Akilah Beasley
HIS201

In Retrospect: USA, Africa, and the World
The first semester of my freshmen year was an extremely enlightening one. There was an extremely significant course that I took; it was my USA, Africa, and the World History Class. This class was one of my most significant classes because I was able to learn about many different aspects of history. This course allowed me to ponder all of the attributes that makes a civilization prosperous; I was able to apply this when I played the computer game, Civilization IV in my English class.
Technology played an enormous role is this course; there were time when we were asked to post blogs on the computer about a specific part of history that we were studying. We also took all of our quizzes on the computer; we were able to turn in many assignments on the computer as well. This course we paralleled with my English class– I was able to use the things that I’ve learned in history in my essays for my English class. My English class was extremely high-tech. Most of our work was done on the computer, we played games that reflected aspects of history and we were able to do creative assignments based on those games.
I’ve written two essays for USA, Africa, and the World this semester. Both of those essays were based on topics that caught my interest. The first essay was based around an ancient artifact from the year two thousand nine. I pretended that I was an archeologist and that I discovered an ancient artifact from the year two thousand nine. I had to observe the artifact and try to infer how life was for people living in two thousand nine. My artifact was a flash drive named SanDisk; I was able to retrieve music, documents, and pictures from the flash drive. I was able to infer that people living during the year two thousand nine were very diverse because they listened to many different genres of music. I was also able to find out that the first African American President was elected that year because the owner had a document about the entire election on their flash drive. Writing this essay helped me to further examine the important aspects of today’s society. This assignment forced me to ponder significant characteristics of my generation and evaluate them. It also enabled me to imagine how someone living in the future would view our society.
The Second essay that I wrote in this course was a Cultural analysis paper. This paper focused on the gender roles of the Ancient Chinese, and how one woman was able to alter the ways that those people viewed gender by becoming the first female Emperor. The female Emperor’s name was Wu Zetian; she was an extremely fair leader who cared for her empire like a mother would care for their child. She was the first and only female Emperor; she ruled over the Chinese empire during its most peaceful time frame. She also highlighted the accomplishments of many powerful women—this is never done before—Emperor Wu was able to make people understand that women were capable of being powerful and strong. I was able to learn a lot while writing this paper. I was amazed that there was actually a female Emperor; I knew that there were empresses, but I never knew that there was a female Emperor. I also realized that this scenario is one of many that contributed to the freedom and respect that women in today’s society have.
I loved being in the USA, Africa, and the World class. This class was one of my favorites and I believe that my performance in this class was good. I look forward to taking the second part of this class next semester.

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