history3

World History - Lesson 3

Jaron Summers

I am writing a history book for Becki, 9, a distant cousin in Canada.

Hi, Becki—

I am glad you liked history lesson 1 and 2. Lesson 1 was that you could enjoy history more if you were connected to it so I wrote about our forefathers, the British.

Lesson 2 was how everyone has a different view of history and the country that writes the history has its own slant.

History Lesson 3 is about all the countries. Last count 192 – this is not quite accurate. Click on the 192 and see why.

Maybe if you went back far enough you would come to a time when there was just one group of people.

You could say they owned the whole world, but the fact is no one owns anything. The world has been around for 4.5 billion years. People have lived on it for about 2 million years and it’s only been in the last 10 or 20 thousand years that people divided up the world into different countries.

One of the oldest icons of civilization are the pyramids. They have only been around for about 5 thousand years. The pharaohs who ruled the land of the pyramids are all dead. See? No one really owns anything. If we are lucky we get to look after it for awhile. Then we are gone, back to the dust.

But between now and dust you will have a lot of fun. So don’t worry about the dust part. Maybe your generation will invent something that stops people from ever dying. A dust buster. My generation invented the dust buster. But it had nothing to do with eternal life. Maybe your generation will hatch something that will make you live forever. You can call it the ultimate dust buster.

Of course if no one died, we would have a bigger world population and I bet more counties.

Right now there are almost 200 counties.

Why do we have so many?

The answer is sad. People conquered each other. They were not happy with sunsets and families, they wanted more so they talked their neighbors into attacking the people on the other side of the river or over the mountains and the winners started new countries.

Everyone attacked everyone else.

Although there was enough for everyone, some people wanted all the food and all the water.

When I was your age we all drank water out of a taps. No bottled water. Today everyone drinks bottled water. Guess what? It costs hundreds of times more for a glass of bottled water than water out of your tap and the bottled water is not as safe as ordinary water. I’m not kidding.

Click here and read about it.

If we spent the money that we squander on bottled water, then everyone in the world could drink water that was safe.

Most people would cooperate. Most countries would not.

So is the solution to pure water and harmony having one country and sharing everything?

I think so but that’s going to be harder to pull off that an ultimate dust buster.

This brings us to the end of Lesson 3 in World History.

Here is your assignment: Find out how much people spend on plastic water bottles that they throw away every day. Hint.

PS -- once I visited the biggest pyramid in the world.