Octavian, an astute politician, did not declare the Republic dead or himself emperor.  In 27 B.C. he accepted the title of Augustus, and rather than emperor he called himself princeps, or chief citizen.  He followed the prescribed legal forms, and the Senate had a role in governing, but most of the authority was in the hands of the princeps.  Significantly, the army swore loyalty to him. Concerned about moral decline, Augustus restored temples and shrines.  Marriage and children were encouraged, extravagance was discouraged. It was a Golden Age in literature with works by Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Livy. 

            Augustus established the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which lasted until 68.  In 69 Vespasian, a successful general but not a member of an old Senatorial family, founded the Flavian dynasty.  His son, Domitian assumed the title of imperator, or emperor.  In the second century five “good emperors” maintained the Pax Romana (Roman peace).  The empire, with its 50,000,000 inhabitants, was prosperous, but more so in the cities than the countryside. The Romanization of the Empire varied widely, but became more entrenched in the West, where Latin took root, than in the East and Asia, with its older traditions and preexisting Greek as the major language. The age of expansion was over: the Rhine and Danube rivers served as the borders in Europe, and the Near East was governed by client rulers.  The Early Empire was a prosperous era for many, including long distance trade over the Silk Road from China and East Asia.

            In the Early Empire Romans excelled in architecture and engineering, as exemplified in its 50,000 miles of roads and the Colosseum.  Rome itself had a population of one million, and the gulf between the rich and poor was enormous. However, the third century was an era of decline.  There were civil wars, invasions, plagues, population decline, and economic collapse.   

            One of the most important events in history was the birth and spread of the religion of Christianity, which grew out of Judaism and probably influenced by the numerous mystery religions of the period.  Jesus (d. c.30 A.D) preached the love of God and one’s neighbor. Some saw Jesus as a false messiah, others were disappointed that he did not lead a revolt against Rome, and the Romans, fearing he was a rebel, executed him. His followers believed that he rose ascended into heaven, and that he would return and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. Christianity, with its promise of salvation as a consolation to this life’s trials, its similarity to many mystery religions, and its universality as a religion for all people, slowly gained acceptance.

            The fifth century saw the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire (the empire was divided in 395). With fewer resources, the West was less able to repel the Huns and German. In 476 the last Western emperor was deposed, and numerous Germanic kingdoms replaced the Western Roman Empire, although the Eastern Empire survived for another thousand years.

CHAPTER 7 SUMMARY

            The third century had been an era of severe decline in the Roman Empire, but under Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) stability was restored. The fourth century saw the triumph of Christianity. Constantine legalized it, becoming the first Christian emperor, and Theodosius (r. 378-395) proclaimed it as the official religion. Constantine founded a New Rome in the east, and named it Constantinople. The empire was divided in 395, and with fewer resources, the West was less able to repel the Huns and Germans. In 476 the last Western emperor was deposed, while the Eastern Empire survived for another thousand years. 

            The migration of the Germanic peoples was a cause as well as a consequence of the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  Germanic kingdoms were established in the West, including the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Visigoths in Spain, several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain, and a Frankish kingdom in old Gaul. Socially, there was often a fusion between old Roman elites and the new Germanic aristocracy, but Roman laws were replaced by the blood feud and the ordeal. 

            Bishops headed the Christian Church in major cities.  The Bishop of Rome claimed supremacy over the Church. According to tradition Peter became the first Bishop of Rome (or pope), and his successors claimed his authority.  One of the most significant was Gregory I, the Great (590-604): the Church would build upon Gregory’s foundations, both religious and political.

            Monasteries were crucial to the success of the Church. Early Christian monks were often hermits who practiced extreme forms of asceticism. The Church was the intellectual force in the Middle Ages.  The early Church was greatly influenced by Greek philosophy in defining doctrine.

            The Eastern Roman Empire suffered no decline and fall, as had the West.  Constantinople was the largest city in Europe, and Justinian (r. 527-565) was among its greatest rulers. He codified centuries of Roman law in the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which was adopted in the West toward the end of the Middle Ages. 

            But the Eastern Empire, which became known as the Byzantine Empire, was overextended, and plagues and wars reduced its territory to Asia Minor and the Balkans. The pope was the recognized head of Western Christendom, but in the East it was the emperor who not only ruled the state but also the church. Eventually the differences led to two different Christian churches, Catholic and Orthodox. 

            Muhammad, one of the most significant figures in world history, was born in the Arabian city of Mecca.  Muhammed received numerous religious revelations from Allah (or God), which were written down in the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam. Although differences emerged after Muhammed's death in 632, in part over who should succeed him, Islam expanded rapidly, with Muslim Moors moving into Spain c.710 and into France until defeated at the battle of Tours in 732.  Constantinople repelled Muslim armies, surviving until 1453, indirectly protecting Christian Europe.  Not only did Muslims capture vast territories, they also created a great culture.

CHAPTER 8 SUMMARY

            Early medieval Europe was a land of isolated villages.  Famine was common and life expectancy low.  In France, Charlemagne (r.768-814) gained a vast European kingdom through military conquest. On Christmas Day, 800, Pope Leo III crowned him Roman emperor, symbolizing the fusion of Roman, Christian, and German elements. It was a much different Roman Empire than existed centuries earlier, but nevertheless, some historians have claimed that Charlemagne should be considered as the “father of Europe.”

There was also a Carolingian intellectual revival.  Monasteries maintained scriptoria for the copying of manuscripts, and the Carolingian minuscule standardized the script. A palace school was established, which taught in classical Latin what later became the liberal arts.

            The Church attempted to establish formal monogamous marriages. Sex outside of marriage was condemned, as was homosexuality. Clergy were to be celibate. The fundamental food for all classes was bread, consumed in great quantities. Drunkenness was common, as was overeating (gluttony), though malnutrition also was widespread.  Bleeding, herbs, magical charms, and appeals to God and the saints were resorted to in curing diseases.

            Charlemagne’s grandchildren divided his lands into a Latin-French west and a Germanic east, with the middle region to be fought over. Invasions by Scandinavian Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars occurred in the ninth and tenth centuries. Divided leadership and the invasions led to feudalism, or lordship, where government became localized and powerful nobles controlled vast lands.  Other free men, vassals, served the lords, promising military service, and were granted lands, known as fiefs. Relations between lords and vassals were formalized by the oath of homage. Peasants, free and unfree (serfs), worked the land in a system known as manorialism.

In the Germanies, with the death of the last Carolingian ruler (911), a Saxon duke was elected king. Otto I (d.973), who was crowned Roman Emperor, attempted to rule both Italy and the Germanies, an impossible task. The Carolingian line also died out in France (987), and Count Hugh Capet was chosen the new king. In England, Alfred the Great (r.871-899), king of Wessex, defeated the Danish Vikings and created a unified monarchy.

            The tenth century was the “Golden Age of Byzantine civilization.”  Under the Macedonian dynasty (867-1081), trade flourished, the Bulgars were defeated, Muslim armies were repelled, and Byzantine territory was increased.  In Eastern Europe the Slavic kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia were established, whose peoples were converted to Christianity by Catholic missionaries.  The eastern and southern Slavs, such as the Bulgars, the Serbs, and the Russ, adopted Orthodox Christianity.

            Under the Umayyad dynasty, Damascus was the capital of Islam until the eighth century when the new Abbasid dynasty moved it east to Baghdad. Greek, Syrian, and Persian scientific and philosophic writings were translated into Arabic, and an urban culture blossomed, not only in the Near East but also in Umayyad Spain’s Cordoba, which later became a gateway of classical knowledge to the Christian west.  Political unity, however, was lost, with separate caliphates established in Spain, Egypt, and elsewhere. 

CHAPTER 9 SUMMARY

            The period from 1000 to 1300, known as the High Middle Ages, saw a doubling of the European population and the growth of cities and trade.  The climate improved, contributing to increased food production, and forests were cleared and lands reclaimed from swamps. Iron plowshares brought heavy soils under cultivation, and horses, with the invention of horse collars, replaced the slower-moving oxen in the fields. Watermills and windmills came into wider use.  The increased demand for agricultural products improved the lot of the peasants.

            While peasants labored, the aristocratic ideal was to wage war.  Tournaments allowed knights to train for battle, but it also provided a social outlet, contributing to the ideals of chivalry. The Church, with mixed success, attempted to limit warfare by forbidding fighting on Sundays and feast days, and by redirecting the ardor for battle into crusades. Castles served as fortresses and homes for the ruling class.  Aristocratic women married young and were to be subservient, but they often had financial responsibilities, and some had considerable influence.

            The revival of urban life occurred first in northern Italy and in Flanders, where the wool-cloth trade developed. Regional fairs, such as at Champagne in northern France, facilitated trade.  In the cities, the largest with a population of 100,000, artisans, organized into monopolistic craft guilds, played a major role. New laws and customs evolved, and many towns gained charters of liberty from local lords, which guaranteed certain freedoms. The urban inhabitants lived and worked in close proximity, fire was a constant threat, and dirt and disease was rampant. 

            There was also an artistic and intellectual renaissance in the High Middle Ages. The first university was founded in Bologna, Italy, where the recently discovered Body of Civil Law was the focus of study. Teaching was in Latin, and the curriculum was the seven liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Books were rare, thus instructors read the texts to students, adding their own interpretations. Many graduates took positions in the royal and church bureaucracies.

            There was a renewed interest in classical writings, particularly those of Aristotle, which were translated into Latin in the twelfth century. Christian theology was the “queen of the sciences,” and scholars attempted to reconcile faith with reason, using logic to validate revelation in a system known as scholasticism.  The most influential of the scholastics was Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who used Aristotelian logic and the dialectical method of posing and answering questions in his Summa Theologica.

            In literature, Latin began to give way to the vernacular. Troubadour poetry was written in the vernacular, as were heroic epics such as the Song of Roland.  In architecture, Romanesque, with its barrel vaults and massive pillars and walls with little space for windows gave way in the twelfth century to the Gothic. Cathedral construction would take decades: it was a community endeavor, an act of faith in this world and the next. 

CHAPTER 10 SUMMARY

            In the High Middle Ages monarchs consolidated their power. When William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066, he created a centralized monarchy. Henry II (d.1189) established a system of royal courts and laws common to the entire kingdom, but Henry’s youngest son, John (d.1216) was forced to accept the Magna Carta in 1215, which established the principle that the king was also bound by the laws.  Edward I (d.1307) advanced representative government in the institution of Parliament when he summoned representatives from the cities and the non-titled knightly class to meet with the higher nobility.

            The early Capetian kings of France had little authority over their nobility, but Philip II Augustus (d.1223) strengthened the monarchy by depriving the English kings of their French lands. By the reign of Philip IV the Fair (d.1314) a royal bureaucracy was firmly in place.  In 1302, Philip summoned representatives of the nobility, clergy, and the cities, thus instituting the Estates-General, which never gained the power of England’s Parliament.

            In the eleventh century several small Christian kingdoms in northern Spain began to wage war against the Muslims, a struggle that continued until 1492 when the Moors were expelled.  The German monarchs, preoccupied with controlling northern Italy, lessened their authority in Germany; centralized royal power never materialized in Germany.  Unified monarchies appeared in Scandinavia, and in Eastern Europe German Teutonic Knights battled Slavs. Further east, the Mongols conquered Russia.

            The Church remained powerful, but its spirituality was compromised by its secular involvements. In the Investiture Controversy, wherein the German kings had been appointing church officials, Pope Gregory VII forced Henry IV to beg his forgiveness at Canossa (1077), an event which symbolized of the pope’s authority. The Church’s power reached its apex under Pope Innocent III (r.1198-1216), who excommunicated kings and authorized crusades. 

            The High Middle Ages was an era of religious enthusiasm. Monasteries provided many social services, including providing food and clothing to the poor, and hospitals for the elderly or terminally ill. Collecting holy relics and embarking on pilgrimages was widespread.  Innocent III supported a crusade against the heresy of Cathar dualism, and instituted the holy inquisition.  Homosexuals and Jews were also victims of popular passions, and the latter were driven out of France and England.

            The crusades exemplified the power of the papacy and popular religious enthusiasm.  The Moslem Seljuk Turks defeated a Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert in 1071, and in 1095 Pope Urban II urged a holy war against Islam. The motives of the crusaders were mixed, including religion, adventure, and the quest for riches, and they captured Jerusalem in 1099 and established several small states in the region.  The Turks struck back, leading to later crusades. The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople; the Byzantine Empire never fully recovered. Other crusades followed, but in 1291 the last western outpost fell to Islam.  The crusades contributed to the revival of trade, already underway, but they also encouraged the spread of religious bigotry and violence. 

CHAPTER 11 SUMMARY

            The fourteenth century was a era of crisis.  A “little ice” age led to famine, but a greater disaster followed: the Black Death.  The bubonic plague, spread by black rats’ fleas carrying the bacterium Yersina pestis, reached Europe in 1347.  In a few years up to 50 percent of the population died, with higher mortality rates in urban areas.  It returned every few years for centuries.

            Reactions differed.  Some escaped into alcohol, sex, and crime.  Others, believing the Black Death to be a punishment from God, attempted to atone for their sins through self-inflicted pain. The Jews became scapegoats.  People fled, carrying the plague with them. The resulting labor shortage could benefit peasants, although the demand for products was also reduced. When the ruling classes reduced wage rates there were peasant revolts. The ruling classes quelled the revolts, but social upheaval continued to bedevil the post-plague world. 

            Wars were also part of the crisis, notably the Hundred Years War between England and France.  In 1328 the French Capetian line ended. England’s Edward III (d.1377) claimed the French throne, but a cousin to the Capets, Philip of Valois, became king (d.1350). War soon began. Armored knights on horseback were the backbone of medieval armies, but English peasants using the longbow had begun to change the face of war. When the French king was captured, a treaty was signed in 1360: France agreed to pay ransom, the English received land in France, and Edward renounced his claim to the throne.

Using guerilla tactics, the French regained their lands, but in 1415 England’s Henry V (d.1422) invaded. The French cause was saved by Joan of Arc (d.1431), a young peasant woman. Her leadership inspired the French, who also began to rely on cannon, and by 1453 France had won.

            During Edward III’s reign, the English Parliament gained control over taxes, increasing its power.  In France, however, the Estates-General failed to achieve the same influence. In Germany, dukedoms and city-states went their own way, independent of the Holy Roman Emperor, itself an elective office.  Italy was divided into small kingdoms in the south, the Papal States in central Italy, and several city-states in the north, notably Milan and the oligarchic republics of Florence and Venice. Warfare was endemic.

            The papacy declined.  Confrontation between France’s Philip IV (d.1314) and Pope Boniface VIII led to the removal of the papacy to Avignon on France’s border in 1305.  From 1377 there were two competing popes. Some argued that a general council, not the pope, should rule the church, and Conciliarism did end the Great Schism.

Vernacular literature was exemplified in Italy by Dante, Chaucer in England, and Christine de Pizan in France. In art, Giotto explored three-dimensional realism.  After the Black Death, artists frequently portrayed subjects of death and decay. The impact of the plague led to urban public health regulations and to younger marriages. Technological developments included the perfection of the clock. Finally, the development of gunpowder blew the Middle Ages into history.

CHAPTER 12 SUMMARY

            Beginning in Italy, the Renaissance (or “rebirth”) was an era that rediscovered the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.  It was also a time of recovery from the fourteenth century.  In comparison with medieval society, the Renaissance had a more secular and individualistic ethos, but might best been seen as evolutionary in its urban and commercial continuity from the High Middle Ages.

            The aristocracy remained the ruling class, its ideals explicated in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier.  Peasants were still the vast majority, but serfdom and manorialism were dying out.  An important minority were the inhabitants of towns and cities, with merchants and bankers at the apex and the unskilled workers at the bottom. The father or husband as a dictator dominated the extended family, and marriages were arranged for social and economic advantage. Wives were much younger than their husbands, with their primary function being to bear children.

            Italy was dominated by five major states: the duchy of Milan, Florence, Venice, the Papal States, and the kingdom of Naples. There were also other city-states that were centers of culture and where women played vital roles. At the end of the fifteenth century, Spain and France invaded the divided peninsula. The exemplar of the new statecraft was Niccolo Machiavelli (d.527), whose The Prince described the methods of gaining and holding political power: moral concerns are irrelevant, for the ends justify the means.          

            There was an increased emphasis upon the human. Civic humanism posited that the ideal citizen was not only an intellectual but also a patriot, actively serving the state, and humanist education was to produce individuals of virtue and wisdom. The printing press was perfected, multiplying the availability of books.  In art, the aim was to imitate nature by the use of realistic perspective. Masaccio (d.1428), Donatello (d.1466) and Michelangelo (d.1564) made Florence a locus of the arts. The High Renaissance of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci (d.1519) and Raphael (d.1520) combined natural realism with Platonic idealism.

            It was the era of the “new monarchies.”  In France, Louis XI (d.1483), the Spider, established a centralized state. England’s Henry VII (d.1509) limited the private armies of the aristocracy, raised taxes, and left a more powerful monarchy.  In Spain, Isabella (d.1504) and Ferdinand (d.1516) created a professional army and enforced religious uniformity by the conversion and expulsion of Jews and Moslems.  The Holy Roman Empire remained weak, but the Habsburg emperors created a strong state of their own through numerous marriages.  The were no “new monarchies” in Eastern Europe, but Russia’s Ivan III (d.1505) ended Mongol control.  Lastly, in 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople.

            The church was besieged by problems.  John Wyclif (d.1384) and John Hus (d.1415) condemned the papacy for corruption, its temporal concerns, and demanded the Bible in the vernacular. The popes reflected their era, and their secular involvements overshadowed their spiritual responsibilities. Most were great patrons of the arts, but religious concerns ranked behind the pleasures of this life.

CHAPTER 13 SUMMARY

            There were several roots of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, including Christian humanism, where the focus was on the Bible and the writings of the church fathers. Among the humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (d.1536), who stressed inner piety and Christ as a guide for daily life rather than dogma and ritual.  The Church was criticized for corruption, materialism, and for abuses such as pluralism and absenteeism. To the medieval church, the sacraments administered by the clergy ensured salvation, but Martin Luther (d.1546) argued that faith alone was the answer, and that the Bible, not the Church, was the sole authority.  In 1517 Luther went public in his criticisms. Outlawed after being condemned by pope and emperor, he translated the Bible into German. 

            Erasmus agreed with Luther’s ideas, but feared that they would destroy Christian unity. When peasants rose in rebellion, Luther condemned them: equality before God did not mean equality on earth, and pragmatically, Luther needed the support of the German princes against Emperor Charles V (r.1519-1556). In 1555, Charles and the princes agreed to the Peace of Augsburg, by which each prince would determine the religion of his subjects. In Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli (d.1531) removed stained glass windows and eliminated music from worship. When Pope Clement VII was unable to annul the marriage of England’s Henry VIII (d.1547), Parliament established a separate church with the monarch as its head.  John Calvin (d.1564) agreed with Luther’s theology, but went further in emphasizing God’s sovereignty and the concept of predestination: some were predestined for heaven, others for hell.  His leadership made Geneva, Switzerland, the locus of Protestantism.

            For Protestants the family was the center of human society, but theological equality did not lead to equality in marriage: the wife’s role was to obey her husband and bear children. Catholic holy days and religious carnivals were abolished; some went further, closing theaters and abolishing dancing.

Within the Catholic Church, the most important religious order was the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola (d.1556).  Pope Paul III (r.1534-1549) called the council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563; its final report reaffirmed traditional Catholic doctrine.

            It was a violent century.  In France, Henry III, a Catholic, was assassinated by a monk in 1589, and the Huguenot, or Protestant, head of the Bourbon family became Henry IV (d.1610).  He converted to Catholicism, reconciling the majority, and he issued the Edict of Nantes, granting religious toleration to the Huguenots: both actions were taken for political reasons. Spain’s Philip II’s authoritarian rule and persecution of Protestants led to rebellion in the Netherlands. It was crushed in the south, but not the north: the Dutch became independent in 1648.

            Elizabeth (d.1603) was a moderate Protestant, whose policies satisfied most, but not the radical Puritans nor her exiled Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who plotted against her and was beheaded. Philip II sent a naval Armada against England in 1588.  It ended in defeat for Spain.

CHAPTER 14 SUMMARY

            The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were an era of Western global expansion.  Among the motives, economics ranked first, followed by religion, and adventure or fame, or, as the text quotes, “God, glory, and gold.”  It occurred when it did because of the emergence of centralized monarchies, sufficient wealth to finance such endeavors, and new technologies such as better maps and charts, more seaworthy ships, the compass and astrolabe, and knowledge of Atlantic winds.

            The first to venture forth were Portugal and Spain.  Portuguese ships were exploring and trading along Africa’s west coast by the mid-fifteenth century, bringing back slaves and gold. Seeking the same Asian goal as Portugal, the Italian Christopher Columbus (d.1506), sailing for Spain, reached the Caribbean West Indies in 1492, believing it was part of Asia.  It was not, and the newfound land became known as the New World or America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an early geographer.  Spanish conquistadors arrived on the mainland of Mesoamerica in 1519.  Aztec resistance was quickly overcome thanks to assistance from other native states, gunpowder and horses, and European diseases such as smallpox. 

In South America, the Incas were conquered by the 1530s.  The natives became Spanish subjects, but were often exploited by Spanish settlers. Catholic missionaries, under the control of the Spanish crown, brought Christianity, including cathedrals, schools, and the inquisition, to the native population.

            Although originally less prized than gold and spices, slaves became a major object of trade, and by the nineteenth century ten million African slaves had been shipped to America. It was not until the late 1700s that slavery came under criticism in Europe.

            The Dutch expelled Portugal from the Spice Islands by 1600, and in India, the British East India Company controlled the Mughal Empire by the mid-1700s.  Trade with China was limited, its rulers believing the West offered nothing that China needed, and Japan gave only the Dutch even minimal trading rights. In the New World, the Dutch, French, and the British also established colonies.  Eventually British North America consisted of thirteen colonies.  France established an empire in Canada, but its French population remained small.

            In Europe, a commercial revolution led to integrated markets, joint-stock trading companies, and banking and stock exchange facilities.  Mercantilist theory posited that a nation should acquire as much gold and silver as possible, there must be a favorable balance of trade (i.e. more exports than imports) and the state would provide subsidies to manufactures, grant monopolies to traders, build roads and canals, and impose high tariffs to limit imports.  

            The impact of European expansion was mixed.  In the Americas, the native culture was largely destroyed and a new multiracial society evolved. The Columbian exchange saw Europeans bringing horses, cattle, sugarcane, wheat, disease and gunpowder to the New World and adopting the potato, maize (corn), and chocolate in turn.  Native cultures were least affected in Asia, particularly in Japan and China. Missionaries, mostly Catholic, were mainly successful in the New World, and within Europe, imperial rivalries could lead to war. 

CHAPTER 15 SUMMARY

            The seventeenth century experienced economic recession and population decline as well as continued religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants.  The breakdown of community and the growth of a more individualistic ethic resulted in a world of greater uncertainty.  One reflection of anxieties was an epidemic of witchcraft accusations, usually against women.   

            Protestant and Catholic animosities remained a prime cause for war, notably the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). There were also national and dynastic rivalries such as those between the Bourbon kings of France and the Habsburgs of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.  The Peace of Westphalia gave the German princes the right to determine the religion of their domains, France gained territory, Spanish power declined, and the Habsburg authority as German emperors was diminished.

            The century is known as the age of absolutism or the age of Louis XIV. Monarchs justified their absolutist claims by divine right–God had chosen kings to rule.  Louis XIV (r.1643-1715), the Sun King, was the model for other rulers. His palace of Versailles symbolized his authority, where the aristocracy was entertained and controlled by ceremony and etiquette.  Louis revoked his grandfather’s Edict of Nantes, and he fought four costly wars, mainly to acquire lands on France’s eastern borders. The Hohenzollern rulers of Brandenburg-Prussia became kings. Austrian power waned in the empire but it gained lands in the east and in Italy.  Russia’s Peter the Great (r.1689-1725) attempted to westernize Russia, especially militarily, and built a new capital, St. Petersburg, to be his window on the west.  The last major invasion by the Ottoman Empire into central Europe resulted in its defeat in 1683.

            The period also witnessed the golden age of the oligarchic Dutch republic. The States General was controlled by wealthy merchants, many from Amsterdam with its population of 200,000.  During wars, the military leader, or stadholder, gained additional power.

            The Stuart kings of Scotland, advocates of divine right absolution, became the rulers of England in 1603.  Religious disputes occurred within Protestantism, between the Church of England and Puritan reformers.  Civil war between Charles I (r.1625-1649) and Parliament led to the creation of a republic, the Commonwealth.  The monarchy was restored under Charles II (r.1660-1685). His brother James II (r.1685-1688), a Catholic, was opposed by his own Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, the Dutch stadholder, invaded.  Before ascending the throne they accepted the Bill of Rights, limiting royal power. John Locke (d.1704) claimed that government is created by a social contract to protect the natural rights of life, liberty, and property, and if it fails to do so, there is a right of revolution.  

            In art, Mannerism, with its emotional and religious content, was followed by the Baroque, which used dramatic effects to convey religious and royal power, which in turn gave way to French Classicism.  Rembrandt (d.1669) made it the golden age of Dutch painting. It was also a golden age of theater with England’s Shakespeare (d.1616), Spain’s Lope de Vega (d.1635), and France’s Moliere (d.1673).

CHAPTER 16 SUMMARY

            There was an interest in nature, “God’s handiwork,” in the Middle Ages, but the world was seen through a theological prism, relying on a few ancient authorities, particularly Aristotle.  Other ancient authors were rediscovered in the Renaissance, and its artists made use of science, mathematics, and nature in portraying the real world.  New technologies also contributed.  The quest for scientific truths was often combined with a belief in magic and alchemy.

            From the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came a new cosmology.  Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy had posited a geocentric universe, with the fixed earth in the center and crystal spheres moving around it in perfect circular orbits. But it was difficult to reconcile the Ptolemaic system with actual astronomical observations until Nicolaus Copernicus (d.1543) theorized a heliocentric or sun-centered universe.  Johannes Kepler (d.1630) discovered that planetary orbits were elliptical and that a planet’s speed is variable, thus destroying the idea of perfect circular orbits.

            Galileo Galilei (d.1642), using the new telescope, discovered the moon’s craters, moons of Jupiter, and sunspots; the universe was not perfect and unchanging as the Aristotelian system had claimed. Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church, which feared a cosmology where humanity was no longer at the center of the universe and where God’s heavens were material. In his Principia, Isaac Newton (d.1722) put forth mathematical proofs to support his universal law of gravitation: the entire universe is a mechanistic entity, operating though mathematical laws.

            There were advances in medicine. Andreas Vesalius (d.1564) used anatomical dissection, discovering that ancient Greek ideas of medicine were often incorrect.  The discovery a single system of blood that circulates through veins and arteries was made by William Harvey (d.1657).

            In spite of gender discrimination, the lack of formal educational opportunities, and the assumption that females were inferior, many women made contributions to the Scientific Revolution, including Margaret Cavendish (d.1673) and the astronomer Maria Winkelmann (d.1720).   

            The Scientific Revolution led to doubt.  Rene Descartes (d.1650) questioned all that he had learned and began again.  What he could not doubt was his own existence–I think therefore I am–truth relies upon reason. Mind and matter differed; the mind could only achieve knowledge of the material world through reason and mathematics.  Francis Bacon (d.1626) contributed the scientific method or the inductive method, where a study of the particular would lead to correct generalizations.  To “conquer nature in action” was Bacon’s goal.  

            Knowledge of the new science was spread through universities, royal patronage, scientific societies, and scientific journals.  The Scientific Revolution was more than merely intellectual theories.  Its appeal was also to non-scientific elites because of its practical implications in economic progress and profits and in maintaining the social order, including the waging of war. 

            Traditional religious beliefs were challenged.  Blaise Pascal (d.1662) claimed that Christianity was not contrary to reason, that reason and emotions were inseparable.  Ultimately, his faith was in the human heart, not the rational mind.

CHAPTER 17 SUMMARY

             A cosmopolitan group, the philosophes used reason to improve society.  The baron de Montesquieu's (d.1755) The Spirit of the Laws praised the system of checks and balances and separation of powers that he believed were the essence of the British political system, an important concept of the United States Constitution.  Voltaire (d.1778) attacked the intolerance of organized religion, and many philosophes adopted Deism with its mechanistic god and a universe operating according to natural laws. 

            Denis Diderot (d.1784) compiled a multi-volume Encyclopedia, a compendium of Enlightenment ideas.  David Hume (d.1776) advocated a “science of man.” In economics, the Physiocrats rejected mercantilism in favor of the laws of supply and demand and laissez-faire, as did Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d.1778), like Locke, believed in the social contract theory, arguing that society must be governed by the general will.  In claiming that in education children should follow their instincts–reason was not enough–he was a precursor of Romanticism.  Many of the philosophes had traditional attitudes towards women, bu Mary Wollstonecraft (d.1797) argued for the equality of the sexes and the right of women to be educated. The Enlightenment appealed mostly to the urban middle classes; it passed the peasants by.  Its ideas were discussed in Parisian salons, coffeehouses, reading clubs, lending libraries, and societies like the Freemasons. 

            In art, the lightness and curves of the Rococo replaced the Baroque.  In classical music there were major development in the opera, oratorio, sonata, concerto, and the symphony by Johann Sebastian Bach (d.1750), George Frederick Handel (d.1759), Franz Joseph Haydn (d.1809), and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (d.1791).  In England, the novel became a new literary form. There was an increase in the reading public with books, magazines, and newspapers.   Elite private schools emphasized the Greek and Latin classics, but new middle class education stressed modern languages and other relevant subjects. The theories of Cesare Beccaria (d.1794) and others contributed to a decline in the use of torture and capital punishment.   

            There was a separation between popular culture and the culture of the elites, although the rate of literacy was rising among the majority, in part because of an increase in primary education.  State churches, traditional and conservative, were the norm.  There was some gain in religious toleration for minorities including the Jews, although anti-Semitic attitudes continued.  Popular religious movements appealed to the non-elites.  Pietists in Germany sought a deeper personal relationship with God, and in England, John Wesley (d.1791) led a revival movement among the common people.  It was a century of both change and tradition.

CHAPTER 18 SUMMARY

            During the eighteenth century, royal authority was often justified by the service the monarch could render to the state and its people rather than by divine right. Some believed that the monarchs should have a monopoly of power in what is called “enlightened despotism” or “enlightened absolutism.” Britain’s constitutional monarchy was an alternative.

            For much of the century France was ruled by Louis XV (r.1715-1774). Only five when he ascended the throne, in his maturity he proved to be weak and lazy, controlled by his mistresses and advisors. His successor was little better.  Louis XVI (r.1774-1793) was unprepared, and his wife, Marie Antoinette, an Austrian princess, became a focus of anti-royal attitudes. In Britain, power was shared between kings and parliament, with the latter gaining influence. The new ruling dynasty, from Hanover in Germany, was ignorant of British traditions and incompetent, which led to a new position in government, that of the Prime Minister.

            Prussia rose to major power status under Frederick William I (r.1713-1740) and Frederick II the Great (r.1740-1786), strengthening the kingdom through an efficient bureaucracy and a larger army.  Frederick the Great was in the model of an enlightened despot: he reformed the laws, allowed religious toleration and considerable freedom of speech and the press, but he also increased the army to 200,000.  In the Austrian Empire, Empress Maria Theresa (r.1740-1780) centralized the government and Joseph II (r.1780-1790) abolished serfdom, reformed the laws, and granted religious toleration, but his reforms did not outlast his reign.  Russia’s Catherine II the Great (r.1762-1796) also instituted reforms, but they favored the landed nobility rather than the peasants and serfs. 

            War was endemic, with national interests and dynastic concerns prevailing in a system guided by the balance of power.  The Seven Years War (1756-1763) was fought not only in Europe but also in North America and India.  Frederick the Great was the instigator, desiring Austrian Silesia, but Britain was the true victor, driving France from Canada and India, and creating a worldwide empire. 

            The population grew, mainly as the result of a declining death rate and improvements in agriculture, and the end of the threat of the bubonic plague. The seeds of the industrial revolution were planted, notably in the textile industry where new technologies transformed the manufacture of cotton cloth, and there was a significant increase in international trade

            The patriarchal family remained the core of society. 85 percent of the population were peasants, freer in the west than the east, but still facing many legal obligations. The nobility were 2 or 3 percent. Their large country estates defined their life style, but anyone with sufficient wealth could generally enter their ranks. Townspeople were a small minority except in Britain and the Dutch Republic; London had a population of 1 million, Paris half that.  Urban mortality rates were high and poverty widespread.

CHAPTER 19 SUMMARY

            An era of revolutions began with the American Revolution, justified ideologically by Locke’s social contract and natural rights philosophy.  The Constitution of 1787, with its Bill of Rights, provided a strong central government with a separation of power between the three branches.  Its affect in Europe was immense: Enlightenment ideals could become reality.

            But there were other causes for the French Revolution, such as the legal inequality of the three Estates of the clergy, the aristocracy, and commoners, who were the vast majority.  In 1788, the government, facing financial collapse, summoned the Estates-General for the first time since 1614.  Assembling at Versailles in May 1789, it deadlocked on whether to vote as estates or by head.  The Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly, an illegal act which Louis XVI failed to repress, in part because of rural and urban uprisings, notably the capture of the Bastille prison in Paris on July 14. 

            The constitution of 1791 subordinated the monarch to the Legislative Assembly.  All were citizens, but only citizens who paid taxes had the vote. The lands of the Catholic Church were nationalized and the church placed under civil control. The result was war in April 1792.  In reaction to early military defeats the revolution entered into a more radical stage, abetted by the Paris Commune of artisans and merchants. A republic was proclaimed and the ex-king, Louis XVI, was executed in January 1793.

            To meet the domestic and foreign threats, the Committee of Public Safety was given dictatorial power.  Under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, it raised an army motivated by national patriotism rather than dynastic loyalties.  Revolutionary courts were created to ferret out those not sufficiently supportive of the revolution, and 50,000 were executed during “the Terror.”  But in July 1794, the National Convention turned against Robespierre, who was quickly executed.

            Revolution and war gave Napoleon Bonaparte, his opportunity. A controversial figure, he was more the enlightened despot than the democratic revolutionary.  He made peace with the papacy on his terms, and his Civil Code guaranteed equality, though less so for women. In 1804 he crowned himself Emperor.  His armies conquered much of the continent but his empire did not last.  Great Britain remained undefeated and French armies on the continent bred nationalistic reactions in many of the conquered areas. In June 1812, he invaded Russia with 600,000 troops, but ultimately the French were forced to retreat.  National revolts, a reaction to French occupation armies, broke out, and Napoleon abdicated in 1814.  He briefly returned to power but was defeated at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, and sentenced to exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, where he died in 1821.  His shadow hung over Europe for decades.

            At the end, order had triumphed over liberty, and the victors were the propertied classes.  However, the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity inspired future generations, and the citizen nationalism created in France led to the development of modern nationalism elsewhere.

CHAPTER 20 SUMMARY

            The Industrial Revolution was a transforming event in world history.  Britain was in the forefront because of several advantageous circumstances.  An agricultural revolution had increased the quantity of foodstuffs thus lowering the costs and a population increase supplied a surplus of labor for the new industrial technologies.  Britain was a wealthy nation with capital for investment.  Coal and iron were abundant, and a transportation revolution created a system of canals, roads, bridges, and later, steam-powered railroads. Parliament had established a stable government where property, one of Locke’s natural rights, was protected.  Finally, Britain was the world’s major colonial power with access to overseas markets.  The cotton industry led the way because of new technologies such as the spinning jenny and power loom.  Most significant was the steam engine, perfected by James Watt (d.1819).  London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased to the world Britain’s industrial might.

            Continental industrialization was delayed because of a lack of transport, the existence of internal tolls, less sympathetic governments, and the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Unlike Britain’s laissez-faire approach, continental industrialization was subsidized by governments the construction of railroads, establishing technical schools, and excluding cheaper British goods through tariffs.  By 1860, the United States was also well along the road of industrialization.

            In the non-western world industrial development was much slower, in part because it lacked the social-economic-political structures of the West, but also because Britain and other colonial powers prevented the growth of local industries in order to maintain a market for their manufactured goods: colonies were to produce raw materials and purchase industrial products.

            The birthrate declined but the population increased because of a reduction in epidemics and wars and an increase in the food supply.  Overpopulation, particularly in rural areas, led to disaster, such as in the potato famine in Ireland that led to the death of a million persons between 1845 and 1851.  Cities grew dramatically: London grew from one million in 1800 to 2.35 million in 1850.  Urbanization was slower on the continent, and until the twentieth century most workers were still engaged in agriculture. Urban living conditions were often horrendous and most cities lacked any semblance of sanitary facilities.   

            The new middle-class consisted of manufacturers and bankers.  Even members of the traditional aristocracy became industrial entrepreneurs. Another new class was the working class. The work environment, especially in the factories, was dreadful: long hours, unsafe conditions, and child labor was the norm.  Laws were passed, in Britain known as the Factory Acts, in the attempt to improve factory conditions, initially for women and children, and workhouses were established for the jobless and homeless.

Labor unions were formed to improve wages and conditions but with limited success.  Workers sometimes protested by destroying the factories and machines, as did the Luddites in England.  England’s Chartist movement petitioned Parliament, demanding reforms, but the politicians rejected their demands.  The Industrial Revolution radically transformed western civilization and then the rest of the world–politically, economically, socially–for good and for ill.  

CHAPTER 21 SUMMARY

            One of the many “isms” of nineteenth century was conservatism.  For conservatives, society and the state, not the individual, was paramount, in a world to be guided by tradition. The victors over Napoleon met at the Congress of Vienna, forming the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia.  Its guiding principle was “legitimacy,” or monarchical government, to be maintained by a balance of power. A new German Confederation replaced the Holy Roman Empire. The Quadruple Alliance became the Quintuple Alliance with the admittance of France. 

            Acting as the Concert of Europe, the major powers intervened to uphold conservative governments.  However, Britain, seeking new markets, opposed intervention when Spain’s Latin American colonies declared their independence. The Bourbons returned to France with Louis XVIII (1814-1824) and Charles X (1824-1830).  Bourbon Spain and Italy remained under conservative rule. Order was maintained in multi-ethnic Austria, and in Russia a reform movement was crushed in 1825.

            Liberalism grew out of the Enlightenment and the era of Revolutions.  Freedom was the aim, both in politics and in economics; the state should have no responsibilities except in defense, policing, and public works construction.  Natural rights and representative government were essential, but most liberals limited voting to male property owners.  Nationalism, with its belief in a community with common traditions, language, and customs, also emerged from the French Revolution, threatening the status quo in divided Germany and Italy and the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire. Utopian socialists envisioned cooperation rather than competitive capitalism, and voluntary communities were established.

            In 1830, an uprising in France led to a constitutional monarchy headed by Louis-Philippe (1830-1848), supported by the upper middle-class.  Belgium split off from the Netherlands, but national uprisings in Poland and Italy failed.  In Britain, the franchise was widened to include the upper middle-classes, and free trade became the norm.  The great revolutionary year was 1848.  France’s Louis-Philippe fled into exile and the Second Republic was established with universal manhood suffrage, but conflict developed between socialist demands and the republican political agenda.  A unified Germany was the aim of the Frankfurt Assembly, but it failed.  In Austria, liberal demands of Hungarians and others were put down.  In Italy, there were uprisings against Austrian rule and a republic was proclaimed in Rome, but conservatives regained control.

            Romanticism, a reaction against Enlightenment reason, favored intuition, feeling, and emotion. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a popular novel about a youth who committed suicide for love.  The brothers Grimm collected folk tales, and the Middle Ages inspired Sir Walter Scott.  Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe wrote about the bizarre and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord George Byron were notable poets.  Nature was often the subject in William Wordsworth’s poetry and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. In music, Ludwig von Beethoven was a major figure. 

CHAPTER 22 SUMMARY

            Louis Napoleon was elected president of France’s Second Republic in 1848, but when the National Assembly refused to sanction a second term, he led a coup d’etat against his own government, and, with the approval of the French voters, he became Emperor Napoleon III. Against the tide of laissez-faire liberalism, his regime took the economic lead, notably in the rebuilding of Paris.  The decline of the Ottoman Empire sparked the Crimean War (1854-1856), the result of Britain and France’s fear of Russian expansion.  Russia was stalemated but it and Britain retreated from European affairs during the era of the unification of Germany and Italy.

            Italian unification was led by Count Camillo di Cavour (d.1861), prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia.  An alliance was made with France against Austria, and victories in 1859 enlarged Piedmont’s territory.  Giuseppe Garibaldi (d.1882) led an uprising against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and in 1861 a kingdom of Italy under Piedmont’s House of Savoy was realized, excluding Rome and Venetia, which were taken over by 1870.

            In 1862, Otto von Bismarck became Prussia’s prime minister.  A brilliant diplomat, in 1866 he maneuvered larger Austria into declaring war against Prussia.  With its superior army, victorious Prussia united the northern states into the North German Confederation.  In 1870, Prussia defeated France in a brief war, and the Second German Empire was the result.  Under Bismarck, nationalism was allied with conservatism, whereas earlier in the century nationalism had been associated with liberalism.

            Austria compromised with Hungarian nationalists, creating the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.  Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War led to reforms under Alexander II (r.1855-1881), including the freeing of millions of serfs. Conservatives feared the tsar went too far, but others wanted more reform, which led to the tsar’s assassination in 1881. Britain escaped disruption because of economic growth and Parliament’s willingness to make necessary reforms.  The American Civil War (1861-1865) ended with the Union preserved and slavery abolished, and in 1867, Britain gave Canada dominion status, including the right to rule itself in domestic matters.

            Karl Marx (d.1883), with Friedrich Engels (d.1895), published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but initially it passed unnoticed.  According the Marx, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”  In the modern world it was the middle-class, or the bourgeoisie, which controlled the means of production, but Marx predicted that the proletariat would rise up, reorganize society on a socialist model, and create a classless society.                

            In science, the laws of thermodynamics, the germ theory of disease, electromagnetic induction, and chemistry’s periodic law changed the world, as did Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) with its theory of the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, and the emergence of new species.           

It was the age of realism in the arts, exemplified in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the works of Charles Dickens.  Gustave Courbet painted scenes of everyday life. 

CHAPTER 23 SUMMARY

            A Second Industrial Revolution occurred in the latter nineteenth century, a revolution of steel, chemicals, electricity, and the internal combustion engine.  Higher wages fueled internal markets. Tariffs replaced free trade and cartels monopolized production.  Germany became the industrial leader while Europe was divided into a industrialized north and a poorer south and east. World-wide, European manufactured goods and investment capital was exported abroad in exchange for raw materials.

            The status of women improved somewhat in service and white-collar jobs as typists and clerks. Prostitution remained an avenue for survival for many women. Working-class political parties, such as Germany’s Social Democratic Party, were established.  The Second International, 1889, hoped to coordinate Marxist socialist parties, but split among advocates of the revolutionary class struggle and those who envisioned socialism being achieved democratically.  Trade unions were most successful in Britain.

            Europe’s population reached 460 million by 1910. Many migrated from the poorer east and south to industrialized northern Europe and abroad, often for economic reasons, but also to escape ethnic and religious persecution.  In the industrial north, urban populations constituted up to 80 percent of the total.  Urban conditions improved because of building codes and better housing, cleaner water, and new sewage systems. Old city walls were torn down and workers commuted by trains and streetcars to the new suburbs. In redesigned cities, such as Paris and Vienna, parks and wide roads were built.

            The standard of living generally improved.  The elite were 5 percent of the population but controlled 30-40 percent of the wealth, as old landed wealth merged with the new industrial wealth.  The middle classes, with their values of hard work and propriety, encompassed the upper middle class professionals down to the lower middle class white-collar clerks and bank tellers. The lower classes made up 80 percent of the population, but with rising wages many workers adopted middle class values.  Industrialism reinforced traditional female inferiorly: women stayed at home while men went out to work.  The birthrate dropped as families limited the number of children.

            Because of expanding voting rights and the need to have an electorate educated in national values, most states assumed responsibility for mass compulsory education up to the age of twelve.  Literacy rates reached almost 100 percent in northern Europe, leading to a demand for mass newspapers, filled with sports and sensationalism.  New leisure hours, including the weekend, led to new mass entertainment.

            By the end of the century most British males had the vote. In France, the Third Republic was established in spite of opposition from monarchists, army officers, and the Catholic clergy.  Italy was troubled by regional differences, political corruption, and ever-changing governments.  The traditional order lasted longer in central and eastern Europe. In Germany, where the popularly elected Reichstag lacked power, Bismarck implemented social welfare programs to seduce the workers away from socialism.  After the assassination of Russia’s Alexander II, the reactionary Alexander III (r.1881-189) and Nicholas II (r.1894-1917) opposed all reforms.

CHAPTER 24 SUMMARY

            By the end of the nineteenth century, faith in reason, progress, and science was being subverted by a new modernity about the physical universe, the human mind, and in the arts.  The anxieties about old certainties were seemingly confirmed by the Great War, which began in 1914.

            The Newtonian mechanistic universe was challenged by the discovery of radiation and the randomness of subatomic particles.  Max Planck said that energy is radiated in packets, or quanta.  Albert Einstein claimed that time and space were relative to the observer, and that matter was a form of energy (E = mc2.).  Friedrich Nietzsche lauded the instinctive irrational, and Sigmund Freud argued that human behavior was governed by the unconscious.  

            Social Darwinists, arguing that society was also a survival of the fittest, justified laissez-faire government, but it was also used by nationalists and racists as a justification for war and inequality.  Science challenged religion, but fundamentalists put their faith in the literal Bible. 

            In literature, Naturalism exhibited a mechanistic attitude toward human freedom.   Symbolists denied objective reality; it was only symbols in the mind.  Art Impressionism stressed the changing effects of light in the paintings of Camille Pissarro.  In Post-impressionism, Vincent van Gogh emphasized light but also structure in portraying subjective reality (photography mirrored objective reality).  Pablo Picasso’s Cubism reconstructed subjects according to geometric forms and Vasily Kandinsky’s Abstract Expressionism abandoned representational images.  In music, mood was stressed; the musical dissonances of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its Paris debut.

            Many women demanded equal rights, including political equality; British suffragettes broke windows and went on hunger strikes to gain attention.  Anti-Semitism revived.  In France, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned on trumped-up charges, and there were anti-Semitic political parties in Germany and Austria.  In Russia, pogroms led many Jews to emigrate.  Theodor Herzl claimed that Jews should have their own state in Palestine. British Liberals enacted social welfare legislation.  Germany’s Social Democratic Party was opposed by the emperor and right-wing parties. In Russia, socialists turned to revolution; after the 1905 Revolution, Nicholas II accepted a weak Duma.  By 1900, the United States was the world’s leading industrial nation.

            National rivalry, Social Darwinism, religious and humanitarian concerns, and economic demands of raw materials and overseas markets contributed to the New Imperialism. By 1914, Africa had been colonized.  Britain occupied Australia and New Zealand and took over India from the East India Company.  France colonized Indochina and Russia expanded to the Pacific. China was unable to resist Western pressures, and Japan was forced to open its borders, but modernized by borrowing from the West.  An imperial United States emerged after 1898.        

            After the unification of Germany, Bismarck formed the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary.  Russia turned to France, and Britain, fearing Germany’s ambitions, joined them in the Triple Entente.  Austrian annexations in the Balkans were resented by Serbia. With Germany backing Austria and Russia supporting Serbia, a spark could set off a conflagration.

CHAPTER 25 SUMMARY

            The text rightly calls World War I the defining event of the twentieth century.  The June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serbian terrorist, was the final spark.  Austria, after receiving a  “blank check” by Germany, declared war against Serbia on July 28.  Germany declared war on Russia after the latter’s military mobilization.  Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was to attack France through neutral Belgium.

By August 4, the Great War had begun.  Initially there was great enthusiasm. War gave excitement to ordinary lives and most assumed that it would soon be over.  The Germans drove the Russians back in the east, but in the west a stalemate developed, with trenches extending from the Swiss border to the English Channel, defended by barbed wire and machine guns.  Attacking troops had to cross “no man’s land”: 21,000 British died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.  Artillery, poison gas, seasonal mud, and ever-present rats and decaying corpses added to the carnage.

            The Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Italy.  After German submarine attacks, the United States entered the war in 1917. Governments took the economic lead, especially in producing munitions, and wage and price controls were instituted.  Propaganda was employed to keep up morale and newspapers were censored.  Many women entered the labor force, and after the war were given the vote in the United States and Britain.

            Russia was unprepared for war, lacking a large industrial base or adequate leadership, and public support waned because of military losses. When bread rationing was introduced in March 1917, women demonstrated in the streets of St. Petersburg/Petrograd.  The Duma established a Provisional Government and Nicholas abdicated on March 15.  But socialist soviets, or workers’ councils, challenged the new government’s legitimacy.  The revolutionary Bolshevik V.I. Lenin campaigned for “Peace, Land, and Bread” and “All Power to the Soviets.”  The war was increasingly unpopular, and in November the Bolsheviks seized power.  Lenin established a dictatorship and signed a costly peace with Germany.  Civil war broke out between the Bolshevik Reds and the Whites, who were unable to agree politically and militarily.  Able military leaders, interior lines of defense, and “revolutionary terror” led the Bolsheviks to victory by 1921.

            After Russia’s withdrawal from the war, Germany launched a massive attack in the west.  However, the war had taken its toll in Germany, and in the fall, after American troops entered the conflict, the German government collapsed.  On November 11, 1918, an armistice was signed.

The peace delegates gathered at Paris in January 1919. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to accept guilt for causing the war and pay reparations. Its army was reduced to 100,000 and it lost territory to France and Poland.  The Austrian and Ottoman empires disappeared.  The United States refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and did not join the League of Nations, the institution that was to guarantee permanent peace.

CHAPTER 26 SUMMARY

            Ten million deaths, a lost generation, disillusionment and despair were among the fruits of World War I. Some of the survivors turned to pacifism; others were attracted to radical national ideologies such as fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany.

            European prosperity, largely the result of American loans and investments, ended with the Great Depression.  The economist John Maynard Keynes favored increased government spending and deficit financing rather than deflation and balanced budgets, but had little support.  Britain’s unemployment remained at 10 percent during the 1920s and rose rapidly in the depression. France was governed, or ungoverned, by frequent coalition governments. The United States’ New Deal was more successful in providing relief than in recovery, and unemployment remained high until World War II. Among most of the nations of Europe there was a retreat from democracy, which seemed to have failed, both politically and economically.

            Totalitarian governments, which required the active commitment of their citizens, came to power in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union.  Italian fascism resulted from Italy’s losses in the Great War, economic failure, and incompetent politicians. Threatening “to march on Rome,” Benito Mussolini was chosen prime minister in 1922.  Legal due process was abandoned and rival parties were outlawed, but totalitarianism in Italy was never as effective as in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

            In Germany, Adolph Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis). A powerful orator, Hitler published his beliefs in Mein Kampf, and created a private army of storm troopers (SA), but it was not until the depression that the Nazis received wide support.  Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and a compliant Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, giving him dictatorial power. Hitler rearmed Germany, abolished labor unions, and created a new terrorist police force, the SS.  The Nuremberg laws excluded Jews from citizenship, and in the 1938 Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses and synagogues were burned and Jews beaten and killed.          

            After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin assumed leadership in the Soviet Union.  In 1928, he announced his first five-year plan to turn the Soviet Union into an industrial society. Giant collective farms were created, and in the process 10 million lives were lost.  Stalin’s opponents were sent to Siberia, sentenced to labor camps, or liquidated.  With the exception of Czechoslovakia, authoritarian governments appeared in Eastern Europe as well as in Portugal and Spain.  In the Spanish Civil War, the fascist states aided Francisco Franco and the Soviet Union backed the Popular Front. 

            In art, German Expressionism reflected the horrors of war and the corruptions of peace, Dada focused upon the absurd, and Surrealism upon the unconscious.  The unconscious “stream of consciousness” technique was used in the novels of James Joyce.  The Bauhaus movement emphasized the functional in architecture.  It was also the “the heroic age of physics.”  The discovery of subatomic particles indicated that splitting the atom could release massive energies, and Werner Heisenberg’s  “uncertainty principle” had implications far beyond the study of physics. 

CHAPTER 27 SUMMARY

            Of the causes of World War II, Adolph Hitler’s ambitions loom large, including his beliefs in Aryan racial supremacy and the need for Germany to have living space in the east (Lebensraum).  Posing as a man of peace, Hitler claimed that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair; and when German troops occupied the demilitarized Rhineland, there was little reaction by Britain and France.  Criticized for invading Ethiopia, Mussolini joined Hitler in forming the Rome-Berlin Axis.     

            Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938.  Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, home of three million ethnic Germans, was next. Hitler soon seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, and launched the Blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1, 1939.  Next the Netherlands fell in five days, and France capitulated in June.  Most of the British army escaped at Dunkirk, and under Winston Churchill’s leadership, Britain survived Nazi Germany’s air assault in the Battle of Britain. Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, but Soviet resistance and winter conditions led to stalemate and soon a Soviet counterattack.

            Imperial ambitions and economic concerns propelled Japan to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The Japanese advance was ended at the naval battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942.  In mid-1943 a German army was defeated at the Battle of Stalingrad, a major turning point in the war.  In June 1944, Rome fell to the Allies and Normandy was invaded.  The Soviets linked up with the western Allies in April 1945, and Hitler committed suicide. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 8, 1945. The war had ended, but at the cost of 50 million dead.

            In the Nazi empire racial assumptions were paramount, and anti-Semitism was central to Nazism.  In the 1930s, Jewish emigration was encouraged, but ultimately the Final Solution was annihilation, and millions died in extermination camps.  Up to six million Jews died in the Holocaust, along with Gypsies, homosexuals, and others.

            Women played a major role in all the combatant nations.  The mainland of the United States was never endangered, and because of its industrial wealth, the United States became the chief arsenal for the Allies. 110,000 Japanese-Americans were placed in relocation camps.  Both sides bombed civilian populations; the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 killed 100,000 persons, and Japanese cities suffered from widespread bombing even before the use of the atomic bomb. 

            Approximately 20 million soldiers lost their lives, and civilian deaths numbered 40 million. The Soviet Union experienced the greatest losses. With the exception of the United States, the economies of the belligerent nations were nearly destroyed.

            By the Yalta conference of February 1945, the Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe.  Germany was to be divided into zones of occupation. An ideological struggle had emerged, pitting totalitarian communism against democratic capitalism.  In 1946, Churchill gave a label to the new Cold War reality: Europe was divided by “an iron curtain.”

CHAPTER 28 SUMMARY

            The Cold War began in the aftermath of World War II.  The United States and the Soviet Union had different philosophies and conflicting ambitions and fears. The Truman Doctrine promised to aid nations threatened by communism, and the Marshall Plan, which provided $13 billion to rebuild Europe, was rejected by the Soviets.  Germany and Berlin were divided into zones.  When the Americans, British, and French unified their zones, the Soviets blocked access to Berlin, leading to a year-long Berlin Air Lift.

            In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was created as a defensive alliance against Soviet aggression.  The Soviet bloc countered with the Warsaw Pact. North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, and the West claimed it was instigated by the Soviets. The Cold War spread to space, with the Soviet space satellite, Sputnik I.  The Berlin Wall was built in 1961, a major Cold War symbol.  The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis almost led to nuclear holocaust until the Soviets backed down. In Vietnam, the United States feared a communist victory would result in the fall of all of Asia, like a row of dominoes.  The communists achieved victory in 1975, but the dominos did not fall.

            By the end of the 1960s, most of Africa had achieved independence.  In the Middle East, Israel was founded in 1948 amidst war with the Arab states; the 1967 Six Day War brought the Palestinian West Bank under Israeli control.  The Philippines became independent, and British India, with its Hindu majority and Muslim minority, was partitioned into Pakistan and India, but at the cost of a million dead.  In China, Mao Zedong’s Communists forced Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists to Taiwan. Soviet emphasis on heavy industry left little for consumers, and when their satellite states pursued independent paths the Soviets cracked down.

            The Western European economy boomed.  Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic saw France leave NATO and develop an atomic bomb.  The Federal Republic of Germany experienced an “economic miracle,” as did Italy in spite of its many coalition governments.  Britain’s Labour Party created a welfare state, but unrealistic union demands and a lack of business investment slowed the economy. The 1960s was a time of upheaval, with the civil rights movement, race riots, and the Vietnam anti-war movement.  Canadian events often mirrored those in the United States.

            A new society, with its own challenges, resulted from economic growth and new technologies.  White-collar workers increased, birth control, notably “the pill,” led to smaller families, and more women joined the work force.  A significant feminist or women’s liberation movement emerged.  In the arts, Andy Warhol’s Pop Art achieved notoriety as did Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism.  Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot exemplified the Theater of the Absurd. The impact of two world wars and the breakdown of traditional values led to the philosophy of existentialism, exemplified by Jean Paul-Sartre and Albert Camus, which reflected the meaninglessness of modern society. Conversely, the same events and concerns led to a revival of religion.

CHAPTER 29 SUMMARY

            At the end of the 1960 protests engulfed the West. A youth movement emerged, and the feminist movement transformed the lives of women. One focus of rebellion was the Vietnam War, which deeply divided American society. At times the protests turned violent, and in reaction, many demanded “law and order,” a desire that Richard Nixon capitalized upon in gaining the presidency in 1968.

            Under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (d.1982), economic stagnation stalked the Soviet Union. Because of Soviet control, Eastern Europe also stagnated. There were some economic reforms in Hungary—“Communism with a capitalist facelift”—but when reforms were introduced in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Red Army crushed the “Prague Spring.”

            After decades of economic growth, Western Europe experienced economic recessions in 1970s. West Germans installed a center-left government in 1969, and under Willy Brandt a policy of Ostpoklitik, or “opening to the East” was adopted. In 1979, the Conservative Party’s Margaret Thatcher became the first woman prime minister in Britain. She reduced the power of the unions and brought down inflation, but some areas of the country suffered unemployment.

            During the 1970s, the administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter struggled with economic stagflation—high inflation and high unemployment. The economic problems compounded by Carter’s inability to gain the freedom of American hostages held in Iran led to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Reagan Revolution reduced welfare benefits and increased military funding. Tax cuts were initiated in the belief that they would stimulate economic growth, and although the economy improved, government deficits also increased.

            In Vietnam, by 1965 the Vietcong opposition, backed by North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh, threatened the survival of the south. In response, Lyndon Johnson sent in American combat forces. Casualties mounted and in 1973, Nixon agreed to withdraw American troops.

            In the People’s Republic of China, the apex of communist radicalism was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. In 1972 the fervent anti-communist Nixon journeyed to China, and met with Mao. The result was a lessening of tensions and by the end of the 1970s a “strategic relationship” against any Soviet threat in Asia.

Relations with the Soviet Union also improved with détente. In 1975 the Helsinki Agreements signatories recognized existing borders in Europe and agreed to protect the human rights of their citizens.  Détente took a step backwards in 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” and pursued a military buildup.

            It was a new era of science, wherein governments and large corporations provided necessary funding. The computer, made possible by the silicon chip, revolutionized society. But scientific developments could lead environmental disaster, as symbolized by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.

            The ideas of Postmodernism rejected objective truth, and literary critics posited structuralism and deconstruction as alternative ways to perceive the world. Serialism and minimalism were influential in music. Popular culture was increasingly globalized, and mass sports increased in popularity, made possible by world-wide television.

CHAPTER 30 SUMMARY

            By the 1980s the Soviet Union was in economic crisis. A new era began in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. In his attempt to reform Soviet society he relied upon perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Competitive elections were instituted, and non-Communist political parties were legalized.

However, the Soviet Union was in disarray as nationalistic movements began in most of the republics, a consequence of the reduction of the Soviet dictatorship. The Soviet Union was abolished in 1991, and a voluntary Commonwealth of Independent States replaced the Soviet empire. New president Boris Yeltsin gave backing to a market economic and a pluralistic political system, but corruption and organized crime remained. Yeltsin resigned in 1999, and a former KGB official, Vladimir Putin, replaced him.

            Across Eastern Europe, Communist regimes collapsed, replaced by democratic governments. A few of the eastern states joined NATO and more became members of the European Union (EU). Ethnic demands shook Serb-dominated but multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, and war resulted when Croatia declared its independence. Yugoslavia, which had come into existence after World War I, disappeared from the map, with the remaining rump renamed Serbia.

            German reunification came at considerable economic cost given the former East Germany’s bankrupt economy.  In Britain in 1997, Tony Blair was elected prime minister, whose tenure was tarnished by corruption and his active support of the Iraq War.  Socialism failed to work in France under Francois Mitterrand, but economic problems continued under conservative Jacques Chirac.

By 2004, the population of European Community was 455 million. The EC became the European Union in 1994, and a common currency, the euro, was adopted by most member states. In the United States, the 1990s was a period of prosperity. The events of September 11, 2001, and the resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, dominated the presidency of George W. Bush.

            Although the Cold War had ended by 1990, “history” had not. There was a new era of conflict, an Age of Terrorism. The motives of terrorists could be nationalist, economic, political, and increasingly religious.

            Women continued to enter the workforce in greater numbers, and the women’s movement prospered. In spite of the opposition of the Catholic Church, birth control and abortion were widely available. The birth rate in many Western countries declined, necessitating immigrants and “guest workers” to staff jobs. Social tensions increased and violent anti-immigrant actions occurred in France and Germany and elsewhere.

            Church attendance declined precipitously in the West. The exception was among fundamentalist Christians, particularly in the United States. Islamic fundamentalism found a receptive audience, some of whom turned to terrorism.

In the visual arts, Neo-Expressionism reached its apex. The world became digitalized, and video games and cell phones transformed society. In the global economy, the multinational or the transnational corporation has become the central arbiter.  But globalization could also contribute to environmental challenges such as global warming and mass immigration, with its social consequences.