CrashCourse
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2015–2021
11:11 · 18M views · Jan 26, 2012
The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.
HN recommends the series as a funny, coherent high-school-level overview of world history that teaches a lot in a few hours.
6 comments from Hacker News
I'm quite surprised that nobody has suggested Crash Course. The first one they did - Crash Course World History by John Green - is really great, and I personally found both endearing and funny ( this video ). It's not advanced material, mostly high-school level, but you've got to crawl before you can walk, and it can help to fill in some missing spots if you have them, or give a high-level overview or recap in an entertaining way. Example: I'd done basic biology, but taken instead chemistry and physics (where I was, you only did all three if you wanted to go into medicine). I used Crash Course Biology ( [LINK] ) to back-fill my knowledge before studying a masters in Bioinformatics.
Interesting is also that you can learn history much better outside of school. In contrast to education institutions youtubers for instance usually succeed at presenting the stuff in an interesting fashion. And if you listen to these kind of presentations in several languages or from diverse political influenced sources then you can also get a rather objective overview. This series taught me in a few hours what I didn't learn in school over years: this video
I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful... > that thinks too-logically about politics There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: [LINK] If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source: - this video - [LINK] - [LINK] For understanding the law, these are a good start: - [LINK] - [LINK] As an exercise, reading both of these and weighing them is a good one. - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] But I really can't actually drop a list of sources on you and give you what you need to have the instinct of thinking
For learning historical narratives, Youtube is honestly pretty great. Crash Course[1] is good for a broad overview. It presents a fairly coherent narrative and the advantage of this is that you can then relate any other historical narrative to this skeleton. Extra History[2] is a good example of a channel that presents narratives of specific incidents. If you are looking for a channel focusing on one particular period from lots of different angles, The Great War is not bad[3]. But none of this is actually going to teach you the skill of inquiry and skeptically reading different competing historical narratives. You kinda do need a class for that. A friend of mine is building a startup to make running one easier: [LINK] [1] this video , [LINK] , and [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
If you're interesting in this kind of history. I can recommend the youtube series: Crash Course - World history. this video Only 42 videos of around 12 minutes. Gave me a good brush up on history.