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16th to 19th Centuries:
The Americas, Europe and Africa to 1700
Time Line of Art History: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
In his famous book, "Organism," Abraham Maslow originated the idea of self-actualization within a hierarchial structure of physilogical and psychological needs. Within this structure are what Maslow calls "esteem needs." From the very beginning of time historians have made manifest evidence of man's expression of "esteem needs." Over 30,000 years ago in Chauvet France the discovery of dynamic, vibrant paintings of animals drawn on limestone cave walls stand as a testament to man's need to express his world through art.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
That is all ye know on earth and
All ye need to know.
-------- John Keats (1819) "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Take the time to see the truth, to see the beauty that man has created across time and space. "Click away!"
Time Line Index:
The Timeline Index : People, Periods, Places and Events in a chronological context.
James I, King of Scots (VI) and England 1566-1625
Isaac Newton, Theory of Gravitation 1643-1727
Readings: Washington State University-World Cultures from 1500
The Enlightenment - Wars of Religion - Scientific Revolution - Absolutism - Industrial Revolution
It's difficult to determine precisely when the Enlightenment begins. Since the Enlightenment is primarily about changes in the world view of European culture, the process cannot really be said to have a beginning, for when a world view changes it essentially draws on previous shifts in world view. The Enlightenment is commonly dated to the middle of the eighteenth century and the activity of the philosophes , the French rationalist philosophers who fully articulated the values and consequences of Enlightenment thought.
The latter half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century brought about one of the most passionate and calamitious series of wars that Europe had ever experienced. The early Reformation had been, in hindsight, remarkably free from bloodshed; the honeymoon, however, lasted only a short while. It was inevitable that the growing division between Christian churches in Europe would lead to a series of armed conflicts for over a century. Protestants and Catholics would shed each other's blood in prodigious amounts in national wars and in civil wars. These struggles would eventually shatter the European monarchical traditions themselves. The monarchy, which had always seemed an impregnable political institution, was challenged by Protestants unhappy with the rule of Catholic kings. The final result of these struggles would be the overthrow and execution of Charles I in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, an historical earthquake that permanently changed the face of Europe.
While continental European states were developing absolute and centralized monarchies, England, in a chaotic and violent century, radically reduced the power of the monarch and developed an alternative state in which the powers of the monarch became subsidiary to the power of the branches of government. The political experiments of England would be dramatic, from absolutist tendencies at the beginning of the century, to the overthrow of the monarch in the middle of the century and the development of an English Republic, and finally to the restoration of the monarch and the severe limitation of monarchical powers. These titanic changes were largely driven by religious concerns as the issues of monarchy in England collided with the concerns and complaints of an increasingly large and increasingly radical Protestant minority.
Seventeenth Century Enlightenment Thought
As a historical category, the term "Enlightenment" refers to a series of changes in European thought and letters. It is one of the few historical categories that was coined by the people who lived through the era (most historical categories, such as "Renaissance," "early modern," "Reformation," "Tokugawa Enlightenment," etc., are made up by historians after the fact). When the writers, philosophers and scientists of the eighteenth century referred to their activities as the "Enlightenment," they meant that they were breaking from the past and replacing the obscurity, darkness, and ignorance of European thought with the "light" of truth.
René Descartes is perhaps the single most important thinker of the European Enlightenment. At an age most people graduate from college nowadays, he quietly and methodically went about tearing down all previous forms of knowledge and certainty and replaced them with a single, echoing truth: Cogito, ergo sum , "I think, therefore I am." From that point onwards in European culture, subjective truth would hold a higher and more important epistemological place than objective truth, skepticism would be built into every inquiry, method would hold a higher place than practice, and the mind would be separated from the body.
Along with René Descartes, the other great mind that wrestled with the new universe opening up in the early European Enlightenment was Blaise Pascal, a mathematician and sometime theologian. The universe in the seventeenth century had expanded beyond human imagination. The century before introduced Europe to an entirely new continent, filled with a people no one had ever heard of before, who had a history spanning centuries, a history that would forever remain a mystery to the Europeans. They looked at fallen cities in Meso-America and gazed on stone stelae and books filled with a mysterious and indecipherable language and realized a wealth of human history lay beyond their grasp.
Of all the changes that swept over Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most widely influential was an epistemological transformation that we call the "scientific revolution." In the popular mind, we associate this revolution with natural science and technological change, but the scientific revolution was, in reality, a series of changes in the structure of European thought itself: systematic doubt, empirical and sensory verification, the abstraction of human knowledge into separate sciences, and the view that the world functions like a machine. These changes greatly changed the human experience of every other aspect of life, from individual life to the life of the group. This modification in world view can also be charted in painting, sculpture and architecture; you can see that people of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are looking at the world very differently.
The eighteenth century was a century of mind-boggling change; when Europeans entered the nineteenth century, they lived in a world that barely resembled the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the one hundred years in between, European thought became overwhelmingly mechanistic as the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton was applied to individual, social, political, and economic life. The century saw the development of the philosophe movement,which articulated the full values of the European Enlightenment, including deism, religious tolerance, and political and economic theories that would dramatically change the face of European society. Europe itself changed from a household economy to an industrial economy. This change, perhaps one of the most earth-shattering transitions in human history, permanently altered the face of European society and the family. Finally, the century ended in revolution. The ideas of the philosophes were translated into new governments--one in France and one in America--that shook the old order down to its very roots.
The European Enlightenment developed in part due to an energetic group of French thinkers who thrived in the middle of the eighteenth century: the philosophes. This group was a heterogenous mix of people who pursued a variety of intellectual interests: scientific, mechanical, literary, philosophical, and sociological. They were united by a few common themes: an unwavering doubt in the perfectibility of human beings, a fierce desire to dispel erroneous systems of thought (such as religion) and a dedication to systematizing the various intellectual disciplines.
Perhaps the single most important Enlightenment writer was the philosopher-novelist-composer-music theorist-language theorist-etc. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who is important not merely for his ideas (which generally recycled older Enlightenment ideas) but for his passionate rhetoric, which enflamed a generation and beyond. The central problem he confronted most of his life he sums up in the first sentence of his most famous work, The Social Contract :
"Man is born free but everywhere is in chains."
Women: Communities, Economies, and Opportunities
The status of women during the Enlightenment changed drastically; surprisingly, much of the talk concerning individual liberties, social welfare, economic liberty, and education did not greatly affect the unequal treatment of women. In many ways, the position of women was seriously degraded during the Enlightenment. Economically, the rise of capitalism produced laws that severely restricted women's rights to own property and run businesses. While Enlightenment thinkers were proposing economic freedom and enlightened monarchs were tearing down barriers to production and trade, women were being forced out of a variety of businesses throughout Europe. In 1600, more than two-thirds of the businesses in London were owned and administered by women; by 1800, that number had shrunk to less than ten percent.
Absolute Monarchy and Enlightened Absolutism
Even though Enlightenment social and political theory introduced radically new ideas such as checks and balances, the social contract and individual liberty, most of the philosophes believed in monarchical government. The seventeenth century had seen an elaborate theorizing on the nature of monarchy and the justification for absolute monarchy, that is, the idea that the monarch is ultimately the sole ruler of the country and is accountable only to God. The principle theorist of absolutism was, as we've discovered in an earlier chapter, Bossuet. He believed that monarchs are placed in power by God; disobedience to a monarch is equivalent to disobeying God. Since monarchs are placed in power by God, that also meant that monarchs are answerable to no-one except God in matters of ruling the state. The power of a monarch, then, was absolute. In order to guarantee the absolutism of monarchical power, Bossuet argued that the government of a monarchy should be a tightly-knit centralized government. Local powers and nobility should be brought under the control of agents of the king. In France in particular, Bossuet's theories of absolute monarchy were applied in their full during the reign of Louis XIV. The most immediate effects of the social and political thought of the philosophes was not felt in any grand overturning of established monarchies, but rather the adoption of enlightened absolutism by a small handful of highly educated and commited monarchs: Joseph II and Maria Theresa of Austria, and Catherine the Great of Russia.
The Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century
The most far-reaching, influential transformation of human culture since the advent of agriculture eight or ten thousand years ago, was the industrial revolution of eighteenth century Europe. The consequences of this revolution would change irrevocably human labor, consumption, family structure, social structure, and even the very soul and thoughts of the individual. This revolution involved more than technology; to be sure, there had been industrial "revolutions" throughout European history and non-European history. In Europe, for instance, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw an explosion of technological knowledge and a consequent change in production and labor. However, the industrial revolution was more than technology—impressive as this technology was. What drove the industrial revolution were profound social changes, as Europe moved from a primarily agricultural and rural economy to a capitalist and urban economy, from a household, family-based economy to an industry-based economy. This required rethinking social obligations and the structure of the family; the abandonment of the family economy, for instance, was the most dramatic change to the structure of the family that Europe had ever undergone—and we're still struggling with these changes.
A Glossary of Enlightenment Terms and Concepts
A Gallery of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Visual Culture
The European Enlightenment Glossary:
Capitalism is a difficult, problematic term; it applies to a diversity of phenomenon spread across disparate historical cultures with substantially variable world views. However, the term is an Enlightenment European term used to describe European practices; so the term "capitalism" means more than just a body of social practices easily applied across geographical and historical distances, it is also a "way of thinking," and as a way of thinking does not necessarily apply to earlier European origins of capitalism or to capitalism as practiced in other cultures.
Economics very simply is the analysis of the production and distribution of goods; this analysis, to be distinguished as economics, involves abstracting this analysis out of other areas of human, physical, or supernatural knowledge. In other words, economics divorces the production and distribution of goods from other concerns, such as politics, religion, ethics, etc., and treats production and distribution as independent human endeavors. In economic thinking, the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life is productive labor and distribution of products and services. So that there really is no such thing as economics unless you have the world view that economic behavior can be separated out from other behaviors.
Video Presentations and Links:
Thirty Years War - Economic and Scientific Development in Europe
Western Tradition: The Wars of Religion
For more than a century, the quarrels of Protestants and Catholics tore Europe apart
Western Tradition: The Rise of the Trading Cities
Amid religious wars, a few cities learned that tolerance increased their prosperity
Witchcraft in Post Medeival Europe
The final product of our video for National History Day:Triumph & Tragedy. Its about the tragedy of the witch hunts in Europe.
Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 -- 8 January 1642) was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include the first systematic studies of uniformly accelerated motion, improvements to the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo's experiment-based work is a significant break from the abstract approach of Aristotle. Galileo is often referred to as the "father of modern astronomy", as the "father of modern physics", and as the "father of science". The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, treated in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics.
Video Presentations
England: King James to Isaac Newton
Charles I: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His attempts at acquiring absolute power ended in his execution by the Parliament. His ... all » reign was plagued with religious conflicts and extreme unpopularity. What were some of the lasting impacts of his rule? How did he influence the development of democracy in England?
Most of those in Parliament's army carried Bibles, and they were led by a devout Puritan member of Parliament named Oliver Cromwell. He was a good organizer and military commander. Parliament's army was aided by the strict discipline that was characteristic of the Calvinists - a strict discipline that helped in maintaining military formation in the heat of battle. Cromwell and his army defeated the Cavaliers at Marston Moor in northern England and the following year, 1645, at Naseby in central England. And King Charles was taken prisoner and put on trial for treason.
The Trial of King Charles I of England
As head of the Anglican Church, Charles pursued
anti-Calvinist policies in favor of the Catholic traditions. The king's income
was not adequate to pay for the operations of his bureaucracy, and the House
of Commons refused to vote Charles the money he needed to keep his government
operating unless he redressed grievances they had with some of his administrative
and religious policies. In 1645 King Charles was taken prisoner and put on
trial for treason. At the trial a lot of talk about God erupted, Charles claiming
that he had a trust committed to him by God and that those trying him would
be called to account by God. And those trying Charles proclaimed themselves
the instruments of God's justice. The prosecutors called on God for guidance,
and they spoke of God's will being done. On January 30,1649, Charles went
to the executioner's block
William III & Mary II: The Glorious Revolution
Isaac Newton - Rejector of The Trinity believer in one God
BBC - 'Newton: The Dark Heretic' Aired 2003 'Heretic' in the sense that he disbelieved in the concept of the Trinity. A very interesting documentary revealing a hidden and truly enlightened side to one of the greatest minds that western civilisation has known. His deep study of science led him to a firm conclusion that there is a Creator and based on his study of early Christian history, he was convinced that the concept of The Trinity was a falsification of the pure message of monotheism that Jesus preached. Newton vehemently rejected the corruption of the Christian establishment and the innovation that is the divinity of Jesus, his belief was the revealed God is one God. During his life he was forced to keep this belief secret for fear of being labelled a heretic and after his death this information was carefully suppressed
Readings: Washington State University-World Cultures from 1500
The African Diaspora:
Europe and Africa in the Fifteenth Century
History is filled with wrong turns and almost were's, and the history of Africa and Europe in the modern period--a history of suffering, greed, torture, cruelty, racism, death, violence, hatred, and, in the midst of this, a triumph of human spirit--could have been a different history. For the history of Africa and Europe, the history of slavery and the history of colonialism, both of which we--Africans, African-Americans, African-Europeans, Europeans, and European-Americans--are still paying for, began with mutual respect and curiosity. The history begins, as so much in the modern world, with the mercantile expansion of European culture.
The Beginnings of European Slave Trading
The European trade in human goods begins right
at the start of European relations with Africa. This initial slave trade,
however, was negligible. The trade itself had begun long before the Europeans
ever cast a covetous eye on the land of Africa. The Islamic civilizations
and traders of North and Western Africa had a booming traffic in black slavery
as they marched slaves across the Sahara to regions in the east. Surprisingly,
though, slavery was not racially based in most of human history; racial slavery,
that is, slavery that is predicated on race as a way of separating slave from
free, is an invention of the seventeenth century.
African-American History:
Crucial turning points in history often occur almost unnoticed. African slavery in America was neither really African nor slavery throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was, in reality, indentured servitude (except in Spanish countries). Africans were enslaved for a time and then released after they had served the time. They settled in the area, usually as farmers, and even voted in the community. If they were serving as indentured servants, their children did not become indentured servants. Not only was the forced labor not full-out slavery, it wasn't specifically racial. In fact, if anything is surprising about the early history of American slavery it's how color-blind everyone seems to be. Not only are released Africans allowed to join the community as pretty much equal members, but there is no race that was immune from indentured servitude.
African Americans in the American Revolution
The American Revolution was approached as a mixed blessing by both slave and free African-Americans. The principles of the revolution unambiguously implied the end of slavery, but the revolutionaries never really delivered on that promise despite severe misgivings. It had been the most ardent desire of Thomas Jefferson to end slavery with the formation of the new nation, yet he himself never freed his own slaves. So in many ways Jefferson is iconic for the American Revolution as a whole: despite its promise of freedom and rights, the revolutionaries would not grant to African-Americans the same foundational rights and equality that they claimed formed the spirit of the revolution itself. This double-edged attitude was not lost on African-Americans, many of whom fought on either side, believing either the revolutionaries or the British were more likely to grant freedom to the slaves.
The year is 1791. The United States is in its first years as the first republic in the western hemisphers. Europe is in disarray as the French Revolution burns across the face of France. The revolutionaries in France are getting ready to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which will declare rights, liberty, and equality to the basis of all legitimate government and social systems. On the French island of Haiti, far from anybody's eyes, French planters, craftsmen, soldiers, and administrators are all closely watching the events unfold across the Atlantic. It's an uncertain time; the results of the revolution are up in the air and loyalties are deeply divided. While they watch the events in France, however, the planters are unaware that a revolution is brewing beneath their very feet.
Very few, if any, African-Americans accepted their status as slaves. Most, if not all, slaveowneres were completely aware of this and, in general, they lived in fear of the African-Americans under the control. Not only did slaveowners expect slaves to run away, letters and diaries give strong evidence that slaveowners (and even non-slaveowners) in the south believed that rebellion was imminent. They had lived with this fear since 1792 when the Haitian Revolution proved unambiguously that slaves were ready to revolt and could do so with a passion that was awe-inspiring. Added to this mix was the fiery rhetoric of abolitionists, both black and white. The most frightening, to the slaveowners, of these abolitionists was Henry Highland Garnet who had escaped from slavery at the age of ten. In 1843 he called for a slave strike and suggested that it escalate to a slave revolt. By this point, the south had been rocked by three slave revolts which had struck fear to the very hearts of slaveowners.
The situation of free blacks in ante-bellum America was double-edged. While they enjoyed freedom, they were technically second-class citizens without the right to vote and both socially and economically discriminated against. In both the north and the south, European racism was an everyday aspect of life. Aside from economic and political marginalization, African-Americans were often victims of racial violence of the worst kind. In spite of this, the culture of free blacks produced some of the highest points of American culture: Phillis Wheatley, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Henry Highland Garnet, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, and Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey who, as a free man, took the name Frederick Douglass.
Video Presentations
Sub-Saharan Africa:
So far, Jared Diamond has demonstrated how geography favoured one group of people – Europeans – endowing them with agents of conquest ahead of their rivals around the world. Guns, germs and steel allowed Europeans to colonize vast tracts of the globe – but what happened when this all-conquering package arrived in Africa, the birthplace of humanity?
An arresting film montage which steps through time and space, drawing together people and places affected by the transatlantic slave trade.
Roots of the Cape Part 1 - Part 2
History of Slavery in South Africa Documentary
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