Final Blog Post

Creativity is Necessary in order to gain a Unique Perspective on History

In world history this year, I thought we would learn about about a new topic every quarter, turns out we would learn about a new topic almost every week. From Religion to Revolution to Colonization we were always reading articles, watching videos, or doing worksheets. We gained a unique perspective on past events and current events through research and inquiry. I found myself in a difficult position during trials and roleplays, I had to abandon my personal opinion and become an entirely different person during the French/ Haitian Revolution Roleplay.

“Slaves cannot be free. Slaves are.... slaves. They’ve been slaves since before I was born. They think that they can... what? Live in society like the rest of us? They’d never be accepted, the only job they would get would be working as a servant. Which is what they are already! What would they do if they didn’t have us? We give them a purpose to be here! We give them jobs and food and a place to sleep. If they fight, they’ll no longer have the things they need to survive in life.” For the rest of my responses click here

It was very hard for me to write this, in the beginning. I didn’t like being that person, but after I started writing I thought to myself ‘what would a privileged, naive women during the French Revolution sound like?’ and the ideas just started flowing. This is one example of being put out of my comfort zone, and instead of seeing things from my own perspective, I was seeing things from multiple peoples perspective. Which ultimately provided the unique perspective I mentioned before.  

I think that the creativity required for this class was something that was not essentially talked about, but was something that was required in order to gain an understanding for the class. Almost every day we wrote a response to a quote or how we felt about a certain topic, and with every journal our minds grew. Another example is during the Cortes trial, we had to put aside our personal opinions and work hard to defend our given group. For my reflection on the trial click here.

Sometimes we were given the opportunity to really explore our creative sides and write plays, poetry, letters, we went on our own and created these things. We usually wrote the poetry as an opposite to something we had already read, for my poem The Somebodies, a response to The Nobodies click here. For my poem Modern Day USA, a response to The White Mans Burden click here