan to modernise rapidly?
Humans and mammals such as monkeys and apes have certain similarities in behaviour and anatomy. This indicates that humans possibly evolved from apes. List these resemblances in two columns under the headings of (a) behaviour and (b) anatomy. Are there any differences that you think are noteworthy?
Which of the following were necessary conditions and which the causes, of early urbanisation, and which would you say were the outcome of the growth of cities:
(a) highly productive agriculture,
(b) water transport,
(c) the lack of metal and stone,
(d) the division of labour,
(e) the use of seals,
(f) the military power of kings that made labour compulsory?
Why were mobile animal herders not necessarily a threat to town life?
‘If history relies upon written records produced by city-based literati, nomadic societies will always receive a hostile representation.’ Would you agree with this statement? Does it explain the reason why Persian chronicles produced such inflated figures of casualties resulting from Mongol campaigns?
How were the lives of different classes of British women affected by the Industrial Revolution?
What were the features of humanist thought?
Keeping the nomadic element of the Mongol and Bedouin societies in mind, how, in your opinion, did their respective historical experiences differ? What explanations would you suggest account for these differences?
What were the effects of the Crusades on Europe and Asia?
Did Japan’s policy of rapid industrialization lead to wars with its neighbors and destruction of the environment?
Why did knights become a distinct group and when did they decline?
Write a careful account of how the world appeared different to seventeenth century Europeans.