Now I'm teaching AP World History at the fabled Los Angeles magnet school LACES (Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies).  It's my fourth year at LACES teaching this wonderful subject, and it cries out for blogging!  (one blog per century maybe?)  Anyway I'm going to resist the tendency to write long posts this time around.  Suffice it to say that I like LACES a lot.  I am struck by the fact that 30 years ago I worked in a group called the Integration Project to integrate the LA schools and now I teach at one of the outcomes of that struggle, a series of integrated magnet schools.  Karma? You decide.
     Historically speaking, I become more and more interested in the Bronze Age Collapse in which a series of interconnected and complex societies in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East area all collapsed or declined within about a hundred years around 1200 BCE.  That would be the Hittite Empire, Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, and the kingdoms of the Levant and Mesopotamia (all destroyed) and Egypt (permanently weakened).  All of these cultures were connected by a dense web of trade, diplomacy and war (sound familiar, 21st century?).  The cause of this system-wide collapse is one of the great historical mysteries.  Was it the legendary "sea people" invading from the north?  or a devastating "earthquake storm"? or peasant rebellions? or some combination of these factors?  This remains a topic of lively debate.
     The similarity with the current world situation is striking.  A series of independent cultures all highly interdependent through trade and diplomacy, a world-system delicately balanced on a fulcrum of law and finance hanging precariously over a roiling sea of poverty and injustice.  Silicon Age Collapse anyone?