Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Early history and Western Civilization

I'm starting once again at the top, which for history, means consideration of nations of the world. There wasn't much to add to Asiatic peoples, this mostly just opened up the possibilities for lower level subdivisions of history, but I reached the magic number of ten nations to prompt a subdivision of Southeast Asian and Oceanic peoples. This will be tackled later, but it offers the promise of being able to consider these in more and more significant detail. I'm also itching to include things such as the agricultural revolution, European pagan religion, and local government along with the history, but I feel as If I should move cautiously.

In Prehistory, however, Asiatic peoples opens up a requirement to re-arrange Middle Eastern peoples in preparation to go into more detail on them. I many have mentioned that inserting Italic peoples instead of Italy, French peoples instead of France directly, and Hispanic peoples instead of Spain directly is a bit of a nuisance at this early period, but these will be required when i start getting into their overseas extensions in modern times. And there are still gaping holes where Portugal and Greece ought to be, but I'm slowly getting there.
Antiquity is pretty much developing similarly, so I don't have much more comment, except that I picked up that pesky half millennium this time through.
I also picked up Classical history, which still at this point has the gaping holes, and also requires a review of Middle Eastern peoples. I did mention a batch of cities, because enough of them existed during this period for them to make a meaningful contribution to the study of peoples in classical and medieval times.

I also began a sweep through sociology. The application of history is rather weak at this point, because so far, only peoples are very well developed. There isn't much new to say about the history of peoples at this point. In Nations, I decided to go ahead and add four more to the list: United Arab Emirates, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Singapore, and Croatia, none of which are on my list of must-haves, but I might as well get them out of the way. I also started a sweep through Western Civilization. The history is pretty much under control, and developing sociology requires that I look at nations and peoples that are connected to it. I overdid it a bit, and Now need to slow down and collect some of these nations into regions. Anglic peoples have a reasonably solid backbone of history, and so does the UK, and from Classical and medieval times on, London gets connected as well. I began a sweep through history of Latin peoples, and except for the missing Portugal, that's in reasonably good order. I went through Italian peoples as well, but now I need to stop and look more closely at the prehistory of Italy, which as I recall, was rather sparse the last time I looked at it. That's where I'll pick up again.

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