HIS 101 MIDTERM EXAM Surprise Questions Unit 1 Introduction • How has geography influenced the course of history? Geography has influenced history in many ways. Since the first people traveled the land, geography has played a major role in their survival.
Geography has influenced history in many ways. Since the first people traveled the land, geography has played a major role in their survival. If even one condition of the geography was found to be too difficult to live in, a part of the population would die out.
Geography is primarily spatial and environmental and history is temporal. A perusal into the world history squarely establishes the fact that history is mostly shaped and enriched by prevalent geographical settings.
Since the first people traveled the land, geography has played a major role in their survival. If even one condition of the geography was found to be too difficult to live in, a part of the population would die out. When empires began to form, geography became important for trade, military usage, and expansion.
The first remnants of the Human Civilization suggest that civilizations flourished around the geographical features necessary for survival, mostly rivers and forests. So, since the beginning humans have looked to find the perfect geographical regions for survival.
The geographic perspective can enrich the study of history by helping students to grasp the significance of location, the inevitability of change, and the importance of human perceptions at given times in the past.
History is as much shaped by geography as it is by almost any other factor. The more easily that students can see the interdependence of history and geography, the more understandable and interesting both subjects become.
Similarly, no geographical account can be intelligible without reference to development in time. So, both history and geography are concerned with the inter-play of human and physical factors. Geography is the stage on which drama of history is enacted and it is the geography which determines the historical events.
Geography doesn't just determine whether humans can live in a certain area or not, it also determines people's lifestyles, as they adapt to the available food and climate patterns. As humans have migrated across the planet, they have had to adapt to all the changing conditions they were exposed to.
Because the events of history take place on the stage of the world, they are inevitably influenced and even determined by geography. Rivers are an easy example of how geography can impact history.
Geography affects every aspect of history as it is responsible for determining the winners of wars, the prosperity of people and the formation of cultures.
Moreover, other geographic features, such as mountains and plains, have had an equally strong impact on history, like when 300 Spartans used the mountain pass at Thermopylae to hold off thousands of Persian soldiers.
Rivers are an easy example of how geography can impact history. Most of the earliest human civilizations developed along large rivers because of the nutrients that were deposited in the surrounding soil during annual floods. Without the specific geography of India, Mesopotamia, China and Egypt, ancient farmers would have quickly used all the nutrients in the soil in these places, and that would have meant that the farmers would have had to keep moving to grow crops. That would have meant that they never would have settled down long enough to develop the advanced tools and societal structures associated with civilization. With rivers, however, these early people had an easy way of transporting goods and a natural defense against invaders in addition to a vital source of food.
The fact that we humans have been ever so curious about our past, our evolution and the earth before humans came in, is the reason why geography and history are interrelated. We always wanted to know of our origins, the origins of the earth and the of course the origin of the universe.
Geography is the study of the physical features of the earth and its atmosphere, and the interaction and interrelationship between human beings and physical environment including the distribution of populations and resources and political and economic activities. History is the record of human activities in the bygone days comprising civilizational ...
In the first war, the Persians were restricted by the number of ships that they had.
South America’s positioning left them weak to European diseases, killing millions and toppling mighty empires - the list goes on.
The desertification of the Sahara impacted the history of Egypt in several ways. First, it forced many to move into the area along the banks of the Nile.
As a result, Egypt today is an economic powerhouse with the second largest one in Africa and is a regional power due to early stability.