Our Very Last Human Geo Class

Today in human geo was our final class. I am glad that I have Mr. Schick next semester because I like this class. Even though some people are leaving, we have a really good class still. I think that the last test that we took wasn't too hard. The very first questions were the hardest for me. I knew the order of the civilizations, but I just didn't know the details about it. I think that I did pretty good on this test.  I hope that I did well. Mr. Schick is grading our tests now. I am excited to start next semester. I wonder what Western Civilization is going to be about. I think it has to do with civilization starting in the west. I am excited to start learning about it. I think its crazy that we have already been through one semester of school. I feel like it has gone by so fast! Overall, I really liked the blogs. I think that we should have them everyday because they help me to remember my notes and to study. Although, I do not think that they should have to be 150 words. Some days, I don't have a lot to write about because I took a test. Its hard to write 150 words about a test. I really liked the PowerPoints and Google Drive. They were a lot of fun! I liked doing Scranton because he told us our grades right away. I can't think of anything major that I didn't like. I had a lot of fun in this class!

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Tomorrow I have a test in human geo. I am going to study the notes that I have taken. I am going to pay extra attention to the 5 places that civilization began, and I will study the notes from the video. Here are some last minute notes from the video:

• The animals had to be social animals
• If humans can control leader of the pack, then they can control the entire pack
• Zebras can be as helpful as horse, but since they live in Africa they are skittish and vicious
• Dacthian and domestic camel
• None of those animals are from Papua New Gatineau
• South America has lama
• Asia, North Africa, and Europe have 13 of those animals  
• Mesopotamia wins
• Made plaster from limestone
• Work with fire was the first step to steel
• Fertile Crescent
• Settlement became bad
• Places of the same latitude (East and West) share the same climate and length of day
• There would be no cattle and wheat in America without the fertile Crescent  

More Notes on The Video

• China makes rice
• American makes corn, squash, and beans
• Africa makes sorgu, milk, and yams
• Papua has sago.
• Good domesticated animals should be able to reproduce within 1-2 years and have 1-2 babies a year. Have to be herbivores
• They can't be carnivores because then you have to get animals other animals for them to eat
• Needs to get along with humans
• 128 that work and are over 100 lbs.
• There are only 14 options!
• Goats
• Sheep
• Pigs
• Cows
• horses
• mithians  
• Donkeys
• camels (2 types)
• Buffalo
• Reindeer
• Lamas
• Yaks 
• Cattle  

These are some more notes that I took today in Human Geo class.

Guns, Germs, and Steel Video

Jared Diamond:

• spent 30yrs studying
• Papua New Gatineau
• Likes studying birds
• "Why you white men have so much cargo and we Mew Guineans have none?"
• Biologist and Professor at UCLA
• Cargo was evidence of white man's power
• white men saw themselves genetically superior
• All great civilizations have had; advanced technology, large populations, and well organized work force

Sago tree:

• lot of food in there
• make into dough
• not nutritious
• eat quickly, cause it goes bad
• only 70lbs of food

Middle Ages:

• Barley and wheat
• Drah:
• think is one of the first permanent villages in the world
• 11 1/2 thousand years ago
• Granary first place to store food
• Domestication: process by which humans pick the best of the crops and keep growing them.

The Second Urbanization

We continued taking notes on urbanization here are some of the notes:

THE SECOND URBANIZATION

• A large scale movement of people cities to work in manufacturing. Made possible by:
• 1. Second agricultural revelation that improved food production and created a larger surplus
• 2. industrialization encouraged growth of cities near industrial resources.
• Snowball effect!
• 2nd half of the 20th century
• Nature of manufacturing changed and locations changed too. Many factories have been abandoned, creating "rust belts" out of once-thriving industrial districts.
• City House in the Indus River were uniform size
• *Why were conditions like this present?
• Uniform houses, sewage system, etc.?
• Zones of the City:
• Central business district (CBD)
• Central City (CBD + older housing zones)
• Suburb (outlying functionally uniform zone outside of the central city)
• Edge Cities:
• Suburban downtowns, often located near key freeway intersections, often with office complexes, shopping centers, hotels, restaurants, entertainment facilities, and sport complexes
• Making Cities in the Global Core:
• Redlining- financial institutions refusing to lend $ in certain neighborhoods
• Blockbusting- realtor purposefully sell a home at a low price to an African American and then solicit white residents to sell their homes and low prices, to generate "white flights."

More Notes on Urbanization

• When people started growing things, they didn't have to keep moving
• 2 components enable the formation of cities: Agricultural surplus and social stratification (leadership class)
• 5 Hearths of Urbanization: Mesopotamia (Iraq) 3500BCE, Nile River Valley (India) 3200BCE, Indus River Valley (Egypt) 2200BCE, Huang HE and Wei River Valleys (China) 1500BCE, Mesoamerica (Guatemala) 200BCE
• Mesoamerica; many ancient cities were theocratic centers where rules were deemed to have divine authority and were god-kings
• Diffusion of Urbanization:
• The Greek Cities:
• By 500BCE, Greeks were highly urbanized
• Networks of more than 500 cities and towns
• On mainland and on islands
• Each city had an acropolis and agora
• Roman Cities:
• A system of cities and small towns, linked together with hundreds of miles of miles of roads and sea routes
• Sites of Roman cities were typically for trade
• A Roman city's forum combined the acropolis and agora into one space
• Roman cities had extreme wealth and extreme poverty (between 1/3 and 2/3s of empire's population was enslaved)

Urban Geography

Today was our first Human Geo class since we got back from break. We started a new lesson called "Urban Geography." Here are some of the notes that we took...

City: a conglomeration of people and building clustered together to serve as a center of politics, culture, and economics.
Urban: buildup of the central city and the suburban realm- the city and the surrounding environs connected to the city.
*Just in the last couple of years, there are more (3.5 million) people living in the cities then rural areas.

The modern process of urbanization: a rural area can become urbanized quite quickly in the modern world

Shenzhen, China: huge skyscrapers. 25 years ago all of the land was duck ponds and rice paddies.

The First Urban Revelation:
Before urbanization, people often clustered in agricultural villages: a relatively small, egalitarian village, where most of the population was involved in agriculture. About 10,000 years ago, people began living in agricultural village.