One of the reasons I've been working more on recent history is to give me material to work with and motivation to study other areas.  I started about mid January with the idea of wrapping up the previous year, but I decided that events were getting old and I wanted to know what was going on more recently, so I've spent most of the past week or so furiously trying to get a bit more caught up on cateogrizing events of the year by nations and peoples. For each successive week, frrom early December of last year to last week, I have a few more nations, and the major political events categorized. I should be able to keep up with current events on a day-to-day besis, although a few days behind.

Before I try to comment on events, I want to be able to put more of them into context. I have an attempt at constructing a narrative history for January. This needs to be revised to account for progress in connecting events, and then I need to go through the major groups of peoples.  Many events are associated with Western Civilization. I have partial separation of British events from Anglic peoples in general, a good start at separating out the Latin American peoples, although not very many associated events, and a start at separating Balkan peoples.  There is, as usual, a lot going on in the Middle East, which is only partly separated out. Events in Tunisia and Egypt have been getting a lot of public attention. There is also a fair amount going on in Western Africa and Eastern Africa, which I note so far without much commentary.

More detailed interpretation depends on progress in religion, government, and economics. and one of the reasons I have been focusing on history is to provide more motivation to study these areas. Now that I'm more caught up on the current events, I hope to be able to put more effort into investigating them.