In this lesson, you will be introduced to our second in depth geography section concerning the World during the first portion of the Great Thirty Years War

Fortify your navigation skills:

I know there are few of you who are saying Mr Greum way do I have to study Geography this is the age of smartphones, thus is it really necessary to have a sound understanding of practical navigational skills. There is an app for that… I ask you what is your plan if you don’t have service or your battery is dead?

If you know geography, you can rest assured that you’ll have better navigational skills than your mobile. You also won’t have to worry about getting lost if your phone runs out of battery because you’ll know how to read a map; provided you have one….

You will start developing cultural literacy:

Geography provides you with a context in which you can understand the world around us. Put the News in Context: How are you supposed to understand the what is occurring news if you don’t know geography? Consider that three months ago many did not know where to find your state and its capital on a map. Such a lack of core knowledge is disconcerting.

One of the grand things about geography is that it merges together numerous different subjects under its one head. You’ll get to learn a little bit about everything from physics, biology, economics, sociology, politics, art, political science, chemistry, and history.

Context for History:

History isn’t just a collection linear events that ere predestined to occur; it ramifications for the present and future. Studying geography helps to put the course of world history into perspective and enables us to understand the currents of history as it ebbs and flows across the surface of the earth.

Better Understanding of the Physical World:

One of the central aspects of geography is understanding the physical world. This knowledge will increase your understanding of things like natural disasters, climate, and the water cycle. Geography allows you to understand the place where you live. People settle in specific places because of the landscape.

Appreciate the wondrous Diversity of the World:

The world is brimming with vibrant cultures that express the diversity of God’s Creation. The study of geography enables student to explore these culture’s societies and appreciate them for their regional variety. Human culture is fundamentally place-based: the land determines or influences the cuisine, clothing, architecture, even social relationships.

Now that you have a better understanding of why it is prudent to study geography, let us take a look at our first set of maps:

Many of find the study of the Great War confusing because the world map looked different in 1914 than it does today.

Our modern map is a direct result of that conflict and those current national boundaries create hostilities to this day. A significant example of this is the endless Israeli/Arab conflict.

What is interesting about this map is that it includes regional languages. If one is aware of the news, we can use this map to understand the regional conflict occurring in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Notice the extent the Kurdish language crosses multiple national boundaries. These artificial boards that were a result of the Great Thirty Years War, arbitrarily split cultural communities, which created the conditions for conflict.

Moving up the map to the Western Europe, we notice that, for the most part, languages reflect national borders. If we, however, reverse the historical timeline to 1700 we observe in this map that things were very different.

Next, we’ll push the timeline forward to observe two maps of Europe from 1815 to1914. Here we see that some empires have swallowed up entire linguistic groups.  Notice the light purple colours that represent ethnic German populations. Those populations are scatted throughout Eastern Europe and deep into Russia. It is these dispersed German populations that would serve as the bases for The Third Reich’s policy of Lebensraum or living space.

Pressing a few years forward to 1919, we see new nations carved out of old empires that are based on those same linguistic groups we observed in the map of Europe in from 1815 to1914.

From this brief introduction to geography, you should be able to discern the how national borders and nations change over the course of history. 

For the remainder of the assignment explore the links in the lesson plan in order to further enhance your understanding of these concepts and to aid you in filling out the map assigned for homework. Remember you may use graphics programs to complete that assignment. Also, don’t forget about the Seterra website to hone your geographical knowledge for the upcoming competition to obtain the coveted homework pass.