Peoples And Empires: Movie Analysis

I learned a lot about the activities of European empires and the development of distinct American societies by reading and watching all the films. There are many interesting books and films that we watched in this class about this subject. Learning about the European empires and how they created civilizations in the Americas was very interesting. I picked the books and films that I learned the most from and that I thought had the most interesting information about the origins of the United States and its history.

Anthony Pagden’s book, Peoples and Empires talks about the many empires that have existed throughout history. He starts off with the Roman Empire, Rome began in the 7th century BC as a small city state of agriculturalists and tradesmen

The movie talks about how with the new developments in technology scientists are able to look at the past to find out the truth about past events. This movie focused on what happened during the Dark Ages. By learning about what caused the Dark Ages it gives us a greater understanding of what happened during that time. One way they were able to find out information is by looking at tree rings as shown in the movie scientist were able to look a pattern of cold weather that could have affected the trees' growth. Another film called the Journey of Man uses science to find out about the human migrations out of Africa and creates the theory that humans migrated from Africa to other parts of the world. Science in the form of genetics is combined with and history to prove that global migration began in Africa. The theory is that the Africans left their homes and migrated after experiencing severe famine and drought. Science and history are often used to explain past events or explain why things are the way they are

Within the first six months eighty out of one hundred settlers died. The settlers traveled from London to Jamestown in hopes of becoming rich but instead when they arrived most of them died from starvation or disease. They also ran into conflict with the Algonquian natives and the colonists were not ready for their first winter causing many of them to starve and freeze to death. Many people were unsure about what happened to the colonist and the explanations ranged from cannabis due to starvation or a conflict with the natives. This is one example of an English colony that died but most of the English colonies did not die and they were able to establish large colonies. The English had the greatest influence over North America, the French controlled Canada and the Spanish and Portuguese were mainly in South