Video Summaries

By: Brandon WhyteHistory 4Professor Arguello

The Story of Gods: Episode 1 The world we live in has been

shaped into the universal conviction that there is more to life than life itself, that there is a God shaped hole at the center of our universe, and we have came up with ways to fill that hole.

People fill the voids with gods for everything to explain life.

Gods make humans different from any other beings on Earth because it allows us to believe in something more than ourselves.

The Story of Gods: Episode 1 Devout men see God

in themselves. Burials have become

religious experiences which is another aspect of life that separates man from other living things on Earth.

The belief in the wheel of life comforted many people, they are born and then die and then are reborn.

Catastrophe Thousands of years

ago there was something that changed with world forever.

With famine, plague, drought, death. Civilizations were wiped out and cities were destroyed.

Comets were believed to cause many phenomenon cause catastrophes in the world.

Catastrophe Many believed that one

major event could alter history and change everything within the world.

Natural disasters have always happen throughout the world but until lately they can now just being explained.

Because of catastrophes many civilizations have been wiped off the face of the planet and ruins are all that are left to study the people who lived there during that time.

The Conquistadores: Hernan Cortes Cortés was part of the generation of

Spanish colonizers that began the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

There were four main journeys the conquistadores made.

Hernan Cortes was the first of these famous conquistadores, and he was not trained in warfare, but law.

Because of the controversial undertakings of Cortés and the scarcity of reliable sources of information about him, it has become difficult to assert anything definitive about his personality and motivations.

Cortes fought many bloody battles throughout Mexico, and with his advance weapons was an asset to those who fought on his side.

The Conquistadores: Francisco Pizarro In 1502 Pizarro returned to returned to

Peru. Pizarro accompanied Vasco Nunez de

Balboa in his crossing of the Isthmus of Panama and they became the first Europeans to view the Pacific coast of the New World.

The first attempt to explore western South America was undertaken in 1522 by Pascual de Andagoya. The native South Americans he encountered told him about a gold-rich territory called Virú, which was on a river called Peru and from which they came.

Pizarro was there and conquered the Inca people.

Pizarro made three trips to Peru. The Inca people were told to be nice

and let Pizarro and his men eat and sleep with the people there.

Engineering an Empire: Rome The Roman empire became to

most advance civilization, but while they dominated the landscape, they were ultimately powerless to defeat their own self-destruction.

Julius Caesar was the most powerful man in all of the Roman empire, he himself nearly doubled the size of the empire, however living through many battles he lay dead, killed in Rome but Romans.

Architecture, aqueducts, roads, money, counting systems all originated from the Roman empire.

Claudius was a brilliant leader who brought water to Roman through greatly constructed aqueducts.

Engineering an Empire: The Maya The Maya is a Mesoamerican

civilization. The Maya civilization shares many

features with other Mesoamerican civilizations due to the high degree of interaction and cultural diffusion that characterized the region.

Advances such as writing, epigraphy, and the calendar did not originate with the Maya

The Maya peoples never disappeared, neither at the time of the Classic period decline nor with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and the subsequent Spanish colonization of the Americas.

Today, the Maya and their descendants form sizable populations throughout the Maya area and maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs that are the result of the merger of pre-Columbian and post-Conquest ideas and cultures.

When the Moors Ruled in Europe: At the Height of the Empire Columbus was on his way to

journey off to the America and landed here.

Although generations of Spanish rulers have tried to expunge this era from the historical record, recent archeology and scholarship now shed fresh light on the Moors who flourished in Al-Andalus for more than 700 years.

The era ended with the Reconquista during which the Catholic authorities burnt over 1,000,000 Arabic texts.

When the Moors Ruled in Europe: Prelude to the Renaissance At this time the majority

of people had converted to Islam.

Family archives exist, however they are much more than that, they are rich sources of documents from the medieval period and before.

Many beautiful cathedrals are more than just places to worship, they are saved because they tell stories of how life was in that time.

Cracking the Mayan Code The Forgotten Maya Temples. In

1774, Spanish explorer Jose Calderon rediscovers the temples of Palenque and the ancient hieroglyphs of the Maya, a people whose culture was decimated by the Spanish conquistadors.

intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script carved on stone monuments and painted on pottery and bark books.

The invading Spanish suppressed nearly all knowledge of how the script worked, unlocking its meaning posed one of archaeology's fiercest challenges.

Cracking the Mayan Code Archeologist were able to decode

many of the strange symbols left behind by the Mayans.

The Mayan civilization was far advanced to what people believed and their language is coded but as time passes people are understanding more and more of it.

Many of the symbols are repetitive and with that archeologist can try and understand what the Mayans were saying.

The symbols were not just random, but often time they would be memorial or tributes to rules during the time.

They also often told stories of the rulers.