笔记如下:1、偶像与幻想除了建立庞大的帝国,亚历山大大帝的第二个伟大之处,在于其死后的影响,除了独裁统治、希腊语、贸易打通,更为深远的是他对后人的影响(ideals of masculinity and heroism)。拿破仑入侵埃及,庞培大帝用发油保持其凌乱的男孩式发型,都是在以亚历山大大帝为标杆(Millennium after his death in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt, not because he particularly needed to invade Egypt but because he wanted to do what Alexander had done. And long before Napoleon, the Romans really worshipped Alexander particularly the Roman General Pompey, AKA Pompeius Magnus, AKA Pompey the Great... he literally tried to emulate Alexander's boyishly disheveled hair style)。亚历山大大帝成为“热门偶像/幻想对象”的原因,在于没有留下任何文字记录,同时,又在他没有老去或者失败的时候死去。正如《埃及》那一集所提到的,"hidden god do better"。 但是课程同时在最后部分提醒,我们必须要清醒认识到历史是由我们自己创造的,要有自己的主见,不要盲目崇拜,尤其是不怎么样的某些偶像(全程引用金卡戴珊,暗指的就是这位?)。(Of course it is not just Assassin Creed and Call of Duty that celebrate the idea that ennoble violence that can lead to a better world. Alexander is Great because others decided he is Great.Because they chose to admire and emulate him.We make Alexander the Great just as today we make people great when we admire them and try to emulate them. History has traditionally been in the business of finding and celebrating great men, and only occasionally great women, but this obsession with Greatness is troubling to me.It wrongly implies, first, history is make primarily by men and secondly, that history is made primarily by celebrated people,which of course makes us all want to be celebrities. Thankfully we are left behind the idea that the best way to become an icon is to butcher people and conquer a lot of land. But the ideals that we are embraced instead are not necessarily worth celebrating either.(Kim Kardashian as a hint all through). All of which is to say we decide what to worship and what to care about and what to pay attention to. We decide whether to care about the situation. Alexander couldn't make history in a vacuum, and neither can anyone else.) 2、女性的历史地位课程再次强调女性的历史地位(《美国历史》中,女性和奴隶常常被同时提及),但表示大家正在为改善而努力。课程提到,现在的历史学家们之所以减少使用伟人(the Great),是为了避免其中暗含的对女性的偏见("one man's Great is generally another man's Terrible.And also The Great has some misogynistic implications, like, it's almost always associated with men.You never hear about Cleopatra the Great or Elizabeth the Great. Sure their is Catherine the Great of Russia. But for her masculine Greatness she was saddled with the completely untrue rumor...")而在公开信环节,课程专门给出了“给女士的公开信”,以期待“未来会更好”("You have been really unfairly neglected like in Crash Course World History and also in text books World History everywhere.Like there will e a whole chapter exploring the exploits of the great men and then at the end there will be one sentence that like also women were doing stuff at the time and it was important, but we don't really know what it was... History has been very good at marginalizing and demeaning women and we are going to fight against that as we move forward in the story of human civilization")在历史中,女性的记录之所以少而较多地含有偏见,也许是因为农业时代才开始有文字记录,而文字记录的记录权掌握在受教育的男性手中(农业时代开始,人类一直处于父系社会,在整个族群历史中,女性常常被当做更低一级的群体)——在女性可以普遍“接受和男性一样的教育、承担和男性一样的工作”的时代,尽管有种种限制,我们仍然看到,和已有文字记录的其他时代相比,女性在社会地位方面有了多么大的提升。而且,更多的人们(如马拉拉),还在为仍受到不平等待遇的女性们,努力。