Thursday, October 16, 2008

I like how occasionally, events from hundreds of years ago tie back to present day.  Interesting that Hungary is now a horse-breeding place, that originated from fierce, horse-breeding warriors.  Also, same sort of idea, Normandy, land of Northman.  

I was wondering whether or not we were going to touch on the vikings, It's interesting to find that the name given to the group of raiders isn't quite accurate.  Despite the many raids, without them, culture in France, England, and Russia would've been different.  

I thoroughly enjoyed the "Advances in Agricultural Technology" section.  It's easy to read over the sections detailing the daily lives of peasants, and not even truly think about it, since we're so removed from it.  Looking at how humans have progressed blows my mind.  Between lack of resources, fertilizer, pesticides, it's a wonder they were able to grow anything at all.

2 comments:

Kurtis Hawkins said...

I was also attached to readings about how the lands and agruculture in general was laid out. Quite different from what we do now. Looking back it is easy to say that these were not the best practices that could have been employed. How discouraging it must have been for these people to work all year and produce virtually nothing. The article that describes the estate and its inventory was especially interesting to me because it helped me to realize that farms then and now do have many similairites--this just helps me to visualize how people lived in those times.

Emily Music said...

i agree, i find that in many of these sections, the way people act when confronted with certain problems, or the methods they used to get what they wanted, are all to familiar.