Chaos

Rate $20
Response 1h

$20/h

MQ International Relations student gives history lessons to High School / University students in Sydney

History
General knowledge
Philosophy
Politics
Geopolitics

Lesson location

- online

About Chaos

I'm currently a student of International Relations, and I have been studying history seriously for several years. This is my first attempt at tutoring or giving lessons, but I will upload a video of a sample lesson shortly for anyone who might be interested in better understanding my approach.

About the lesson

I will start by developing a general framework and seeing how this applies to the actual sequence of events, avoiding grand theories and ideological stances as much as possible. I have a strong grasp of European / Western history (as well as its interactions with the world at large) up to and including the present day, which along with 20th century history and the study of complex systems, is currently one of my main areas of study. History (political and cultural) has been an enduring passion of mine since probably 2003, when the Horrible Histories magazines were first published.

In Complexity theory, history is viewed as an example of a 'dancing landscape', where reference points are interdependent and continually adapting to changes in their environment (i.e. other reference points). If you want optimal beach conditions, should you go when the weather is good? This is what most people would do, but this in itself creates problems (i.e. too many people). So one might adjust to this situation by going when the weather was slightly below optimal, but there were fewer people. There is a lot more to be said about this concept, but I can cover it in more detail later.*

I will just give one concrete historical example about 'Emperor' Norton of 19th century San Francisco. When rice crops failed in China, prices in America rose significantly and Norton (a relatively wealthy businessman, and so fairly 'high' on the landscape) seized the opportunity to buy a shipment coming in from Peru. His investment backfired, however, when several other shipments from Peru arrived shortly after (because others were also adjusting to the landscape), causing the price to decline rapidly. Not only that, but the rice itself (as a point on the landscape) is not something that you can just hoard until the market improves, like you could with, for instance, gold or oil, because it is perishable and easily reproducible, and thus its value is always declining. Norton's wealth plummeted (falling from his relative advantage, or 'peak'), and he died in poverty.

These kinds of fluctuations are central to my overall approach in investigating and understanding historical processes. For reference, the theories of Great Men, or Great Civilisations, are not discounted entirely, but can instead be seen as always being secondary to the shifting and often opaque contours of the whole environment. The more elements are added to this environment, the higher the number of possible outcomes, the greater the complexity, the greater the difficulty of understanding which inputs (or combination of inputs) caused which outputs, and so on.

*Scott E. Page 'Complexity and Diversity'.

MQ International Relations student gives history lessons to High School / University students in Sydney

Lesson location

About Chaos

About the lesson

Rates

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online

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MQ International Relations student gives history lessons to High School / University students in Sydney

Lesson location

About Chaos

About the lesson

Rates

Rate

Pack rates

online

Other tutors in History

Qasim

Alex Hartman

Arthur

Alaa

Masa

Layla

Natasha

Harry

Aidan

Kamal

Marta

Sara

Lopez

Leila

Victoria

Robert

Eliane

Ken

Dyana

Yousr

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