I learned more than ten new things in this course, I also gained new knowledge about things I already knew and now I feel I have a much greater understanding of how civilizations build upon each other other. The realization that many of the things in our civilization were passed down from civilizations that existed thousands of years ago was amazing and surprising and made me see things in a whole new way. I have always enjoyed studying history and ancient Rome has always fascinated me, but I had never really learned anything about their public works system until this course, what I learned was surprising and exciting. The video used for this part of the lesson was fantastic, actually being able to see the remains of an ancient Roman city brought it all to life. I had no idea that ancient Rome used a grid system to build their cities and I certainly didn't know that we use a similar system when building our cities today. They had many other innovations that would be passed on to future civilizations, including sanitary sewers, newly developed and well-built aqueducts, roads, speed bumps, and public toilets. Modern civilization owes a lot to ancient Rome and every time I go over a speed bump in a parking lot or use a public bathroom I will be reminded that perhaps we wouldn't have them if it weren't for a civilization that came thousands of years before ours. Ancient Roman Civilization and their engineering skills lead me to the next thing I learned in this course and that is architecture. Like most people, I admired beautiful architecture before taking this course, but I wouldn't have even been able to guess what kind of architecture I was looking at. Modern and postmodern architecture of...... middle of paper ......vations and changes that art, music and literature have undergone to give us what we have today. The creation of scores, which became precious musical instruments. The use of new materials and styles in art, literature that was once memorized finds its way onto paper, and the creation of the novel. What's interesting here is that when we continued to make innovations and changes in these areas, we didn't just throw out the old, we kept it. We still read books by Homer, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and poems by William Wordsworth and John Donne. We visit museums to admire the art of ancient civilizations, and orchestras still play music composed by Bach and Beethoven. I wonder if some of today's books or music will become classics of a future civilization or if some art of our civilization will one day be admired in a museum.