1. The Flow & Impact of Economics on our World from a Historical Perspective My Holes and Goals

2. Personal Holes and Goals One of my weaknesses is the effects of economics on history and historical trends. So, I created a course that not only investigates the impact of economics on world history, but also examines how economics are directly ingrained into history, current events, and our world today.

3. Essential Questions 1) How much do economic trends dictate history? 2) What impact has economics had on past historical events? 3) Does the flow of economics have any impact on history? 4) How has past economic events created the world we live in today?

4. Enduring Understanding After my Holes and Goals course, I now fully comprehend that the world would not be the way it is today without the impact of economics on the history of the world. – I now recognize the direct correlation between economics and history. – In addition, I now understand that the flow of economics caused many major historical events to occur. – I also have a handle on the fact that economics has had more impact on history then I previously was aware of. – Overall, I came out of Content Investigations with a broadened sense of comprehension my social studies content area as a whole.

5. Product #1 I acted as a journalist and wrote a newspaper article; Afghan Economics: The Seed to Success (my resource was The Comparative Political Economy of Development: Africa and South Asia). This newspaper article focused on the question- Would altering the Opium Revolution in Afghanistan lead to a free-standing state?

6. Product #2 I created a tri-circular Venn diagram based off my resource of The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner. This Venn diagram included the similarities and differences between the three most influential economists whose theories changed economics and the history of the world. These three theorists are Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes.

7. Product #3 I created a large-scale timeline of major economic events in history and dubbed this product, The Historical Flow of Economics. This timeline starts in 20,000 B.C.E. and ends right before the twenty-first century C.E.. I used the resource of A Concise Economic History of the World to pick extremely influential events and then date them across my visual timeline that represents the peaks of economic progress and influence on history.

8. Product #4 For my final product, I created a visual slideshow that represented the main points of an article that I used as one of my course resources (Ottoman State Finances in European Perspective 1500- 1914). While this is a dense article, by creating a slideshow I increased my comprehension while using visual images to further my understanding of how economics led to the downfall of a great empire.

9. Favorite Resource Personally, my favorite resource was an article, The New Silk Road, which I found in an issue of National Geographic. While I had a fair amount of prior knowledge of the historical components of the Silk Road, I did not realize the economic impacts that these ancient trade routes still have today. With the current construction of a transcontinental railway, these ancient commerce ties will be exaggerated (this invokes both current and past regional and cultural relationships) Additionally, the photographs that National Geographic has with this article are phenomenonal.

10. Reflections/Questions From a reflective standpoint, I can admit that I greatly underestimated the influence that economics had on world history. – This leads me to question… How current economic trends are affecting our world today? How will historians look upon the impact of economics on the twenty-first century? Are there any trends in the rise and fall of empires that have direct relations to economics?