David Beck’s Blog

I have decided to focus my website on the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. There is not much information on the web available when one conducts a search on the various reasons for why Rome fell. I will use the Virginia Standard WHI.6k as my guide in constructing this site. I feel these standards lay the basic theories for the fall of Rome in a simple, yet expandable format. For those not familiar with the way the standards are written (these were last updated in 2001), there is an essential question and an essential understanding that needs to be achieved by the students. The questions is why did the Western Roman Empire decline? The essential understanding is – Over a 300-year period, the western part of the Roman Empire steadily declined because of internal and external problems. In order to achieve the essential understanding, students must be able to identify the following causes:

1. Economy – cost of defense and devaluation of Roman Currency

2. Military – Army membership starting to include invaders, resulting in a decline of discipline

3. Moral Decay – People’s loss faith in Rome and the family

4. Political Problems – Civil Conflict and weak administration

5. Invasion – attacks on the borders

The best part of these standards is the it will keep the site focus, but allow the various popular theories of Rome’s decline to be discussed. For example, Gibbons theory fits very well with the Moral Decay cause described above. While in reality any number of aformentioned causes would probably apply to the fall of any and every empire throughout the course of history, it is surprising how little quality information there is on the end of Rome. Roman-empire.net has a couple of pages devoted to the collapse of Rome, but the information requires a significant investment in time to sift through all the unessential parts. Wikipedia is the number one search result when doing a google search on the decline of Rome. So clearly there is a opening for me to develop a site solely for illustrating the factors involved in bringing down arguably the greatest empire the world has even known (apologies to the Anglophiles in the class).

As I explained in my last blog, teachers are going to be the main audience. I still intend to have a spot on my site for discussion, lesson plans, bibliography, and other various resources. I’ve recently discovered the site http://www.eduweb.com.  Eduweb is a company that helps develop interactive websites for museums, and other educational institutions. It is a great resources to use when comparing different websites and their elements of design. There is one site in particular dedicated to U-505. It was a German U-boat that the Americans were actually able to recover. This site is very easy to navigate and includes text, animation, videos, and timelines to really highlight this amazing feat. I would like to use it as inspiration for my own site.