**This essay should be based on PERSONAL experience & feelings. If you decided to use outside sources for references please keep it at MINIMAL.

Assignment Goal:

One important factor to keep in mind when studying history is to understand that people
in the past (especially the ancient past) experienced and viewed the world in much
different ways than we do in 2020. The purpose of these experiments is to get you
thinking about their reality in a different way than you do by reading documents or
looking at images and artifacts. Experiencing the activities is much different from just
imagining yourself doing them, so its important that you at least try to complete them.
You will also get much more out of them if you make the effort. Even if you fail to
complete them you can and should explore in your essays why that was the case.

Assignment Description:

It can be difficult to imagine just how dark the world can be without electric light and the
impact this had on the way people thought and acted.

a) Try for one evening to do everything by candlelight or its equivalent (i.e. a small
flashlight or similar app on a smartphone). Try and avoid activities that generate
their own light (watching t.v., texting, etc). Some things might be easy to do
but what about other tasks like cooking or reading?

b) Take some friends or family along and go for a walk somewhere really dark using
only minimal light. It may be hard to find a place in a city because of all the light
pollution but you shouldnt have to go too far away. Somewhere with trees is
ideal.

Think about what it would have been like to do this in a world without GPS or cell
phones and where there are no scientific explanations to help understand the sounds you
hear or the creatures that may (or may not) live there. Imagine that there could be
dangerous creatures including the natural (bears) and supernatural (spirits). Describe your walk, your responses to it and imagine how it would have felt in the pre-modern world.