The Best Episodes of Crash Course: World History

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9.0/10(8 votes)
#1 - World War II, A War for Resources: Crash Course World History 220
S2:E2012/14/2014
John Green teaches you about World War II, and some of the causes behind the war. In a lot of ways, WWII was about resources, especially food. The expansionist aggression of both Germany and Japan was in a lot of ways about resources. There were other reasons, to be sure, but the idea that the Axis needed more food can't be ignored.
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8.3/10(9 votes)
#2 - Climate Change, Chaos, and The Little Ice Age: Crash Course World History 206
S2:E68/21/2014
John Green teaches you about the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling that occurred from the 13th to the 19th centuries. This cooling was likely caused by a number of factors, including unusual solar activity and volcanic eruptions. The Little Ice Age greatly impacted human social orders, especially during the 17th century. When the climate changed, and the weather became unpredictable, the world changed profoundly. Poor harvests led to hunger, which led to even less productivity, which even resulted in violent upheaval in a lot of places. All this from a little change in the temperature? Definitely.
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8.2/10(8 votes)
#3 - How World War I Started: Crash Course World History 209
S2:E99/12/2014
John Green teaches you about World War I and how it got started. Crash Course doesn't usually talk much about dates, but the way that things unfolded in July and August of 1914 is kind of important to understanding the Great War. You'll learn about Franz Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, the Black Hand, and why the Serbian nationalists wanted to kill the poor Archduke. You'll also learn who mobilized first and who exactly started the war. Sort of. Actually, there's no good answer to who started the war, but we give it a shot anyway.
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8.2/10(8 votes)
#4 - The Railroad Journey and the Industrial Revolution: Crash Course World History 214
S2:E1411/1/2014
John Green teaches you about railroads and some of the ways they changed the world, and how they were a sort of microcosm for the Industrial Revolution as a whole. Prior to the invention of steam-powered railroads, pretty much all locomotion had been muscle-powered. You either walked where you wanted to go or rode on an animal to get where you were going. The railroad changed human perception of time and space, making long-distance travel much faster and easier. Railroads also changed habits, including increasing reading. People needed some sort of distraction to ensure they didn't have to talk to other people on the train. Like any new technology, railroads also scared people. All kinds of fears surrounded rail travel, but over time, people got over them. And the quality of boiler manufacturing improved, so the trains exploded less often, which also made people feel safer.
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8.0/10(12 votes)
#5 - Globalization II - Good or Bad?: Crash Course World History #42
S1:E4211/8/2012
John asks whether globalization is a net positive for humanity. While the new global economy has created a lot of wealth and lifted a lot of people out of poverty, it also has some effects that aren't so hot. Wealth disparity, rising divorce rates, environmental damage, and new paths for the spread of disease. So does all this outweigh the economic benefits, the innovation, and the relative peace that come with interconnected economies? As usual, the answer is not simple. In this case, we're living in the middle of the events we're discussing, so it's hard to know how it's going to turn out.
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8.0/10(10 votes)
#6 - Money & Debt: Crash Course World History 202
S2:E27/17/2014
John Green teaches about filthy, filthy lucre. Money. And Debt. So, what is money? And what is it for? And why do we use money? And why does it all disappear so quickly after payday? John will look into 75% of these questions, and if he doesn't come up with answers, we'll get into some interesting ideas along the way, at least. This week we'll investigate whether money displaces barter, then leads to war, slavery, and what we think of as civilized social orders. We'll also see what old Adam Smith thinks of big money, no whammies, this week on Crash Course.
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The 20 WORST Episodes of Crash Course: World History

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8.0/10(11 votes)
#7 - Disease! Crash Course World History 203
S2:E37/24/2014
John Green teaches you about disease and the effects that disease has had in human history. Disease has been with man since the beginning, and it has shaped the way humans operate in a lot of ways. John will teach you about the Black Death, the Great Dying, and the modern medical revolution that has changed the world.
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8.0/10(8 votes)
#8 - Drought and Famine: Crash Course World History 208
S2:E89/5/2014
John Green teaches you a little bit about drought, which is a natural weather phenomenon, and famine, which is almost always the result of human activity. Throughout human history, when food shortages strike humanity, there was food around. There was just a failure to connect those people with the food that would keep them alive. There are a lot of reasons that food distribution breaks down, and John is going to teach you about them in the context of the late-19th century famines that struck British India.
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8.0/10(8 votes)
#9 - Who Started World War I: Crash Course World History 210
S2:E109/20/2014
John Green teaches you WHY World War I started. Or tries to anyway. With this kind of thing, it's kind of hard to assign blame to any one of the nations involved. Did the fault lie with Austria-Hungary? Germany? Russia? Julius Caesar? One thing we can say for sure is that you can't blame the United States of America for this one. Woohoo! Well, you can hardly blame the US.
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8.0/10(8 votes)
#10 - Water and Classical Civilizations: Crash Course World History 222
S2:E221/21/2015
John Green teaches you about water! So, we talk about resources a lot on Crash Course, and today is no exception. It turns out people can't live without water, which means it's absolutely necessary for civilization. Today John talks about water in the context of classical civilizations, but not like Greece or Rome or something. We're talking about the Maya civilization in Central America, and the Khmer civilization in what is now Cambodia. So this is an awesome video, OK?
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7.9/10(19 votes)
#11 - The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1
S1:E11/26/2012
John Green investigates the dawn of human civilization. John looks into how people gave up hunting and gathering to become agriculturalists, and how that change has influenced the world we live in today. Also, there are some jokes about cheeseburgers.
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7.9/10(11 votes)
#12 - Archdukes, Cynicism, and World War I: Crash Course World History #36
S1:E369/27/2012
John Green teaches you about the war that was supposed to end all wars. Instead, it solved nothing and set the stage for the world to be back at war just a couple of decades later. As an added bonus, World War I changed the way people look at the world, and normalized cynicism and irony. John will teach you how the assassination of an Austrian Archduke kicked off a new kind of war that involved more nations and more people than any war that came before. New technology like machine guns, airplanes, tanks, and poison gas made killing more efficient than ever. Trench warfare and modern weapons led to battles in which tens of thousands of soldiers were killed in a day, with no ground gained for either side. World War I washed away the last vestiges of 19th-century Romanticism and paved the way for the 20th-century modernism that we all know and find to be cold and off-putting.
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7.9/10(12 votes)
#13 - Globalization I - The Upside: Crash Course World History #41
S1:E4111/1/2012
John Green teaches you about globalization, a subject so epic, so, um, global, it requires two videos. In this video, John follows the surprisingly complex path of a t-shirt as it crisscrosses the world before coming to rest on your doorstep, and eventually in your dresser. The story of the t-shirt and its manufacture in far-flung places like China, Guatemala, and India is a microcosm of what's going on in the global economy. Globalization is a bit of a mixed bag, and there have definitely been winners and losers along the way. In this episode, John will talk about some of the benefits that have come along with it. Next week, he'll get into some of the less-positive side effects of globalization.
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7.8/10(11 votes)
#14 - World War II: Crash Course World History #38
S1:E3810/11/2012
John Green teaches you about World War II, aka The Great Patriotic War, aka The Big One. So how did this war happen? And what does it mean? We've all learned the facts about World War II many times over, thanks to repeated classroom coverage, the History channel, and your grandfather (or maybe great-grandfather) showing you that Nazi bayonet he used to keep in his sock drawer and telling you a bunch of age-inappropriate stories about his harrowing war experiences. So, why did the Axis powers think forceful expansion was a good idea? (they were hungry). So why did this thing shake out in favor of the Allies? Hint: it has to do with the fact that it was a world war. Germany and Japan made some pretty serious strategic errors, such as invading Russia and attacking the United States, and those errors meant that pretty much the whole world was against them.
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7.8/10(11 votes)
#15 - USA vs USSR Fight! The Cold War: Crash Course World History #39
S1:E3910/18/2012
John Green teaches you about the Cold War, which was occasionally hot, but on average, it was just cool. In the sense of its temperature. It was by no means cool, man. After World War II, there were basically two big geopolitical powers left to divide up the world. And divide they did. The United States and the Soviet Union divvied up Europe in the aftermath of the war and then proceeded to spend the next 45 years fighting over the rest of the world. It was a great ideological struggle, with the US on the side of capitalism and profit, and the USSR pushing Communism, so-called. While both sides presented themselves as the good guy in this situation, the COLD reality is that there are no good guys. Both parties to the Cold War engaged in forcible regime changes, built up vast nuclear arsenals, and basically got up to dirty tricks.
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7.8/10(8 votes)
#16 - War and Civilization: Crash Course World History 205
S2:E58/9/2014
John Green investigates war, and what exactly it may or may not be good for. Was war a result of human beings organizing into larger and more complex agricultural social orders, or did war maybe create agriculture and "civilization?" It's hard to know for sure, but it's sure fun to think about.
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7.8/10(8 votes)
#17 - Humans and Energy: Crash Course World History 207
S2:E78/28/2014
Stan Muller subs for John Green and teaches you about energy and humanity. Today we discuss the ideas put forth by Alfred Crosby in his book, Children of the Sun. Historically, almost all of the energy that humans use has been directly or indirectly generated by the sun, whether that be food energy from plants, wind energy, direct solar energy, or fossil fuels. Stan looks into these different sources and talks about how humanity will continue to use energy in the future as populations grow and energy resources become more scarce.
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7.8/10(8 votes)
#18 - The End of Civilization (In the Bronze Age): Crash Course World History 211
S2:E1110/3/2014
John Green teaches you about the Bronze Age civilization in what we today call the middle east, and how the vast, interconnected civilization that encompassed Egypt, The Levant, and Mesopotamia came to an end. What's that you say? There was no such civilization? Your word against ours. John will argue that through a complex network of trade and alliances, there was a loosely confederated and relatively continuous civilization in the region. Why it all fell apart was a mystery. Was it the invasion of the Sea People? An earthquake storm? Or just a general collapse, to which complex systems are prone? We'll look into a few of these possibilities. As usual with Crash Course, we may not come up with a definitive answer, but it sure is a lot of fun to think about.
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7.8/10(8 votes)
#19 - The Rise of the West and Historical Methodology: Crash Course World History 212
S2:E1210/17/2014
John Green talks about the methods of writing history by looking at some of the ways that history has been written about the rise of the West. But first, he has to tell you what the West is. And then he has to explain the Rise of the West. And then he gets down to talking about the different ways that historians and other academics have explained how the West became dominant in the world. He'll look at explanations from Acemoglu and Robinson's "Why Nations Fail," Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order," and Ian Morris's "Why the West Rules, for Now."
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7.8/10(8 votes)
#20 - War and Nation Building in Latin America: Crash Course World History 225
S2:E252/11/2015
John Green teaches you about nation-building and nationalism in Latin America. Sometimes, the nations of Latin America get compared to the nations of Europe and are found wanting. This is kind of a silly comparison. The rise of democratic, economically powerful nations in Europe came about under a very different set of circumstances than the way nations arose in Latin America, so the regions are necessarily a lot different. But why? John will explore whether it was a lack of international war which impeded Latin America's growth, which sounds like a crazy thing to say, but you should hear him out.
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7.7/10(14 votes)
#21 - The Amazing Life and Strange Death of Captain Cook: Crash Course World History #27
S1:E277/26/2012
John Green teaches you about the life and death of one of history's great explorers, Captain James Cook of the British Navy. He charted large swaths of the Pacific ocean, laid claim to Australia and New Zealand, and died a bizarre death in the Sandwich Islands, which are now called the Hawaiian Islands. Exactly how and why Captain Cook was killed in Hawaii is a long-running historical debate. John presents two interpretations of the event and talks about what the differing interpretations say about history. It turns out how the story is told depends on who is doing the storytelling, and people from different backgrounds can interpret events in very different ways. Also, there is a celebration and a mustache involved in this episode, so you definitely don't want to miss it.
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7.7/10(10 votes)
#22 - Rethinking Civilization - Crash Course World History 201
S2:E17/11/2014
John Green returns to teaching World History! This week, we'll be talking about the idea of civilization, some of the traditional hallmarks of so-called civilization, and why some people would choose to live outside the civilization model. It turns out that not everyone who lives outside of what we traditionally think of as a "civilized" social order is necessarily a barbarian! To defuse any tension you may be feeling, I'll just tell you now that the Mongols are back. You'll learn about Zomia, swidden agriculture, and even a little about anarchy!
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7.7/10(9 votes)
#23 - War & Human Nature: Crash Course World History 204
S2:E47/31/2014
John Green teaches you about war! Specifically, John talks about whether humanity is naturally warlike, hard-wired to kill, or if perhaps war is a cultural construct. John will talk about the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate, the effects that war has on human social orders, and the effects that war has on individuals. So is war human nature? Watch and find out what we have to say about it.
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7.7/10(9 votes)
#24 - Asian Responses to Imperialism: Crash Course World History 213
S2:E1310/24/2014
John Green teaches you about Imperialism, but not from the perspective of the colonizers. This week John looks at some Asian perspectives on Imperialism; specifically, writers from countries that were colonized by European powers. We'll look at the writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani from the Middle East, Liang Qichao from China, and Rabindranath Tagore from India. these voices from the countries that were colonized give us a sense of how conquered people saw their conquerors, and give an insight into what these nations learned from being dominated by Europe. It's pretty interesting, OK? A lot of this episode is drawn from a fascinating book by Pankaj Mishra called The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. You should read it.
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7.7/10(10 votes)
#25 - Congo and Africa's World War: Crash Course World History 221
S2:E211/16/2015
John Green teaches you about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which used to be Zaire, which used to be The Belgian Congo, which used to be the Congo Free State, which used to be the region surrounding the Congo River Basin in central Africa. So the history of this place is a little convoluted. The history of Congo is central to the history of central Africa, and the Congo Wars embroiled neighboring countries like Uganda and Rwanda. John will talk you through the history of Congo and the region.
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