When I was at West Point, this was everyone's History TEE (final):
Explain the history of the world from the Babylonians through present day. Ensure you use specific examples. You have three hours. Good luck!
This might more properly be posted under Summer Reading, but the subject seems too urgent to let it wait until everyone's putting on suntan lotion.
If for some reason you've been unable or unwilling to study world history all semester and your only choices are to flunk out or survive the on-line exam by any means necessary, then you might want to borrow (i.e., plagiarize) from an out-of-print book titled
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy. The following passages are an example of what should be good for at least a C Plus. I've left in Cuppy's footnotes, which could make all the difference:
Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedonia was born in 356 B.C., on the sixth day of the month of Lous. He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time. (Footnote) He did this in order to impress Greek culture upon them. Alexander was not strictly a Greek and he was not cultured, but that was his story, and who am I to deny it?
Alexander's father Philip II subdued the Greeks after they had knocked themselves out in the Peloponnesian War and appointed himself Captain General so that he could uphold the ideals of Hellas. The main ideal of Hellas was to get rid of Philip, but he didn't count that one.
Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.
[Footnote] Alexander was often extremely brutal to his captives, whom he sold into slavery, tortured to death, or forced to learn Greek.
Hannibal
The Romans were stern and dignified, living hard, frugal lives and adhering to the traditional Latin virtues, gravitas, pietas, simplicitas, and adultery.
[Footnote] Carthage was governed by its rich men and was therefore a plutocracy. Rome was also governed by its rich men and was therefore a republic.
[Footnote] The Phoenicians employed an alphabet of twenty-one consonants. They left no literature. You can't be literary without a few vowels.
Hamilcar also told Hannibal about elephants and how you must always have plenty of these animals to scare the enemy. He attributed much of his own success to elephants and believed they would have won the First Punic War for him if things hadn't gone slightly haywire; for the war had turned into a naval affair. But even when the fighting was on land, the Romans did not scare nearly so well as expected. The Romans had learned about elephants while fighting Pyrrhus, whose elephants defeated him in 275 B.C., and even before that, in Alexander's time, King Porus had been undone by his own elephants. Thus, if history had taught any one thing up to that time, it was never to use elephants in war.
Then Hamilcar … was drowned in 228 B.C. while crossing a stream with a herd of elephants.
Taking elephants across the Alps is not as much fun as it sounds. The Alps are difficult enough when alone, and elephants are peculiarly fitted for not crossing them.
Whenever a thousand or so of his men would fall off an Alp, Hannibal would tell the rest to cheer up, the elephants were all right. If someone had given him a shove at the right moment, much painful history might have been avoided.
[Footnote] Livy informs us that Hannibal split the huge Alpine rocks with vinegar to break a path for the elephants. Vinegar was a high explosive in 218 B.C., but not before or since.
Most of the original group [of elephants] succumbed to the climate, and Hannibal was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what he had done with the elephants they sent before. Sometimes, when he hadn't an elephant to his name, he would manage to wangle a few from somewhere, a feat which strikes me as his greatest claim to our attention.
And he [Hannibal] probably believed, up to the very end, that everything might still come out right if he only had a few you-know-whats.
Cleopatra
Julius Caesar stayed in Egypt from early October until late in June settling affairs of state. It was a boy and they called him Caesarion, or Little Caesar, so Cleopatra now regarded herself as practically engaged. Caesar might have married her, but he had a wife at home. There's always something.
[Footnote] The first of Caesar's three marriages — to Cornelia, a very rich girl — resulted tragically. Sylla, Caesar's enemy, confiscated her dowry soon after the wedding.
Nero
In some respects, Nero was ahead of his time. He boiled his drinking water to remove the impurities and cooled it with unsanitary ice to put them back in. He renamed the month of April after himself, calling it Neroneus, but the idea never caught on because April is not Neroneus and there is no use pretending that it is. During his reign of fourteen years, the outlying provinces are said to have prospered. They were farther away.
[Footnote] At the age of twelve Nero had shown a lively interest in the arts, particularly music, painting, sculpture, and poetry. Why was nothing done about this?