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The Day the Universe Changed is a ten-part documentary television series presented by science historian James Burke. The series tells a series of stories of how specific scientific and technological advances have shaped the Western way of life. The series posits that when one's view of the universe changes, the universe itself effectively changes. The series' primary focus is on the effect of advances in science and technology on western philosophy. The title comes from the philosophical idea that the universe essentially only exists as you perceive it through what you know; therefore, if you change your perception of the universe with new knowledge, you have essentially changed the universe itself. To illustrate this concept, James Burke tells the various stories of important scientific discoveries and technological advances and how they fundamentally altered how western civilization perceives the world. The series runs in roughly chronological order, from around the beginning of the Middle Ages to the present.

Major setbacks occurred at the end of the thirteenth century and continued into the fourteenth, when population expansion and declining crop yields coincided with a devastating and widespread plague, the Black Death (1348-1349). This had a major impact on population numbers-which dramatically declined-and on both society and economy. Immediately following an economic crisis, a period of crop failure, and an intensification of criminal activity (which may, perhaps, have been linked to fluctuations in food prices), the plague was devastating in its effects, and forms a turning point in the history of medieval England. Nor was the Black Death an isolated event; further pestilence struck in the 1360s, accentuating the problems. Read more: Medieval Britain - Documentation, Norman Period, Feudal Period, Economic Recovery, Cathedrals, Churches, and Monasteries, Impact of Protestantism - England, Castles, Century, Period, Norman, and Built - JRank Articles http://www.jrank.org/history/pages/5958/Medieval-Britain.html#ixzz1Z3mRCdHa

The long term effects of the Black Death were devastating and far reaching. Agriculture, religion, economics and even social class were affected. Contemporary accounts shed light on how medieval Britain was irreversibly changed.

Thousands of  painters, craftsmen, patrons of the arts perished during the mid 14th century. The heart of the cultural world was torn open.  The horrors of the black death pervaded all aspects of Medieval culture and especially art. The effects were lasting, bringing a somber darkness to visual art, literature, and music. The dreadful trauma of this era instigated the imaginations of writers and painters in worrying and unsettling ways for decades to follow. The insecurity of daily survival created a atmosphere of gloom and doom influencing artist to move away from optimistic themes and turn to images of Hell, Satan and the Grim Reaper. Many painters simply gave up art believing that it was hopeless to try and create beauty in a hellish world.

"The Conqueror's men were frustrated in their efforts to capture 'Hereward the Wake' for over a year. In 1070 he and his men made a daring raid on the monastery at Peterborough which marked him as a dangerous and effective resistance leader. William and his army gradually closed on Hereward until he withdrew to the Isle of Ely where he lived in comfortably - out of reach of the invading force."

On this site, you will find several hundred pages of information describing the flow of history, from the evolutionary processes that formed our bodies, to the forces of globalization that exploded in the 1990s. It is detailed, engaging reading-the result of over 25 years of continuous refinement for actual classroom use. Reading about a period will fill your head with facts and names about your chosen topic like any good history textbook. But you won't remember the important lessons-the ones that history classes exist in order to teach us, so that we don't each have to learn them on our own. Good students studying traditional History texts learn much about the past, but even the best rarely take the lessons of the past with them when they leave class. As a history teacher at University High School in Urbana, Illinois since 1979, I have developed a method for teaching history, using a series of about 200 cross-referenced flowcharts and over 100 powerpoint multimedia lecture outlines to help students see history as a dynamic process of causes and effects, not just a meaningless list of names and dates. With this website you can help bring about a revolution in the History classroom, producing students that deeply understand the past and enjoy learning about it.

The international effects of Black Death Death and disease were familiar features of life in the Middle Ages, but previous epidemics were dwarfed by the arrival of the Black Death. It erupted out of central Asia to create a pandemic greater even than the Plague of Justinian 800 years earlier. Present in bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic forms, the Black Death had killed millions by the time it finally declined. Europe may have lost a third of its people, China perhaps half. Besides death, the disease brought fear, panic and very often a complete breakdown of society.

THE BLACK DEATH AND ITS EFFECT ON FOURTEENTH-  AND FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ART

So much death could not help but tear economic and social structures apart. Lack of peasants and laborers sent wages soaring, and the value of land plummeted. For the first time in history the scales tipped against wealthy landlords as peasants and serfs gained more bargaining power. Without architects, masons and artisans, great cathedrals and castles remained unfinished for hundreds of years. Governments, lacking officials, floundered in their attempts to create order out of chaos.

The Harrying (or Harrowing) of the North was a series of campaigns waged by William the Conqueror[1] in the winter of 1069-1070 to subjugate Northern England, and is part of the Norman conquest of England. It effectively ended the quasi-independence of the region through large-scale destruction that resulted in the relative "pacification" of the local population and the replacement of local Anglo-Danish lords with Normans. The death toll is believed to be over 100,000, with substantial social, cultural, and economic damage.[2][3] Because of the scorched earth policy, much of the land was laid waste and depopulated, a fact to which Domesday Book, written almost two decades later, readily attests.[4]

The plague's influence on art is profound because of the infection's overall impact on many artists and their work. The historical imprint the illness left on Renaissance art is undeniable.

"Introduction: Between the mid-11th and late-15th centuries, an historically specific configuration of material and ideational factors gave rise to a constellation of religious wars that have come to be known as "the crusades". This constellation included Church-organized wars in the Holy Land, Iberia and along the Baltic frontier as well as within Latin Christendom itself.[1] The Crusades to the Holy Land were "wars of liberation" initially launched by the Church to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule. Following the First Crusade and the establishment of the crusader principalities (the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem - collectively known as Outremer), these expeditions were conducted primarily to defend the Holy Places against Muslim attempts at reconquest or, following its loss in 1187 and again in 1244, to recover Jerusalem for Latin Christendom. While authorized by, and fought on behalf of, the Church these wars were prosecuted by princes, nobles and knights from every corner of Latin Christendom as well as by so-called "para-crusaders" (milites ad terminum), and members of military orders such as the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights.[2] They were fought primarily against a range of Muslim powers, although the Fourth Crusade ended up being waged largely against adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite. Although the idea of launching additional expeditions to liberate Jerusalem persisted for a considerable time, the Crusades to the Holy Land effectively came to an end with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in Palestine - Acre - in 1291.[3]"

The majority of the population lived in the countryside at the time of the Black Death. Dr Mike Ibeji traces the plague's devastating impact on the rural communities.