History in Living Colour - Friday, Period 3 (Week 4)

[veryarthurdent.livejournal.com]

"Okay, change of plan." He'd given up working on this week's program in exchange for trying to figure out how exactly he'd become a woman. He got carried away. "Genghis Khan will join us later in the semester. Instead, after yesterday's little oddity, let's talk about that. Pick a historical event that you know of. Doesn't have to be on Earth or this universe. Something from home if you'd like. Anything you want. Now have a good think about it and I want you to tell the class what you think would have gone differently if the people involved had their genders swapped. Male, female, none of the above, all of the above, any gender you can think of. Would Shakespeare have been so popular under a king instead of a queen? Would the Roman Empire have grown so far under a female leader? Would it have fallen?"

At the end of class, he added, "Wear something you can run in next week."

Comments

Re: Discussion Topic - Gender Changes

[futureclone]

"Alexander the Great would have never become king if he was a woman," Alex said. "The crown would have passed to Philip's only other son, who was mentally disabled, or else to someone else entirely, possibly causing tribal warfare, and Macedonia would have either become completely ineffectual or collapsed like a flan in a cupboard instead of taking over most of the known world."