Clip of the Week

Well, the original video I had picked out for Clip of the Week, "10 Centuries in 5 Minutes", got pulled down before I could post it. Typical. To be honest, I'm surprised it took this long for it to happen to one of my clips.

So, to get the general idea of what was an awesome video, I'm posting two separate clips, which together show the incredible border changes that have occurred in Europe over the past two millennia.





A couple of things are striking to me about the videos, which despite not being quite as professional as "10 Centuries in 5 Minutes" are nevertheless mesmerizing. First of all, we tend to take stability (whether economic, political, geographic, or otherwise) for granted in the United States. Our borders here at home have remained essentially unchanged for generations, and the last 20 years (post-USSR) have been relatively stable in Europe and the rest of the world as well (the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia marking exceptions). But things can and always do change; stability can be wrenched from us nearly without warning, with incredible implications.

But besides that, while watching the original video, I couldn't keep my eyes off of Germany (or the area that became Germany). For centuries, the northern portion of the former Holy Roman Empire essentially consisted of large swaths of unincorporated territory, with a few semi-organized kingdoms popping up here and there. Then Otto von Bismarck (one of the most fascinating and important statesmen in history, in my opinion) came along, and the rest is history. If you want the "short version" of the German story, just watch the second video clip by itself. It's pretty shocking to see how powerful a previous non-entity became in a very short time. The 20th century global story was largely dominated by Germany, which by any account of European history was the new kid on the block. Crazy.