I am doing this week’s prep a little differently by separating out optional readings/videos with required readings/videos. Remember -the optional material could be used in the exercises for the week.
REQUIRED:
- Read: Revolutions 1750 to 1914
- Submit your answers on Blackboard
- Key Ideas and Understanding
- In general, what were politics and government like around the world at the beginning of the long nineteenth century?
- What important new political ideas resulted from the circulation of new ideas around the world?
- What revolutions does this introduction suggest came first? In which part of the world were these revolutions?
- What is nationalism, and what role does this author suggest it played in political revolutions?
- Evaluating and Corroborating
- What ideas from the political revolutions described in this overview continue to be important today?
- Does this overview provide any sense of the limitations of these revolutions? Who do you think didn’t get to fully participate in these changes?
- Read Origins and Impacts of Nationalism – Provides a strong foundational understanding of nationalism and its role in revolutions.
- Submit your answers on Blackboard
- Key Ideas and Understanding
- How does the author define nationalism?
- How did the French, Haitian, and American revolutions help spread nationalism?
- How does the author explain the decline in religious identity during the Long Nineteenth Century?
- Why was it harder for Germans and Italians to build a unified nation-state than it was for the French?
- Evaluating and Corroborating
- The author argues that national identities have replaced traditional identities like religion. Is this true for you? What about for people you know, like grandparents or teachers? Do you see any new types of communities that people are identifying with in our world today?
- How do you think changes in communication helped spread nationalism through networks across the Atlantic Ocean?
- Read: The World Revolution of 1848 – Offers a case study to analyze the spread and impact of revolutionary ideas.
- Submit your answers on Blackboard
- Key Ideas and Understanding
- What caused the revolutions of 1848 in Europe?
- Why did the revolutions of 1848 fail?
- What effects did the Taiping Revolution and the Great Revolt of 1857 have on British power in Asia?
- Why does the author suggest that all these revolutions happened around the same time?
- From Europe to China, what was the common effect of the failed world revolutions from 1848 to 1865?
- Evaluating and Corroborating
- All the revolutions mentioned in this article failed. However, how revolutionary would the revolutions of 1848, the Taiping Revolution, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857 have been, if they had succeeded?
- The 1848 revolutions were driven by two questions: a communities frame question that mostly the middle class liberals pushed (who gets to participate in ruling?) and a production and distribution frame question that mostly working class radicals pushed (who gets the profit from industrialization?) Were either of these questions resolved by these revolutions?
OPTIONAL
- Read: The Enlightenment
- No questions for credit but read for this week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- The author argues that the Enlightenment introduced the idea that the universe had rules, and that these rules could be understood by studying and examining the world around us. Why was this a revolutionary idea?
- The author also describes the Enlightenment as a political movement. What idea does she say was most revolutionary in this regard?
- The author also describes the Enlightenment as an economic, ethical, and religious phenomenon. What changing idea does she look at in this regard?
- According to the author, most Enlightenment thinkers wanted gradual and limited change. What evidence does she give for this argument?
- Some people pushed for a more revolutionary result from the Enlightenment. Who were they?
- After reading this argument, do you think the Enlightenment should be called “revolutionary”? Why or why not?
- How could the ideas expressed in the Enlightenment pave the way to political revolution?
- No questions for credit but read for this week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- Watch: The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment
- No questions for credit but read for this week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- 1:01 What, according to the video, was powerful about Nicolaus Copernicus’ On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres?
- 2:06 What, according to the video, was important about Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia?
- 3:04 According to the video, how did these questions lead to changes in how people thought about political rights and organizations (in the Enlightenment)?
- 5:50 What is the argument John Locke makes in the excerpt from Second Treatise Concerning Civil Government presented in this video?
- 8:30 This video asks to what degree the Enlightenment helped people. But it also speaks to the limits of the Enlightenment. What were some of these limits?
- This video makes the argument that the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in Europe led to political revolution later in this era. Do you think these ideas were enough to launch revolutions and revolutionary wars? What else might have been necessary?
- No questions for credit but read for this week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- Read: Sovereignty
- No questions for credit but read for this and course week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- What is a citizen, and how is the idea of popular sovereignty important to creating citizens?
- Thomas Hobbes was an important thinker from this period who wrote a book called Leviathan about popular sovereignty. How does the image from Leviathan express that idea?
- The author argues that sovereignty left people out. What are examples she gives?
- Beyond just being left out, the author argues that sovereignty for some actually meant that others could lose rights. How does she make this argument?
- No questions for credit but read for this and course week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- Read: The Atlantic Revolutions
- No questions for credit but read for this week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- How, according to the author, did the Seven Years’ War help to lead to both the American and French Revolutions?
- What were the results of the American Revolution in terms of achieving independence? What were the results in terms of creating an egalitarian society?
- How did the French Revolution transform France? What was not transformed?
- Why, according to the author, was the Haitian Revolution the most radical of them all?
- What fears, according to the author, led to internal divisions within the Latin American revolutions?
- No questions for credit but read for this week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included in this link.
- Watch: Samurai, Daimyo, Matthew Perry, and Nationalism
- No questions for credit but read for this and course week’s activities. If you prefer having questions to help with notetaking, they are in included below.
- Key Ideas—Understanding Content
- 2:37 How does John Green define nation-state?
- 3:50 John Green gives two different theories for how people become a nation: organic process and government construction. What is some evidence he offers for each?
- 7:43 What were some internal and external factors that made the Shogunate government of Japan unstable by the mid-nineteenth century?
- 9:20 What changes did the Japanese nationalist rebels bring to Japan once they removed the shogunate?
- 11:16 What connection does John Green make between Japanese nationalism, modernization, and empire?
- Evaluating and Corroborating
- You’ve watched videos and read articles about the political revolutions of the eighteenth century. How do you think those political revolutions affected the types of nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century?
- John Green says that nationalism was a “global phenomenon”. How do you think it became global? What are some ways that ideas about nationalism might have spread so quickly to the Ottoman Empire, India, China, and Japan?
