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brookegoodman

How Did the American Revolution Influence the French Revolution? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...nfluence-the-french-revolution

history US politics economics

shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • When American colonists won independence from Great Britain in the Revolutionary War, the French, who participated in the war themselves, were both close allies and key participants.
  • While the French Revolution was a complex conflict with numerous triggers and causes, the American Revolution set the stage for an effective uprising that the French had observed firsthand.
  • Economic struggles: Both the Americans and French dealt with a taxation system they found discriminating and unfair.
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  • Monarchy: Although the colonists had lived in a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system, they revolted against the royal powers of King George III just like the French rose up against Louis XVI.
  • Unequal rights: Like the American colonists, the French felt that specific rights were only granted to certain segments of society, namely the elite and aristocrats.
  • During the war in North American colonies, some allied Frenchmen fought side by side with soldiers of the Continental Army, which allowed for the exchanging of values, ideas and philosophies.
  • The ideas of the enlightenment flowed from Europe to the North American continent and sparked a revolution that made enlightened thought all the more popular back across the Atlantic.
  • The Declaration of Independence was a template for the French.
  • The French people saw that a revolt could be successful – even against a major military power
  • The Americans provided a working model of revolutionary success that wasn’t lost on the French.
brookegoodman

5-Marx's Comm M. - Google Drive - 0 views

drive.google.com/...0BxWXwwoF4MF-U2xGbnRZYjcwQlU

homework

shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.
  • Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
  • It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
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  • The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
  • village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland.
  • the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms.
  • The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.
  • The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour in each single workshop.
  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.
  • the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
  • The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
  • The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production,
  • Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
  • The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
  • The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property.
  • Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune*
  • In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
  • He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.
  • Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
  • Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
  • Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
  • And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.
  • Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.
  • But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
  • Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers.
  • Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
  • At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois.
  • the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.
  • But every class struggle is a political struggle.
  • a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.
  • The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for
  • The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois.
  • The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
  • It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.
  • Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
brookegoodman

How Bread Shortages Helped Ignite the French Revolution - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...ch-revolution-marie-antoinette

history

shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Voltaire once remarked that Parisians required only “the comic opera and white bread.”
  • The storming of the medieval fortress of Bastille on July 14, 1789 began as a hunt for arms—and grains to make bread. 
  • bread shortages played a role in stoking anger toward the monarchy.
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  • Poor grain harvests led to riots as far back as 1529 in the French city of Lyon. During the so-called Grande Rebeyne (Great Rebellion), thousands looted and destroyed the houses of rich citizens, eventually spilling the grain from the municipal granary onto the streets.
  • a group of economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of land development and that agricultural products should be highly priced.
  • In late April and May 1775, food shortages and high prices ignited an explosion of popular anger in the towns and villages of the Paris Basin.
  • On October 21, 1789, a baker, Denis François, was accused of hiding loaves from sale as part of a plot to deprive the people of bread. Despite a hearing which proved him innocent, the crowd dragged François to the Place de Grève, hanged and decapitated him and made his pregnant wife kiss his bloodied lips.
  • A huge rise in population had occurred (there were 5-6 million more people in France in 1789 than in 1720) without a corresponding increase in native grain production.
  • As the monarch was required to ensure the food supply of his subjects, the king was nicknamed “le premier boulanger du royaume” (First Baker of the Kingdom).
  • in 1789 to foment rebellion against the crown, allegedly proposed several articles, the second of which was to “do everything in our power to ensure that the lack of bread is total, so that the bourgeoisie are forced to take up arms.” Shortly thereafter the Bastille was stormed.
  • the revolution did not end French anxiety over bread.
  • The wave of popular protest became known as the Flour War.
  • Do not meddle with bread.
brookegoodman

Where Did the Terms 'Left Wing' and 'Right Wing' Come From? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...-wing-and-right-wing-originate

history culture politics

shared by brookegoodman on 15 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • originally coined in reference to the physical seating arrangements of politicians during the French Revolution. 
  • The split dates to the summer of 1789, when members of the French National Assembly met to begin drafting a constitution.
  • The anti-royalist revolutionaries seated themselves to the presiding officer’s left, while the more conservative, aristocratic supporters of the monarchy gathered to the right. 
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  • The divisions only continued during the 1790s, when newspapers began making reference to the progressive “left” and traditionalist “right” of the French assembly.
  • with the Bourbon Restoration and the beginning of a constitutional monarchy in 1814, liberal and conservative representatives once again took up their respective posts on the left and right of the legislative chamber.
  • “center left,” “center right,” “extreme left” and “extreme right.”
  • France’s “left” and “right” labels filtered out to the rest of the world during the 1800s, but they weren’t common in English-speaking countries until the early 20th century.
  • Democrats and Republicans traditionally sit on opposite sides of the House and Senate chambers.
brookegoodman

French Revolution - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...french-revolution

history

shared by brookegoodman on 14 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • began in 1789 and ended in the late 1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte
  • The upheaval was caused by widespread discontent with the French monarchy and the poor economic policies of King Louis XVI,
  • Not only were the royal coffers depleted, but two decades of poor harvests, drought, cattle disease and skyrocketing bread prices had kindled unrest among peasants and the urban poor. Many expressed their desperation and resentment toward a regime that imposed heavy taxes – yet failed to provide any relief – by rioting, looting and striking.
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  • they wanted voting by head and not by status.
  • they met in a nearby indoor tennis court and took the so-called Tennis Court Oath (serment du jeu de paume), vowing not to disperse until constitutional reform had been achieved.
  • many consider this event, now commemorated in France as a national holiday, as the start of the French Revolution.
  • The document proclaimed the Assembly’s commitment to replace the ancien régime with a system based on equal opportunity, freedom of speech, popular sovereignty and representative government.
  • This compromise did not sit well with influential radicals like Maximilien de Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, who began drumming up popular support for a more republican form of government and for the trial of Louis XVI.
  • On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.
  • In June 1793, the Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the more moderate Girondins and instituted a series of radical measures, including the establishment of a new calendar and the eradication of Christianity.
  • They also unleashed the bloody Reign of Terror (la Terreur), a 10-month period in which suspected enemies of the revolution were guillotined by the thousands.
  • Over 17,000 people were officially tried and executed during the Reign of Terror, and an unknown number of others died in prison or without trial.
  • Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe.
brookegoodman

As Mongolia Melts, Looters Close In On Priceless Artifacts | History | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...nge-looters-close-in-180968764

history crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The history and archaeology of Mongolia, most famously the sites associated with the largest land empire in the history of the world under Ghengis Khan, are of global importance.
  • Climate change and looting may seem to be unrelated issues. But deteriorating climate and environmental conditions result in decreased grazing potential and loss of profits for the region’s many nomadic herders.
  • For Mongolians, these remains are the lasting reminders of their ancient past and a physical tie to their priceless cultural heritage.
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  • The vast Mongolian landscape, whether it be plains, deserts or mountains, is dotted with man-made stone mounds marking the burials of ancient peoples.
  • Each and every one of them had been completely destroyed by looters looking for treasure. Human remains and miscellaneous artefacts such as bows, arrows, quivers, and clothing were left scattered on the surface.
  • For the untrained looter, any rock feature has the potential to contain valuable goods and so grave after grave is torn apart. Many of these will contain no more than human and animal bones.
  • Archaeologists’ interest in these burials lie in the information they contain for research, but this is worthless on the black antiquities market.
  • The looting of archaeological sites in Mongolia has been happening for a very long time. Regional archaeologists have shared anecdotes of finding skeletons with break-in tools made from deer antlers in shafts of 2,000 year old royal tombs in central Mongolia.
  • This is not to mention the loss of whatever goods (gold, silver, gems) the looters decided was valuable enough to keep.
  • Archaeological teams are currently working against climate change, looters, and each other for the chance to unearth rare mummies in the region that are known to pique public interest within Mongolia and abroad.
  • Others are ice mummies, interred in burials that were constructed in such a way that water seeped in and froze—creating a unique preservation environment.
  • Efforts to provide training opportunities, international collaborations with mummy experts, and improved infrastructure and facilities are underway, but these collections are so fragile there is little time to spare.
  • The situation in Mongolia could help us to understand and find new solutions to dealing with changes in climate and the economic drivers behind looting
  • There’s truth represented by a material record of the “things” left by ancient peoples and in Mongolia, the study of this record has led to an understanding of the impact of early food production and horse domestication, the emergence of new social and political structures and the dominance of a nomadic empire.
brookegoodman

How Feasting Rituals Help Shape Human Civilization | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...d-human-civilization-180969540

history

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Both bread and wine are products of settled society. They represent the power to control nature and create civilization, converting the wild into the tamed, the raw into the cooked—and their transformation cannot be easily done alone.
  • civilization arose in different regions around the world thanks to the evolution of cooperation.
  • We concluded that these sites were the endpoints of ritually significant social events that were timed by the solstices and possibly other astronomical phenomena.
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  • we have been able to piece together a comprehensive prehistory of the valley beginning several millennia ago.
  • One significant time period is known as Paracas; it lasted from roughly 800 to 200 B.C. This is the time when the first complex societies developed in the region, the origin of civilization in this part of the ancient world.
  • he Paracas peoples built linear geoglyphs: designs etched into the desert landscape that they lined with small field stones.
  • Our research indicated that a number of these small structures and many of the lines pointed to the June solstice sunset.
  • consumption of food and drink in ritually prescribed times and places—known technically as feasting—is one of the cornerstones of heightened sociality and cooperation throughout human history
  • Excavations by Tantaleán and his team in one of these patios yielded a rich trove of artifacts, including textiles, foodstuffs, pottery, decorated gourds, stone objects, reeds, miscellaneous objects and human offerings.
  • Cerro del Gentil, in fact, was a classic archaeological example of a very significant feasting place
  • there was plenty of evidence that from time to time many people were present to eat, drink and even make human sacrifices together, probably at particular special times of the astronomical calendar.
  • This case study demonstrates that the earliest successful complex societies in the south coast of Peru circa 400 B.C. involved a wide catchment of people and objects.
  • that cooperation in non-state societies is achieved by “ritualizing” the economy.
  • They therefore promote sustained group behavior toward common goals and solve what is famously known as the “collective action problem” in human social life—how do you get everyone to work together toward something that’s in everyone’s long-term self-interest? Feasting is a key component of this kind of sociality and cooperation.
brookegoodman

A Warming Climate Threatens Archaeological Sites in Greenland | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...ical-sites-greenland-180973021

history crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • In Norse mythology, there are many myths that once known, are now lost. But the Norse, of course, left behind more than their tales. They also left behind their things and, in places like Anavik, on the western coast of Greenland, their dead.
  • the indigenous Inuit people left behind mummies, as well as hair with intact DNA.
  • The Arctic’s ice helps preserve these snippets of human history.
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  • there’s a place called the Corpse Headlands, where there are graves filled with the bodies of 17th and 18th century whalers. When archeologists excavated the site in the 1970s,
  • They found that instead of Arctic archaeological remains taking at least a century or more to fully decompose, up to 70 percent will likely vanish in the next 80 years. In Greenland alone, there are over 6,000 registered archaeological sites. This number includes both Norse and Inuit sites.
  • Vandrup Martens studies remains on Svalbard that stand a good chance of decomposing at a rapid pace over the coming years, and she hopes this new research will help archaeologists like her when it comes to prioritizing which of those sites they need to work to preserve.
  • We don’t know which ones contain something that could be fantastic,” he said. “You don’t know what you haven’t found yet.”
brookegoodman

An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock, Not a God | S... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...oon-was-rock-not-god-180972447

history

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Close to the north pole of the moon lies the crater Anaxagoras, named for a Greek philosopher who lived in the fifth century B.C.
  • Anaxagoras, who died around the time Plato was born, had a knack for astronomy, an area of study that requires careful observational and calculation to unlock the mysteries of the universe.
  • Modern scholars have only “fragments” to describe the life of Anaxagoras—brief quotes from his teachings and short summaries of his ideas, cited within the works of scholars from later generations, such as Plato and Aristotle.
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  • Anaxagoras came to believe that the moon was a rock, not totally unlike the Earth, and he even described mountains on the lunar surface.
  • While Anaxagoras was not the first to realize that moonlight is reflected light from the sun, he was able to use this concept to correctly explain additional natural phenomena, such as eclipses and lunar phases.
  • Although many Greek philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. believed in one or a few fundamental elements—such as water, air, fire and earth—Anaxagoras thought there must be an infinite number of elements.
  • He noted that when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth than the sun, the full face is illuminated, “[producing] a model of the heavens that predicts not only phases of the moon, but how eclipses are possible.”
  • he philosopher also realized that the occasional darkening of the moon must result from the moon, sun and Earth lining up such that the moon passes into the Earth’s shadow—a lunar eclipse.
  • Anaxagoras also wrestled with the origins and formation of the moon, a mystery that still challenges scientists today.
  • Though his life was spared, the philosopher who questioned the divinity of the moon found himself in exile in Lampsacus at the edge of the Hellespont. But his ideas regarding eclipses and lunar phases would live on to this day, and for his recognition of the true nature of the moon, a lunar crater, visited by orbiting spacecraft some 2,400 years later, bears the name Anaxagoras.
brookegoodman

Who were the Goths and Vandals? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...who-were-the-goths-and-vandals

history

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Goths and the Vandals were two of the Germanic groups that clashed with the Roman Empire throughout Europe and North Africa from the third to the fifth centuries A.D
  • Today, to “vandalize” someone else’s property means to cause damage or destruction, while “Goth” is applied to a subculture known for its dark, gloomy aesthetic.
  • they may have come from Scandinavia, according to some sources, or from modern-day Poland
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  • In Italy, the Ostrogoths (eastern Goths) established dominance by the end of the fifth century, but would fall to the Byzantine Empire within a few decades.
  • Around 375, a new group known as the Huns appeared north of the Danube and began pushing other groups–including both the Goths and Vandals–further into Roman territory.
  • Alaric’s descendants, known as the Visigoths (western Goths), settled in Gaul and Iberia; the last Visigoth kingdom, in Spain, fell to the Moors in 711.
  • With Genseric’s forces marching on Rome in 455, the desperate Romans sent Pope Leo I to plead for mercy; in exchange for free entry, the Vandals agreed not to burn the city or massacre its citizens
  • Byzantine force invaded in 534 and took the last Vandal king, Gelimer, captive in Constantinople.
brookegoodman

Searching for Genghis Khan - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...searching-for-genghis-khan

history

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • On August 18, 1227, Mongol leader Genghis Khan died from unknown causes while leading a military campaign in China.
  • According to legend, Khan’s soldiers murdered anyone who witnessed his funeral procession back to the Mongol capital of Karakorum, as well as the 2,000 people who attended his funeral, before being executed themselves on the orders of Khan’s successors.
  • Via the Internet, Lin’s Valley of the Khans project invited interested members of the public to join the search for Khan’s tomb by visiting a National Geographic website and scanning thousands of high-resolution images of Mongolia taken from orbital satellites.
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  • They reveal that in the first six months of the project, more than 10,000 volunteers spent a total of some 30,000 hours (the equivalent of 3.4 years) scanning the images, which covered a total of roughly 2,300 square miles of land.
  • narrowed the list to only 100 accessible locations, and a field team verified 55 of those with archaeological significance
brookegoodman

How Far Did Ancient Rome Spread? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...re-map-julius-caesar-conquests

history

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • At its peak, Rome stretched over much of Europe and the Middle East.
  • The Roman Empire conquered these lands by attacking them with unmatched military strength, and it held onto them by letting them govern themselves.
  • So the idea of them expanding is always deep in the historical DNA of the republic, and even the monarchy before the republic.”
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  • The republic’s first significant expansion came in 396 B.C., when Rome defeated and captured the Etruscan city of Veii.
  • Over the next two-and-a-half centuries, Rome spread throughout the Italian Peninsula by conquering territories and either making them independent allies or extending Roman citizenship.
  • This strategy of absorption changed as Rome conquered its first overseas territories.
  • Taking this new territory wasn’t something Rome had initially intended to do.
  • After Rome pushed Carthage out of Sicily in the first war, the Italian island became Rome’s first foreign province.
  • his time, Rome destroyed the capital city of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia and enslaved the city’s inhabitants. It also conquered all of Carthage’s territory in North Africa and made it a Roman province.
  • In the 60s B.C.E., Rome extended into the Middle East and captured Jerusalem. These eastern territories had old and complex political systems that Rome largely left in place.
  • When Rome took over, it introduced some Roman systems, while still trying to keep power in the hands of local leaders to ensure a smooth transition.
  • The republic fell for good when his great-nephew, Augustus Caesar, declared himself emperor in 27 B.C. Now, the sprawling state of Rome was officially the Roman Empire.
  • The empire reached its peak in 117 A.C. when it fortified its borders and reached all the way into England. But after that, it stopped expanding, because leaders didn’t think it was worth the time and energy.
  • the extension of imperial bureaucracy made the empire much harder to manage; and this was one of the reasons that the empire began to divide itself
  • In the east, the Roman Empire—also known as the Byzantine Empire—continued on for over a millennium.
brookegoodman

7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...printing-press-renaissance

history

shared by brookegoodman on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before.
  • German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436
  • His greatest accomplishment was the first print run of the Bible in Latin, which took three years to print around 200 copies,
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  • Gutenberg died penniless, his presses impounded by his creditors.
  • Since literacy rates were still very low in the 1490s, locals would gather at the pub to hear a paid reader recite the latest news, which was everything from bawdy scandals to war reports.
  • Italian emissaries spent years in the Ottoman Empire learning enough Ancient Greek and Arabic to translate and copy rare texts into Latin.
  • but publishing the texts had been arduously slow and prohibitively expensive for anyone other than the richest of the rich.
  • As the legend goes, Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Palmer says that broadsheet copies of Luther’s document were being printed in London as quickly as 17 days later.
  • There’s a famous quote attributed to German religious reformer Martin Luther that sums up the role of the printing press in the Protestant Reformation: “Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one.”
  • The largest European library in 1300 was the university library of Paris, which had 300 total manuscripts.
  • Thanks to the printing press and the timely power of his message, Luther became the world’s first best-selling author.
  • Not only were handwritten copies of scientific data expensive and hard to come by, they were also prone to human error.
  • The people most willing to take risks and make the effort to be early adopters are those who had no voice before that technology existed.
  • As critical and alternative opinions entered the public discourse, those in power tried to censor it. Before the printing press, censorship was easy. All it required was killing the “heretic” and burning his or her handful of notebooks.
  • During the Enlightenment era, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were widely read among an increasingly literate populace.
  • Even the illiterate couldn’t resist the attraction of revolutionary Enlightenment authors, Palmer says.
  • The Industrial Revolution didn’t get into full swing in Europe until the mid-18th century, but you can make the argument that the printing press introduced the world to the idea of machines “stealing jobs” from workers.
  • Before Gutenberg’s paradigm-shifting invention, scribes were in high demand. Bookmakers would employ dozens of trained artisans to painstakingly hand-copy and illuminate manuscripts. But by the late 15th century, the printing press had rendered their unique skillset all but obsolete.
brookegoodman

What is the Magna Carta? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...what-is-the-magna-carta

history

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • While the Magna Carta, signed in 1215, primarily secured liberties for England’s elite classes, its language protecting due process and barring absolute monarchy has guided the fundamental principles of common law in constitutions around the world for the last 800 years.
  • In fear that the rebellion would escalate to full-scale civil war and endanger his throne, King John affixed his seal on the document at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, making it Europe’s first written constitution.
  • the Magna Carta was reinstated under 9-year-old King Henry III.
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  • Ironically, the Magna Carta would inspire American colonists a few hundred years later to declare independence from the British themselves
  • “No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.”
  • The four remaining copies of the original Magna Carta are housed at Salisbury Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral and the British Museum.
brookegoodman

How Did Magna Carta Influence the U.S. Constitution? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...us-constitution-bill-of-rights

history

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The 13th-century pact inspired the U.S. Founding Fathers as they wrote the documents that would shape the nation.
  • In 1215, a band of rebellious medieval barons forced King John of England to agree to a laundry list of concessions later called the Great Charter, or in Latin, Magna Carta
  • For 18th-century political thinkers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Magna Carta was a potent symbol of liberty and the natural rights of man against an oppressive or unjust government
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  • “For early Americans, Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence were verbal representations of what liberty was and what government should be—protecting people rather than oppressing them,”
  • The two most-cited clauses of Magna Carta for defenders of liberty and the rule of law are 39 and 40:
  • The Founding Fathers credited the 39th clause as the origin of the idea that no government can unjustly deprive any individual of “life, liberty or property” and that no legal action can be taken against any person without the “lawful judgement of his equals,” what would later become the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers.
  • That spirit is clearly present in the Declaration of Independence, which used Magna Carta as a model for free men petitioning a despotic government for their God-given rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
  • Section 9 forbids the suspension of habeas corpus, which essentially means that no one can be held or imprisoned without legal cause.
  • But perhaps the greatest influence of Magna Carta on the Founding Fathers was their collective understanding that in drafting the U.S. Constitution they were attempting to create a Magna Carta for a new era.
  • “They knew exactly what they were doing,” says Kaminski. “They didn’t know if it would succeed or if it would last for centuries, but they were doing the best they could.” 
brookegoodman

Byzantine Empire - Definition, Timeline & Location - HISTORY - 0 views

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history

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  • The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a “New Rome” on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium.
  • The Byzantine Empire finally fell in 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople during the reign of Constantine XI.
  • The citizens of Constantinople and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and not Latin.
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  • Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.
  • Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.
  • The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external attack, thanks in part to its geographic location.
  • As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome.
  • Even after the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of most eastern Christians.
  • Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the first great ruler of the Byzantine Empire
  • In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.
  • By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.
  • Known as Iconoclasm—literally “the smashing of images”—the movement waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.
  • Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian.
  • Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity
  • The end of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Near East from 1095 to 1291.
  • During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine state was crippled, and never regained its former stature.
  • The fall of Constantinople marked the end of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire.
  • In the centuries leading up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, law and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.
  • Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that practiced its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.
brookegoodman

Ottoman Empire - WWI, Decline & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

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  • The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in world history.
  • The chief leader, known as the Sultan, was given absolute religious and political authority over his people.
  • Osman I, a leader of the Turkish tribes in Anatolia, founded the Ottoman Empire around 1299. The term “Ottoman” is derived from Osman’s name, which was “Uthman” in Arabic.
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  • In 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror led the Ottoman Turks in seizing the ancient city of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire’s capital. This put an end to 1,000-year reign of the Byzantine Empire.
  • Sultan Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul, meaning “the city of Islam” and made it the new capital of the Ottoman Empire.
  • By 1517, Bayezid’s son, Selim I, brought Syria, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt under Ottoman control.
  • The Ottoman Empire reached its peak between 1520 and 1566, during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent
  • The Ottomans were known for their achievements in art, science and medicine.
  • Some of the most popular forms of art included calligraphy, painting, poetry, textiles and carpet weaving, ceramics and music.
  • The Ottomans learned and practiced advanced mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, physics, geography and chemistry.
  • Under Sultan Selim, a new policy emerged, which included fratricide, or the murder of brothers.
  • The threat of assassination was always a concern for a Sultan. He relocated every night as a safety measure.
  • the millet system, a community structure that gave minority groups a limited amount of power to control their own affairs while still under Ottoman rule.
  • The devshirme system lasted until the end of the 17th century.
  • Starting in the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire began to lose its economic and military dominance to Europe.
  • n 1878, the Congress of Berlin declared the independence of Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.During the Balkan Wars, which took place in 1912 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire lost nearly all their territories in Europe.
  • At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was already in decline. The Ottoman Turks entered the war in 1914 on the side of the Central Powers (including Germany and Austria-Hungary) and were defeated in 1918.
  • In 1915, Turkish leaders made a plan to massacre Armenians living the Ottoman Empire. Most scholars believe that about 1.5 million Armenians were killed.
  • After ruling for more than 600 years, the Ottoman Turks are often remembered for their powerful military, ethnic diversity, artistic ventures, religious tolerance and architectural marvels.
  • The mighty empire’s influence is still very much alive in the present-day Turkish Republic, a modern, mostly secular nation thought of by many scholars as a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.
brookegoodman

Middle Ages - Definition, Timeline & Facts - HISTORY - 0 views

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history

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  • People use the phrase “Middle Ages” to describe Europe between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century.
  • The phrase “Middle Ages” tells us more about the Renaissance that followed it than it does about the era itself.
  • European thinkers, writers and artists began to look back and celebrate the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome.
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  • the Catholic Church became the most powerful institution of the medieval period.
  • After the prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, Muslim armies conquered large parts of the Middle East, uniting them under the rule of a single caliph
  • Under the caliphs, great cities such as Cairo, Baghdad and Damascus fostered a vibrant intellectual and cultural life
  • Crusaders, who wore red crosses on their coats to advertise their status, believed that their service would guarantee the remission of their sins and ensure that they could spend all eternity in Heaven.
  • No one “won” the Crusades; in fact, many thousands of people from both sides lost their lives.
  • Romanesque cathedrals are solid and substantial: They have rounded masonry arches and barrel vaults supporting the roof, thick stone walls and few windows.
  • Gothic structures, such as the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis in France and the rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral in England, have huge stained-glass windows, pointed vaults and arches (a technology developed in the Islamic world), and spires and flying buttresses. In contrast to heavy Romanesque buildings, Gothic architecture seems to be almost weightless.
  • illuminated manuscripts: handmade sacred and secular books with colored illustrations, gold and silver lettering and other adornments.
  • Between 1347 and 1350, a mysterious disease known as the " Black Death " (the bubonic plague) killed some 20 million people in Europe—30 percent of the continent’s population.
  • Symptoms of the Black Death included fever, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, terrible aches and pains – and then death. Victims could go to bed feeling healthy and be dead by morning.
  • The plague killed cows, pigs, goats, chickens and even sheep, leading to a wool shortage in Europe.
  • Today, scientists know the plague was caused by a bacillus called Yersina pestis, which travels through the air and can also be contracted through the bite of an infected flea or rat, both of which were common in the Middle Ages, especially on ships. 
  • In a feudal society, the king granted large pieces of land called fiefs to noblemen and bishops. Landless peasants known as serfs did most of the work on the fiefs: They planted and harvested crops and gave most of the produce to the landowner. In exchange for their labor, they were allowed to live on the land.
  • By 1300, there were some 15 cities in Europe with a population of more than 50,000.
  • The Renaissance was a time of great intellectual and economic change, but it was not a complete “rebirth”: It had its roots in the world of the Middle Ages.
brookegoodman

Renaissance Period: Timeline, Art & Facts - HISTORY - 1 views

www.history.com/...renaissance

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  • The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.
  • Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T
  • Also known as the “Dark Ages,” the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death.
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  • Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated,
  • Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.
  • In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.
  • Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.
  • Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor, and “Renaissance man” responsible for painting “The Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.
  • Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.
  • Donatello (1386–1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like “David,” commissioned by the Medici family.
  • Raphael (1483–1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and “The School of Athens.”
  • Michelangelo (1483–1520): Italian sculptor, painter, and architect who carved “David” and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.
  • Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance.
  • For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.
  • Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.
  • Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)The Last Supper (Da Vinci)Statue of David (Michelangelo)The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)
  • Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.
  • By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.
  • While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn’t much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.
brookegoodman

Hunter-Gatherers - HISTORY - 0 views

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history culture

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  • Hunter-gatherers were prehistoric nomadic groups that harnessed the use of fire, developed intricate knowledge of plant life and refined technology for hunting and domestic purposes as they spread from Africa to Asia, Europe and beyond.
  • tools and settlements that teach us about the hunter-gatherer diet and way of life of early humans.
  • evidence of their activities dating as far back as 2 million years ago
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  • The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat
  • the Neanderthals (400,000 to 40,000 years ago), who developed more sophisticated technology.
  • It also spanned most of the existence of Homo sapiens, dating from the first anatomically modern humans 200,000 years ago, to the transition to permanent agricultural communities around 10,000 B.C.
  • sharpened stones were used for cutting before hand-axes were developed, marking the onset of Acheulean technology about 1.6 million years ago.
  • Use of hearths dates back almost 800,000 years ago, and other findings point to controlled heating as far back as 1 million years ago.
  • By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as burying their dead and creating ornamental objects
  • These more specialized tools enabled them to widen their diet and create more effective clothing and shelter as they moved about in search of food.
  • From their earliest days, the hunter-gatherer diet included various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds and nuts. Lacking the means to kill larger animals, they procured meat from smaller game or through scavenging.
  • Modern humans were cooking shellfish by 160,000 years ago, and by 90,000 years ago they were developing the specialized fishing tools that enabled them to haul in larger aquatic life.
  • With limited resources, these groups were egalitarian by nature, scraping up enough food to survive and fashioning basic shelter for all.
  • Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.
  • Fire enabled hunter-gatherers to stay warm in colder temperatures, cook their food (preventing some diseases caused by consumption of raw foods like meat), and scare wild animals that might otherwise take their food or attack their camps.
  • By 50,000 years ago, huts made from wood, rock and bone were becoming more common,
  • Modern-day hunter-gatherers endure in various pockets around the globe. Among the more famous groups are the San, a.k.a. the Bushmen, of southern Africa,
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