Welcome to Students Incorporated, a podcast exploring the topics of business, education,
technology and design.
I'm your host, Mr. Jason.
Join me weekly as my team and I produce content that's informative, positive, fun and uplifting.
Episodes include student conversations, interviews with thought leaders and inspirational stories
with an international flavor.
This podcast is created and produced with the help of students from the International
Community School of Bangkok.
Hello everyone and welcome back to our show.
I'm Mr. Jason and I'm joined by my co-host today, Primi.
We also welcome our special guest, Mr. Andy, a multi-talented and uniquely gifted speaker
and educator.
We'll get into some of his history and journey from early jobs and careers until now, where
he's an experienced history teacher.
We'll also be discussing some significant events in history that have shaped the world
as we know it today.
But first, let's hear the quote of the day and get some headline news.
Our quote of the day comes from Leon Brown.
He said,
History repeats itself endlessly for those who are unwilling to learn from the past.
This quote emphasized that history can repeat itself for those who refuse to learn from
the past.
They fail to recognize the patterns and lessons that can guide them towards a better future.
By neglecting history's warnings and insights, they become trapped in a cycle of repeating
the same mistakes again and again.
We can break free from this cycle by acknowledging the past and learning from it so that our
path forward is full of progress and growth.
And that's our quote of the day.
And now onto some historical news you have probably never heard of.
Our first historical news piece comes out of Australia.
I bet you've never heard of the Emu War?
Well here's what happened during the Emu War.
Emus in Australia were destroying large amounts of crops after an unusual migration in 1932.
Farmers were allowed to shoot the emus to protect their land, but there were just too
many of them.
Three members of the Royal Australian Artillery decided to bring along two machine guns with
them in an attempt to hunt the emus.
However, the operation was a failure and the emus evaded them every single time.
Thus marked the victory of the emus in the Emu War.
Our second news piece is about a disaster that happened in Boston, Massachusetts.
And you've probably never heard of it.
No, it's not the famous Boston Tea Party.
In 1919, a storage tank containing 8 milliliters of molasses burst, sending waves of sticky
and sweet syrup into the streets of northern Boston.
The wave of molasses measured several meters high and traveled at high speeds, destroying
buildings and trapping people.
It then hardened in the winter cold, making rescue efforts even harder.
And our final news piece is about the River Thames frost fairs.
During a period of harsh winters wind in the UK, people organized fairs on the frozen river
Thames where multiple events took place, such as sledding, skating, horse racing in place.
Even King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I had gone to visit some of these fairs, going
about and purchasing goods from the many vendors set up on the frozen rivers.
In this first segment, we welcome Mr. Andy and we'll hear a little bit about his journey
from early jobs, lessons learned, and now what he's doing today.
Bremie will start us off with our first question.
We'll start off with a few lighthearted questions.
Our first question is, which historical figure would you like to have lunch with?
And you can choose anyone.
Anyone.
That is a great question.
Almost for sure, my answer is going to change depending on when you ask me, depending on
what month or what year.
But I think right now, the person that comes to mind would be Martin Luther, the reformer.
Such an interesting individual and had recently been studying the Reformation.
And I just think he'd be the kind of guy that would be a really enjoyable conversationalist.
And it would be a lot of fun to kind of hang out and hear him.
He might be a little bit annoying, to be honest, but it would also be really interesting to
hear him because he's kind of a passionate individual.
All right.
So the next question is, if you could go back in history and tell your past self just one
thing, what would it be?
To be honest, I think that what I would tell myself was to have more patience with my children.
I think that's one of the things that I often think back and regret the most, which kind
of funny.
It is an historical lesson in that it's only something I've realized as I've gotten older
and I think back about certain experiences.
But man, that is definitely one that I wish I could tell myself.
Yeah.
And now moving on to your own personal history, what were some of your past jobs and work
experiences like?
Oh, thanks for asking that.
I have had a lot of jobs, actually.
Yeah, I'd love to hear about them.
The first one that I actually, one of my very first jobs was as a gymnastics coach.
Oh, wow.
So I was a gymnast, like a recreational gymnast, and then I thought I wanted to try to compete.
And so I went to a club that had a competition team and I tried out and I got a spot, but
I had to make a decision because it was going to be a super long period of commitment, like
each day that I would have to go and train and it would kind of take over a little bit.
So I decided not to do it.
And instead, where I was learning, I started coaching and I still would work out and enjoy
learning, but I started coaching.
And then from there, I ended up coaching kind of for a long time, actually, and then through
high school and then later after college, I started coaching again when I was in graduate
school.
But this time it was in like a gym where they had some really good competing, like competitive
athletes that would travel around the nation and compete.
And it was an amazing learning experience because I was working with people who like
that's their profession.
And it was really amazing how much I didn't know.
But also one thing that it helped me develop all of the years of coaching gymnastics was
how to manage groups of people, groups of students, actually.
And one lesson that I'll never forget is one of the coaches that I worked with, he also
actually happened to be a PE teacher and he would just come in and coach a certain team
like a couple of times or like most nights of the week.
But it was just like he had a special team and he coached.
And I remember him saying, Andy, no one pays for their kid to come stand in line.
And it was like a philosophy of like, how do you manage this group of people, even if
there's lots of people around, you know, they're there to learn and they should be given the
experience to work.
And I think that's really stuck with me even in my teaching, like to have people just kind
of wait that waiting in line is not a very healthy or good way to manage people or to
help them learn.
So that was something that was an important lesson.
Another job that I had, I worked for, I was the operations manager for the Los Angeles
office of a corporation called Quest Drape.
And we set pipe and drape and no one has ever heard of it, but almost everyone's seen it.
So if you've ever watched a political figure speaking on TV, usually when they're at like
a hotel or conference center, you'll see they're almost always in front of like a blue drape.
Or if you see like a big event, like one that comes to mind, like when Coca-Cola released
Coke Zero, they'll have these huge screens up.
They'll be in a big theater like this one event we did, which was at the Hollywood and
Highland Theater.
It's called the Dolby Theater now, I think.
It used to be the Kodak Theater, but we would go in and set drape between the screens and
behind the stage.
And it was an awful job actually.
It's not that it was an awful job.
It just wasn't really my personality.
And so it was one of those situations where we were excellent at it.
The corporation as a whole was, and we had a return client rate that was unheard of in
the industry.
But that was mainly because, I mean, you were taught you pretty much don't ever say no.
And even if it was unsafe or not possible, you figured out a way to do it so that it
was safe and possible.
And if it wasn't quite what was expected at first, you had to learn to convince them that
is really the best way to do it.
So it taught me to work with people in new ways.
And you had to be really patient.
But I was actually the operations manager.
So I was also operating crews of people and things.
So that organization level was good for me.
But the demand on the managers was enormous.
It was exhausting.
And it took me away from home regularly.
It was the first cell phone I ever had was given to me from work.
The first laptop, I think, was given to me by work.
But it was just ways that you could try to work, that you worked all the time.
And so it was a good learning experience.
And it was actually an amazing way that God provided for my family at the time.
So in that way, it was a blessing.
But it also helped me to realize this is not what I want to do forever.
So it kind of encouraged me to get back into teaching again.
All right, so this transitions well into the next question.
Can you tell us a bit about your personal journey into education and why you decided
to focus on teaching and specifically the subject of history?
Yeah, this is one of those funny stories.
So because I had had so much experience working with kids, working with students as a gymnastics
coach, and then I worked at the Y and I would work at sports camps and things occasionally
over the summer.
And I also came from a big family.
So either my sister or myself, we were babysitting our kids or friends, families, this kind of
thing.
I was so burnt out on working with kids.
And I can remember our oldest son who I adopted.
So the timing is kind of odd here.
But I can remember I went into the school, the classroom where he was going to school
and I picked him up and he was in first grade, I think, at the time.
And I remember walking into the classroom and thinking, I never want to do this.
Like I, yeah, this is awful.
And yeah, so it was quite some time.
So actually I went to I went to seminary, which is usually people who go to seminary
are going to be like, like ministers or like kind of professional church leaders, like
pastors and I knew I wasn't going to be a pastor, but I wanted to I wanted to go to
school and study and I loved it.
And I can remember thinking afterwards, actually, while I was there, I remember hearing these
guys one one was like a doctoral student at a different university, but he was teaching
some classes there.
And some of the other guys were talking and and they were saying, you know, if I if it
ever changes and I'm not working full time in like pastoral ministry, I really think
like the most amazing job would be a history teacher.
And I remember thinking about that.
And then the the the seminars and the classes that I took that talked about the backgrounds
of like the New Testament and the backgrounds of the Old Testament.
I mean, I just I love those.
Those just kind of like inspired me to like think this is so amazing to better even it's
just a little bit to better understand what life was like or what was happening in the
world at the time that these things that we are so familiar with happened.
It just sheds a whole new light on it.
And I loved it.
And so I that stuck with me.
But then I ended up actually teaching P.E. at school, my first teaching job in at ICS.
But I don't know if you knew Mr. Darren.
He used to be the headmaster of ICS for a long time.
This was forever ago.
So I'm going to say like maybe 1999 or 2000.
He was a history teacher.
And I remember we were having lunch one time and I mentioned that it would be great to
teach history.
And he said, you know, Andy, you'd make a great history teacher.
I don't know why he told me that.
Like I don't know why.
Like where that came from.
But again, it stuck with me.
And so then over the years, when I got back into teaching later, it was teaching elementary
school.
But I kept that in mind.
And I think I just needed some time to grow and mature.
And then I when I got the opportunity, I jumped on it.
And I have never regretted teaching history.
I love it.
Absolutely love it.
And it's been one of those like great choices and amazing experiences to have students that
I get to talk about history with all the time.
So we know that history, there's different subjects of history.
So what are some of the classes of history that you teach and do you actually have a
favorite class?
Yeah.
So currently I'm only I only teach two courses and they're both world history courses.
And one is called Advanced Placement World History.
And I love that class.
I love it because of the depth that we get to go in the way that students are challenged
to grow and to think it is an exciting, super exciting class.
And it's way worth the effort.
So students, you see this this growth in them throughout the year.
So at the beginning, they're a little bit miserable and they don't mind telling you.
And it's hard.
And I even told them at the beginning, there's just no way around this.
And by the end of the year, I hear comments frequently like, I can't believe it.
I've read this entire textbook or they'll come back to me.
Students will come back to me in years later on and say, hey, Mr. Andy, I use the skills
that I learned in that class and all of these other classes.
And it's just stuck with me.
And I that really excites me because I feel like they've they've grasped some some understanding
about how to think about the world that's impacting what they do if they're studying
engineering, if they're studying literature, it doesn't matter.
It gives them an opportunity to kind of think differently about people.
I love that.
And I definitely really like last year when I started, I was like, no, 20 pages each weekend.
But then at the end of it, like I love that I really and I feel like I I did like learn
a lot so much.
And then all the skills that come with it to like synthesis and then like everything.
So yeah, definitely.
It was an experience.
I'll give you that.
All right.
I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah.
OK, now on the same idea of favorites, if you could choose to live in a specific time,
period or era in history, which one would you choose and why this one's going to be
good?
I always disappoint people with this question.
Sorry, I'm just going to tell you ahead of time.
There are so many like moments in time that I am so fascinated with.
Like I would love if I could go and experience maybe for a little while.
Yeah.
Certain eras like the early, early century CE or the early modern era of, you know, like
that that time of great change, like during the Reformation that brings like an immediate
and important impact into our world today.
It would be so fascinating to see that.
But to be honest with you, it would be dangerous and it would be difficult and hard and life
probably wouldn't be that great.
And I'm so thankful for modern medicine.
And I really think that I would not want to live any other time than now.
I mean, not if I had to go and stay forever because I feel like, yeah, it's easy to have
a romantic view of it.
But the reality is that it would be most likely I would not be an elite and I wouldn't have
access to, you know, the basic.
That's right.
Yeah.
And I think we live in a pretty amazing time for the most part.
It would be fascinating.
Maybe if you could go and see for a day, maybe.
Yeah.
I am curious, though, if you were able to go back for a day and visit a specific period
in time.
Yeah.
Which would it be?
I am really interested.
I would love to kind of visit the like like what is today, Turkey.
So like on the Mediterranean, just some of these these these old cities.
Yeah, would be so fascinating to see that kind of mixture of that like Roman and Greek
life, but with peoples that are maybe partially that or not that at all and all living together
and that mixture.
And then just to visit some of the early Christian thinkers that are so impactful for the later
development of ideas.
It would be so cool.
I think that would be pretty amazing.
That's the Silk Road comes through there as it does.
It sure does.
Yeah.
And it's right there.
And that's one that comes to mind.
I mean, there are a couple of other instances that would be really fascinating to see, but
not to have to stay very long at.
So like some of the locations where revolution broke out during the Atlantic revolutions
would be really fascinating to see and meet people and recognize the diversity that was
happening in all of that change.
It would be really cool.
But again, it would be really risky to stay at either time.
OK, well, shifting a little bit.
Here's more of a specific question about your teaching methods.
Is it difficult to incorporate, encourage diverse perspectives into the teaching of
historical events?
I'm not a history teacher, but I assume it would be somewhat difficult, like incorporating
different perspectives.
It is super difficult.
And what makes it really challenging is that I teach survey courses, meaning that we have
to span.
We have to sacrifice depth for like width, if you will, for like the amount of material
we have to cover, which makes my subject very difficult.
And it's currently sort of a debate among academics in this area of world history.
Like how do you manage to create a story like a narrative when you have so much of the world
to cover in so little time?
So that makes like really understanding the diverse perspective super challenging.
And that's why usually historians, this is changing a little bit, but usually they focus
on a single region or field of history, often even a certain time period, almost always.
And then later in life, when they've been working for a long time, they begin to expand
and explore.
Like a lot of our major world historians today actually were educated and focused and trained
on a specific field in a different way and then later grew into it.
Now there are, it is changing a bit because of the popularity of world history and you
can actually just focus on that, but it makes for this diverse perspective really challenging.
And so we as world history teachers have to rely on the authors that do go deep and we
have to try to pull that in and say, okay, what was it like for women in this era?
What was it like for a minority group living in that region that I talked about, say modern
day Jerusalem at the time that the Ottoman Empire ruled that area?
Because you'd have people of different ethnic groups and religious groups.
And what was that like?
Or what I just recently conducted some research on Jewish people in England during the time
of King Edward and he's the first European king to expel the Jews from a whole kingdom.
And so that's called social history when you're studying what was it like for the Jewish people
living in that culture.
And then of course I was looking at it from like kind of motivations or reasons for that,
but it intermixed.
So, yes, sorry, it is difficult to kind of get those perspectives in.
One follow up question to that, how important is the curriculum in helping to do this?
I know you talked about that you have to cover a lot in a very short period of time.
And I think he even talked about pulling in like other authors and stuff, but is that
curriculum something that you can kind of like change a little bit or what's that look
like from a teacher standpoint?
So actually this is the cool thing is as a history teacher, we kind of have the freedom.
We're working with concepts, ideas like historical developments, but the history of those historical
developments is complex.
So we have the opportunity to draw on various sources to use in our classes, but it's important
that we don't mislead students as well.
So one way I try to explain this or show this to the students is we look at the Mongols
when they're creating an empire and we'll read modern historians and ancient accounts
of that and try to determine what's the deal here?
Are they horrible?
Are they like an awful destructive force in world history or are they actually beneficial
to the progress of world history, at least in the long term?
And students have to recognize, oh man, there's different perspectives on this.
Even amongst people writing today, there was different perspectives amongst people writing
in the time of the Mongols.
And so the demands that they realize, I probably shouldn't use the word demands, but encourage
them to realize that this is complex and kind of messy.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's history.
And here's our last question for this first segment.
For you personally, what historical event or events have had a significant impact in
shipping your perspective on life and other things?
So I've been challenged by certain individuals who had a strong grasp on the importance of
studying and learning and trying to kind of pursue excellence, as well as the idea of
being sort of honorable to live to have integrity.
So in other words, I'm a Christian and so I think that it's important that I have integrity
as a way to try to be honest with others.
And so certain individuals have kind of impacted me on being humble, but being diligent.
And so that impacted me when I was working jobs I didn't like, and that's impacted my
work in jobs that I do like.
That it's worth the effort just because it's a way to do something excellently.
And maybe, you know, I know everyone's in different circumstances at different times,
but that's something that's been impactful for me.
And then just recently, I've been learning about or I was about half a year ago studying
the Reformation in the early modern era, the Christian Reformation.
And it's astounding to learn about the change in history and how many sort of legends is
maybe the wrong word, maybe myths I should use that we believe about that time and what
was taught.
And when you spend some time in that era and with those individuals and with people that
have studied them, you recognize, oh, wait, a lot of what I've believed or been taught
some myths, even from what these individuals said, and it's developed over time.
And so again, it's reinforced that studying that era has reinforced the importance of
having humility and not demanding I know or I'm right, but recognizing that I have a lot
to learn, even if I'm maybe a little more familiar with a certain period of time than
others.
But that's had a kind of a big impact in me.
All right.
Thank you so much.
And that ends our first segment.
We'll be right back after this short PSA announcement about a famous Thailand fruit festival.
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So if you have never tried durian before, Thailand is the best place to visit.
We are back with part two.
In this segment, we'll be having a discussion with Mr. Andy about the concept of history
repeating itself.
Does history really repeat itself?
And to keep this conversation going, we'll come up with four main historical themes.
Premi will introduce the first theme.
The first topic or theme under the idea of history repeating itself is intellectual and
religious history.
So to get us started, our guiding question for this first theme is, how have some recurring
patterns in intellectual and religious history shaped current events on faith and reason?
This is a big question.
I'm a little intimidated with it here.
Let me start by saying this is a good question about does history repeat itself?
As probably a lot of listeners have heard or been told that we study history so we don't
repeat the mistakes of the past.
But the very first lesson that I give to my students is that I'm going to ask you that
question on a test, and if you tell me that, you will get a bad grade on that.
We don't study history in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past because society's
never really stopped repeating the mistakes of the past, if you will.
But the question about history repeating itself is really somewhat philosophically complex
because history is the story of people.
And people are individuals and they're influenced by various factors and the decisions that
they make are impossible to predict.
So when we say it repeats itself, I think we mean like, oh, we see sort of cycles in
the rise and fall of government systems or political systems, or we see like the spread
of religious faiths at different times and over different places, and those things don't
seem to stop.
And I guess I would argue it's probably because they're about people and we're human beings
and so we have similarities regardless of the era in which we're living.
So for social and intellectual or intellectual and religious history, I'm really keen on
this because I love the history of thought and the way people think about things and
how that's traveled through time and impacted or been expanded upon over time.
And it has definitely impacted current views on faith and reason.
So one of the beautiful things about studying history is that it gives us insight into peoples
that we don't know or that we don't know well.
And in our world today, some hot topic faiths are going to be Christianity and Islam.
But when you have an opportunity to study about the developments of those religions
and you learn about historically maybe how they've spread, who's embraced them, who's
rejected them and why, it gives you insight into the way people have been brought along
and what they might think today.
We have to be careful not to stereotype the way those people think.
That's really important because again, they're all individuals.
However, those faith systems have like doctrines of belief and by understanding them and how
they've developed, it helps us to understand people a little bit.
And so sometimes we're careless and sometimes our people that we see in the media or on
TV or political leaders or what have you are occasionally careless as well in the way they
sort of stereotype peoples that are others, if you will, the way they talk about other
people.
And so I think it gives us some insight when we see the development of religion and intellectual
thought over time of how people have grappled with ideas and how they've influenced the
way we think today.
So easy for us to understand on a basic non-threatening level is the idea of enlightenment thought,
intellectual history, all of us, the way we think today is or at least the way we think
at ICS and in many countries.
They have ideas that people are responsible for their choices and for their behaviors
and what they learn and that they should have the freedom to be able to make those choices.
And this idea of freedom of choice and like religion, so crossing that intellectual and
religious themes is really an idea of this era, of the modern era, if you will, and that
people are and should be given that right.
We call it now, people will call it a natural right or a God given or an alienable right.
These are different ways I hear of it.
But that hasn't always been the way people have thought about that.
And so it's really helpful for us to get a grasp on the roots and to see how it's changed
over time to give us a responsible outlook in the present.
That's really good to just point to the fact that history is full of humans.
And so the human is part of that element from the past to the present and the future.
Okay.
So now we're into our second topic and theme.
It is social and cultural history.
And our guiding question for this theme is how have major social and cultural changes
shaped community identities and what can we learn from them today?
Okay, this is a great question.
The social and cultural history is super important and changes in cultural history that have
led to the cultures that we experience today are many and complex.
And so being able to kind of focus on how they developed helps us better understand
why people behave the way they do.
So this is sort of one of those main reasons for studying history that I tell students
is that it enables us to understand societies and peoples.
Why do they behave the way they do?
And we can learn that from studying the culture and society.
And it also gives us kind of the life of history, like so much history we think right away,
can I name all the presidents of the United States or all the prime ministers?
All the wars.
That's right, all the wars.
People will talk about the great men of history, but that is such a small snapshot of what
reality was for so many people within those times and places.
And so the study of the cultures, the study of the societies of the various eras just
fill out a picture that provide a better insight.
And sometimes we get maybe even a clearer insight into why things were done than even
individuals had in that time period because we can draw now on so many sources from that
era that people in that era may not have even had.
So I think we have a responsibility to spend some time thinking about it and trying to
understand people better.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I want to remind you of what you said earlier.
I love how you say history of thought, right?
Like how people have been thinking or evolving.
I love philosophy.
I love this.
And yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point because I feel like a lot of times when you study
history, it's like the important people in history or the important wars, right?
But less so how society functioned back then or different societies or different cultures.
I feel like that is often overlooked when you're learning history sometimes.
So absolutely.
Okay, and now on to our third theme.
Is on the same topic of history repeating itself.
What's technological revolutions?
Our guiding question for this theme is, have technological revolutions transitioned to
human societies and what can they teach us about navigating the future?
So technological change or technological development is actually a key theme that the students
in my class have to think about in each era of history because along with the interactions
of societies, there has been exchanges of culture, of thought, of learning, but there
has also been an exchange of technology.
And technology has continuously developed and gotten, what's the word I'm looking for
here, more complex and sophisticated.
And so even from earliest times, we see technology developed to solve problems.
And people, when they interact, they spread that.
So there are big moments though that we focus on as eras of technological change.
And we can think of like the age of exploration.
Like why is it that all of a sudden individuals from Western Europe could get on a boat and
travel around the world?
Well they were only able to do that from learning that had developed for a long time.
And then they put together these tools, these technological advancements to create even
more technological advancement.
So a ship that they used would have tools like a compass and an astrolab.
It has certain sails like a square sail.
That's right, exactly.
And then the ship would be designed a certain way so they could go places that people couldn't
easily go before.
All of a sudden they could do things that the majority of the world couldn't do or do
as easily and it gave an advantage.
We constantly see this change.
So then we'll see again moments of great change like during the Industrial Revolution where
technology will fundamentally change people's lives.
It leads to urbanization and it leads to a new way of work and family life and everything.
So in our present day, we're experiencing technological change.
Unfortunately we're seeing it happen so rapidly we hardly have time to respond to it.
And so what I think is healthy is putting the humanity back into our perspective.
And you're going to easily get a ton of people who kind of preach messages that are scary.
It's changing so fast it's going to overcome this or overcome that.
People have often been afraid of technology.
So even during the Industrial Revolution people fought against it because they thought it
was taking away jobs.
And we see the same thing happening now.
We think about AI and say, wait, I can get that to write that for me.
Do I need to learn to write?
But because we're dealing with people, they're the change makers and they're the creators
of even the technology and we have a responsibility to use it wisely.
And so in my perspective, the way we think about it, instead of letting it drive us with
fear, I think it should help us to be proactive in approaching it in a fashion that helps
us to improve maybe our interactions with others, but maintains that human driven purpose
and aspect behind it.
Okay.
This brings us to our fourth and final topic.
And this theme is about the rise and fall of empires.
That sounds like a video game actually.
So the theme is the rise and fall of empires.
Our final guiding question on this theme is what are some things that cause empires to
rise and fall?
Are there patterns and what does this tell us about today's world powers?
Yeah.
So this is actually one of those topics that maybe fits the idea of repetition or cycles
in history so well.
So there are actually some historians that have created a model that they believe articulates
like a cycle, a rise and fall of empires.
But there's also other thoughts about the rise and fall of empire.
So there's traditional thought, like in Chinese perspective, about the mandate of heaven and
about an empire or a dynasty having the right to rule and losing that right to rule and
it being intermixed between earthly and heavenly authorities.
And really even in Western thought, I think there's even been that perspective.
So probably the most famous example would be the fall of Rome because people love to
talk about why did Rome fall and what happened, whose fault was it?
And so there's so much written on that.
But I guess if we were going to try to pinpoint certain principles that often accompany the
rise of an empire and then like the collapse of an empire, there does seem to be certain
attributes like an empire can't rise unless there are certain, there are state forms that
have resources and military technology that can support that empire.
And so that sort of encourages the rise of an empire.
There's almost, there's regularly almost always like an ideology that accompanies that empire.
That might be a religious thought perspective or it could be a philosophical perspective,
cultural one, but that often helps to unify the empire.
So even empires by definition govern over more than, it's different than our modern
day perspective of a nation state.
That's very modern.
Empires usually governed over a variety of people groups.
And so their legitimacy for governance is a little different than like nationalism,
which would kind of inspire modern nation states, people who share a similar culture
and language and history.
But the empires, they would govern many people, so they'd have to be able to manage that.
So they would have to have political forms that would manage these vast empires and they
needed resources.
So they usually had to keep expanding.
And then empires tend to get, I'm going to use the word lazy or corrupted, or there tend
to be certain people that prosper more than others.
And then once they gained that prosperity and that wealth and that power, it's hard
to get rid of.
And they occasionally lose sight on some of the principles that helped them achieve that
success.
And so that can contribute to the fall, overextension, the inability to deal with people from outside
of the empire.
And it causes weakness and collapse and the cost of it and the lack of continued resources.
These are some of the normal sort of explanations.
And I think we can identify them in many empires, whether they fit everyone.
I can't say that.
It's probably unlikely that you could define that for all of them.
But that seems to be sort of a regular pattern.
So in today's world, I think it's really important that people think carefully in...
We're divided by nation states, right?
And people that are outside of that nation state, we kind of look at differently.
So our policies on immigration, our policies on resource use and where we're getting those
resources are important to think about for the stability of our present countries because
they create turmoil and they create conflict with other peoples.
And we have to figure out how to do that well, how to do that responsibly as we interact
and govern at least a portion of humanity.
Also, very good.
The thing that will never change, and I think you'll like this one, Mr. Annie, is paying
tribute, right?
Taxes.
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
That's something that will never change in the rise and fall of empires.
All right, we're going to shift gears a little bit.
So thank you, Mr. Andy, for helping us understand those topics and themes as it relates to our
question, does history repeat itself?
Now to end this last segment, we've asked Mr. Andy, along with Premi and I, to help
read a list we've compiled.
We all know that history is full of bizarre and often overlooked events that can seem
almost unbelievable.
Events that have not repeated, at least that we've heard of.
So with that in mind, and without further ado, we present the top 10 weirdest historical
events not covered in Mr. Andy's history class.
Mr. Andy, you have the honor of starting us off with number 10.
All right, coming in at number 10 is the War of the Bucket in 1325.
The War of the Bucket was sparked by the theft of a wooden bucket between the rival city
states of Bologna and Modena in Italy.
This theft led to a battle in which thousands died.
And number nine is the Dancing Plague of 1518, a case of mass hysteria in Brasburg, Germany,
where hundreds of people danced uncontrollably for days without rest, leading to numerous
deaths from heart attack, stroke or exhaustion.
And number eight is the Great Stink of 1858.
This was a period of time in London when the smell of untreated human waste in the Thames
River became so unbearable that it led to significant investment in the city's sewer
system.
And number seven also happened in London.
It is the Beer Flood of London in 1814.
The rupture of a brewery vat sent a wave of beer pouring through the streets, killing eight
people and destroying several houses.
Yeah, wow.
And now onto number six.
It is the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876.
This event occurred when meat pieces fell from the sky in bath country Kentucky.
This phenomenon has never been fully explained.
And coming in at number five is Operation Cat Drop in 1959.
This was a campaign by the British and Borneo where cats were parachuted from the air to
control a rat population that had grown following a campaign to combat malaria.
Number four is the Green Children of Woolpit sometime in the 12th century.
It is said that this was the appearance of two children with green-hued skin in Suffolk,
England, who spoke an unknown language and ate only beans.
And number three is the Pepsi Fleet in 1989.
In a remarkable trade deal, PepsiCo became the sixth largest military power in the world
for a brief time when it acquired 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer from
the Soviet Union in exchange for its products.
Number two is the Great Moon Hoax in 1835.
A series of articles published in the New York Sun falsely reported the discovery of
life and civilization on the moon by Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer at that time.
Finally, the number one weirdest historical event not covered in history class is the
exploding whale on the coast of Oregon in 1970.
A dead whale that had beached itself was deemed too large to bury, and authorities decided
to use half a ton of dynamite to dispose of it.
The explosion sent whale blubber flying through the air, damaging property and covering by
standards in the process.
As we end this episode, I'm reminded of this thing my world history professor in college
used to say.
He basically said the best way to describe history is by defining it as his story.
It's the idea that history and the stories recorded from the past were often shaped and
narrated by those who had the power and means to do so at that time.
I hope this episode encourages all of us to look deeper into history to find those missing
stories, and in doing so, it may help all of us have an even better understanding of
our past so that we can learn from it.
And as always, this podcast would not be possible without the hard work and support of our international
student production team.
Music and sound effects are a courtesy of Pixabay.com, a vibrant community of creatives
sharing copyright-free images, videos, and music.
And we are signing off until next time.
Be your student, and incorporate it, because your voice matters.