WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS

Western Civilization
HMS 301

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Main Topics  The Black Death  The Effects of the Black Death  The Rise of Constitutional Monarchy  The Hundred Years’ War  The Decline of the Church  The Renaissance  Italy: Birthplace of the Renaissance  Italian Renaissance Humanism  Machiavelli and Power Politics  Leonardo Da Vinci  Global Travel and Trade  The African Cultural Heritage  West African Kingdoms  The Europeans in Africa  Native American Cultures  Maya Civilization  The Empires of the Incas and the Aztecs  The Spanish in the Americas and the Aftermath of Their Conquest  The Impact of Technology  Christian Humanism and the Northern Renaissance  Luther and the Protestant Reformation  The Spread of Protestantism  The Catholic Reformation

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 The French Revolution  Napoleon Bonaparte  The Industrial Revolution  Advancing Industrialism  Colonialism  China and the West  Social and Economic Realities  Nineteenth-Century Social Theory: conservatism, liberalism & socialism  The Radical View of Marx and Engels  Picasso and the Birth of Cubism  Futurism, Fauvism and Non Objective Art  The Birth of Motion Pictures  Freud and the Psyche  Total War and Totalitarianism  The First World War  The Russian Revolution  Nazi Totalitarianism  The Second World War  Identity and Liberation: Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

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The Black Death
The most devastating natural catastrophe of the early modern era was the bubonic plague, which hit Europe in 1347 and destroyed one third to one half of its population within less than a century. Originating in Asia and spread by the Mongol tribes that dominated that vast area, the disease devastated China and the Middle East, interrupting long-distance trade and crossnatural encounters that had flourished for two centuries.

Flea-bearing black rats aboard commercial vessels, which brought goods to Mediterranean ports transmitted the Plague to Europe. Within two years of its arrival, the plague ravaged much of the Western world.

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In its early stages, it was transmitted by the bite of either the infected flea or the host rat; in its more severe stages, those infected with the disease passed it on. The symptoms of the malady were terrifying: Buboes (or abscesses) began to appear turning the body a deathly black, hence the popular label “the Black Death”. Once the boils and

accompanying fever appeared, death usually followed within two to three days.

Traditional treatments, such as the bleeding of victims and fumigation with vapors of

vinegar, proved useless. The plague hit towns the hardest due to the high population and lack of sanitation, which created difficulties in containing the spread of the disease. Four waves of bubonic plague spread throughout Europe between 1347 and 1375, infecting some European cities several times and nearly wiping out their entire populations. The virulence of the plague and the mood of mounting hopelessness horrified the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). In his preface to the Decameron, (a collection of tales told by ten young people who abandoned plague-ridden Florence for the safety of a country estate), Boccaccio described the physical conditions of the plague, as well as its psychological consequences. He recorded with dark precision how
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widespread death had forced Florentine citizens to abandon the traditional forms of grieving and the rituals associated with death and burial. The stirring vernacular (dialect) prose captured the mood of dread (fear-terror) that prevailed in Florence, as people fled their cities, homes, and even their families. “So many bodies were brought to the churches every day that the consecrated ground did not suffice to hold them...” The Decameron- Boccaccio

The Effects of the Black Death
Those who survived the plague tried to understand and explain its meaning and purpose. Some viewed it as the manifestation of God’s displeasure with the growing materialism of contemporary society, while others saw it as a divine warning to all Christians, especially to the clergy whose luxurious lifestyle and moral carelessness were common.

Those who perceived the plague as God's threat, urged a return to religious orthodoxy, and some devised fanatic kinds of punishment. Groups of flagellants, for instance, wandered the countryside lashing their bodies with whips in frenzies of self-mortification. At the other extreme, there were many who resolved to “eat, drink, and be happy” in what might be the last hours of their lives; while still others, in a spirit of doubt and inquiry, questioned the very existence of a god who could work such evils on humankind.

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The abandonment of the church–directed rituals of funeral and burial described by Boccaccio threatened tradition and shook the confidence of medieval Christians. Inevitably, the old medieval regard for death as a welcome release from earthly existence began to give way to a gnawing sense of anxiety and a new self–consciousness. The abundance of death–related pictorial images that appeared during the Black Death century reflected some of these changes including purgatorial visions and gruesome depictions of death and burial. Of all plague–related themes, the most popular was the “Dance of Death”. Set forth in poetry and the visual arts, the Dance of Death or dance macabre portrayed death as a grinning skeleton or cadaver shepherding his victims to the grave. The procession (which might have originated in conjunction with popular dances) included men, women, and children from all walks of life and social classes: peasants and kings, school–masters and merchants, priests and nuns–all succumb to Death’s ravishment. The Dance of Death objectified the new regard for death as “the Great Equalizer”, that is, as an impartial phenomenon threatening every individual regardless of status or wealth. This vulnerability of humankind is a prevailing motif in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century verse.

The theme of the Dance of Death captured the imagination of fourteenth–century artists and appeared in almost every medium of expression, including woodcut and

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engraving, for two centuries thereafter. In the medieval morality play Everyman, Death is a powerful antagonist. However, in visual representations, he assumes subtle guises – ruler, predator, and seducer – and is a sly and cajoling figure who mocks the worldly pursuits of his unsuspecting victims. If the psychological impact of the Black Death was shocking, its economic effects were equally devastating. Widespread death among the poor caused a shortage of labor, which in turn created a greater demand for workers. The bargaining power of those who survived the plague was thus improved. In many parts of Europe, workers pressed to raise their status and income. Peasants took advantage of opportunities to become tenant farmers on lands leased by lords in need of laborers. Others fled their rural manors for cities where jobs were readily available. This migration from the countryside, encouraged and incited urban growth, and contributed to the slow disintegration of manorialism. All of Europe, however, continued to be disadvantaged by the climatic disasters that caused frequent crop failure and famine, and by the continuing demands of financially threatened feudal overlords. Violent working–class revolts – the first example of labor rebellion in Western history – broke out in France and England in the mid – fourteenth century. In 1358, French peasants (known as Jacques) staged an angry protest (the Jacquerie) that took the lives of hundreds of nobleman before the French king suppressed it.

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Despite their ultimate failure, these revolts left their imprint on the social history of the West. They frightened landowners everywhere and lent and instability to class relationships that accelerated the departure of the old feudal order.

Europe in Transition
The Rise of Constitutional Monarchy
While the peasant rebellions achieved no immediate reforms, the lower classes had taken a major step toward demanding equality with the rest of society. England’s laboring classes were not the first, however, to have contested and opposed the absolute authority of the English monarch. As early as the year 1215, the barons of the kingdom had forced King John of England to sign a document called the Magna Carta (Latin, meaning “great charter”), which forbade the king from levying (charging) additional feudal taxes without the approval of his royal council.

The Magna Carta, proclaimed the primacy of law above the will of the ruler – a principle that paved the way for the development of constitutional monarchy. It also provided guarantees of other freedoms such as trial by jury. Only fifty years after the signing of the
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Magna Carta the English nobility, demanding equal authority in ruling England, imprisoned King Henry III and invited middle–class representatives to participate in the actions of the Great Council (Parliament), thus initiating the first example of representative government among the increasing and growing nation – states of the West. During the fourteenth century, as Parliament met frequently to raise taxes for England’s wars with France, it bargained for greater power, including the right to initiate legislation (law making). Peasants and laborers still exercised no real political influence, but by the end of the century, the English had laid the groundwork for a constitutional monarchy that would bridge the gap between medieval feudalism and modern democracy.

The Hundred Years’ War
In France, the ills of plague, famine, and civil disturbance compounded by a war with England that lasted more than one hundred years (1337– 1453) and that was fought entirely on French soil. Larger and more protracted (prolonged) than any previous medieval conflict, the Hundred Years’ War was the result of a longstanding English claim to continental lands: From the time of the Norman Conquest, the kings of England had held land in France, a situation that caused chronic anger for the French. However, the immediate cause of the war was the English claim to the French throne, occasioned by the death of Charles IV, the last of the male successors in a long line of French kings.

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The war began in 1337 and continued by a series of discontinuous battles. Many of which the French outnumbered the English by three or four to one. Nevertheless, the English won most of the early battles of the war, owing to their use of three new “secret” weapons: the foot soldier, the longbow, and gunpowder – the invisible enemy that would ultimately eliminate the personal element in military combat. Along with the traditional cavalry, the English army depended heavily on foot soldiers armed with longbows.

Introduced into Europe by the Muslims, who borrowed it from the Chinese, the English used gunpowder for the first time in Western combat during the Hundred Years’ War. It is fair to say then, that the Hundred Years’ War initiated the impersonal style of combat that has come to dominate modern warfare. Although throughout the Hundred Years’ War, the English repeatedly devastated the French armies, the financial and physical problems of garrisoning French lands ultimately proved too great for the English, who, facing a restored army under the charismatic leadership of Joan of Arc, finally withdrew from France in 1429.
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Of peasant background, the seventeen-year-old Joan begged the French king to allow her to obey the voices of the Christian saints who had directed her to expel the English. Donning armor and riding a white horse, she led the French into battle. Her success, which forced the English to withdraw from Orleans, initiated her execution; in 1431, she was condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake.

The Hundred Years’ War dealt a major blow to feudalism. By the mid-fifteenth century, the war badly depleted the French nobility and those knights who survived the war found themselves “outdated.” In France, systems of national conscription soon superseded feudal allegiances. In the decades following the English withdrawal, both countries were ready to move in separate directions, politically and culturally.

The Decline of the Church
The growth of the European nation-states contributed to the weakening of the Christian commonwealth, especially where Church and state competed for influence and authority. The two events that proved most damaging to the prestige of the Catholic Church were the Avignon Papacy (1309-1377) and the Great Schism (1378-1417). The term “Avignon Papacy” describes the relocation (moving) of the papacy to the city of Avignon in Southern France. The move from Rome to Avignon occurred in response to political pressure from the French king.
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The Avignon popes attempted to compete in prestige and political influence with the secular rulers of Europe, and used harsh (and occasionally corrupt) means to achieve their purpose. The increasing need for Church revenue led some of the Avignon popes to sell Church office (a practice known as simony), to charge additional taxes upon clergymen, to elect members of their own families to clerical office, and to step up the sale of indulgences (pardons from temporal penalties for sins committed by lay Christians). From the twelfth century on, the Church had sold these certificates of grace–drawn from the “surplus” of good works left by the saints–to lay Christians who bought them as a means of speeding their own progress to Heaven or to benefit their

relatives and friends in Purgatory. While the seven popes who reigned during the Avignon Papacy were able administrators, their unpleasant efforts at financial and political exaggeration damaged the reputation of the Church. One of the most devastating events in Church history followed the return of the papacy to Rome in 1377: A rift between French and Italian factions of the College of Cardinals led to the election of two popes, one who ruled from Avignon, the other who ruled from Rome. This schism (breakup) produced two conflicting claims to universal sovereignty (power- authority) and violent dispute within the Church. As each pope excommunicated the other, lay people questioned whether any Christian soul might enter Heaven.

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The Great Schism proved even more damaging to Church prestige than Avignon Papacy, for while the latter had provoked strong anticlerical feelings–even shock–in Christians who regarded Rome as the traditional home of the papacy, the Schism violated the very sacredness of the Holy Office. The ecumenical council at Pisa in 1409 tried to remedy matters by deposing both popes and electing another (the “Pisan pope”), but, when the Rome and Avignon popes refused to step down, the Church was torn by the three claims to the throne of Christ, a scandalous situation that lasted for almost a decade. In 1417, the Council of Constance settled the Schism problem, authorizing Pope Martin V to rule from Rome, but religious (clerical) discord continued. Fifteenth–century popes refused to acknowledge limits to papal power, thus hampering the efforts of church councils to exercise authority over the papacy. The Avignon Papacy and the Great Schism drew criticism from uneducated Christians and intellectuals alike. They called for the abolition of pilgrimages and relic worship, insisting that Christian belief and practice must rest solidly in the scriptures, which they sought to translate into the vernacular.

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THE RENAISSANCE
While humanism, in its most general sense, describes an attitude centered on human interests and values, the term classical humanism refers to the revival of Greco-Roman culture–a phenomenon that gave the Renaissance (the word literally means “rebirth”) its distinctly secular stamp. The classical revival of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries–the age of the Renaissance– generated new and more all-embracing attitudes toward Greco– Roman antiquity than any period that had preceded it. Renaissance humanists supported and encouraged the recovery and uncensored study of the entire body of Greek and Latin manuscripts and the self-conscious imitation of classical art and architecture. They regarded classical authority not exclusively as a means of clarifying Christian truths, but as the basis for a new assessment of the role of the individual in the world order. Renaissance humanists discovered in the Greek and Latin classics a rational guide to the fulfillment of human potential. Moreover, the Renaissance revival of humanism differed from earlier revivals because it attracted the interests of a broad base of the population and not a mere handful of theologians, as was the case, for instance, in medieval times. Unattached to any single school or university, this new breed of humanists pursued what the ancient Romans had called “studia humanitatis”, a program of study that embraced grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. These branches of learning fostered training in the moral and aesthetic areas of human knowledge–the very areas of experience with which this textbook is concerned. While such an educational curriculum was assuredly not antireligious– indeed, most Renaissance humanists were devout Catholics–its focus was secular rather than religious. For these humanists, life on earth was not a vale of tears but, rather, an extended occasion during which human beings
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might cultivate their unique talents and abilities. Classical humanists saw no conflict, however, between humanism and religious belief.

Italy: Birthplace of the Renaissance
The Renaissance designates that period in European history between roughly 1300 and 1600, during which time the revival of classical humanism spread from its birthplace in Florence, Italy, throughout Western Europe. Italy was the homeland of Roman antiquity, the splendid ruins of which stood as reminders of the greatness of classical civilization. The least feudalized part of the medieval world and Europe’s foremost commercial and financial center, Italy had traded with Southwest Asian cities even in the darkest days of the Dark Ages. It had also maintained cultural contacts with Byzantium, the heir to Greek culture. The cities of Italy, especially Venice and Genoa, had profited financially from the Crusades and– despite the ravages of the plaque–continued to enjoy a high level of commercial prosperity. In fourteenth-century Florence, shopkeepers devised a practical system (based on Arab models) of tracking debits and credits: Double-entry bookkeeping helped merchants to maintain systematic records of transactions in what was the soundest currency in the West, the Florentine gold florin. Fifteenth-century handbooks on arithmetic, foreign
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currency, and even good penmanship encouraged the commercial activities of traders and bankers.

Middle-class men and women challenged canonical sources of authority that frowned upon profit making and the accumulation of wealth. In this materialistic and often only superficially religious society, the old medieval values no longer made sense, while those of pre-Christian antiquity seemed more compatible with the secular interests and ambitions of the rising merchant class. The ancient Greeks and Romans were indeed ideal historical models for the enterprising citizens of the Italian city-states. Politically, Renaissance Italy had much in common with ancient Greece. Independent and disunited, the city-states of Italy, like those of ancient Greece, were fiercely competitive. As in the Golden Age of Greece, commercial rivalry among the Italian city-states led to frequent civil wars. In Italy, however, such wars were not always fought by citizens (who, as merchants, were generally ill prepared for combat), but by condottieri (professional soldiers) whose loyalties, along with their services, were bought for a price. The papacy, a potential source of political leadership, made little effort to unify the rival
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Italian communes. Rather, as temporal governors of the Papal States (the lands located in central Italy), Renaissance popes joined in the game of power politics, often allying with one group of city-states against another. Italian Renaissance cities were ruled either by members of the petty nobility, by mercenary generals, or–as in the case of Florence and Venice–by wealthy middle-class families. In Florence, some one hundred families dominated political life. The most notable of those was the Medici, a wealthy banking family that rose to power during the fourteenth century and gradually assumed the reins of state. Partly because the commercial ingenuity of the Medici enhanced the material status of the Florentine citizens, and partly because strong, uninterrupted leadership guaranteed local economic stability, the Medici ruled Florence for four generations.

Italian Renaissance Humanism
The effort to recover, copy, and produce accurate editions of classical writings dominated the early history of the Renaissance in Italy. By the middle of the fifteenth century, almost all of the major Greek and Latin manuscripts of antiquity were available to scholars. Throughout Italy, the small study retreat, or studiolo, filled with manuscripts, musical instruments, and the artifacts of scientific inquiry, was considered essential to the advancement to intellectual life. Wealthy patrons like Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino and his wife Battista Sforza encouraged humanistic education, commissioning private studies for their villas and for the ducal palace itself. Among the humanists of Italy, classical writings kindled new attitudes concerning the importance of active participation in civic life. Aristotle’s view of human beings as “political animals” and Cicero’s glorification of duty to the state encouraged humanists to perceive that the exercise of civic responsibility was the hallmark of the cultivated individual. Such civic humanists as Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati, who served Florence as chancellors and historians during the Renaissance, defended the precept that one’s highest good was activity in the public interest.

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After the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Greek manuscripts and Byzantine scholars poured into Italy, contributing to the efflorescence of what the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) called “a golden age”. Encouraged by the availability of Greek resources and supported by his patron Cosimo de’Medici, Ficino translated the entire corpus of Plato’s writings from Greek into Latin, making them available to Western scholars for the first time since antiquity. Ficino’s translations and the founding of the Platonic Academy in Florence (financed by Cosimo) launched a reappraisal of Plato and the neoplatonists that had major consequences in the domains of art and literature. Plato’s writings–especially the Symposium, in which love is exalted as a divine force–advanced the idea, popularized by Ficino, that “platonic” (or spiritual) love attracted the soul to God. Platonic love became a major theme among Renaissance poets and painters, who held that spiritual love was inspired by physical beauty.

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Machiavelli and Power Politics
The modern notion of progress as an active progress of improving the lot of the individual was born during the Renaissance. At the same time, technological innovations as gunpowder made warfare increasingly impersonal and devastating, while the rise of strong national rulers occasioned the worst kinds of aggression and brute force. The most acute critic of these conditions was the Florentine diplomat and states-man Niccolò

Machiavelli (1469-1527). A keen political observer and a student of Roman history, Machiavelli lamented Italy’s disunity in the face of continuous rivalry among the citystates. He anticipated that outside powers might try to take advantage of Italy’s internal weaknesses. The threat of foreign invasion became a reality in 1494, when French armies marched into Italy, thus initiating a series of wars that left Italy divided and impoverished. Exiled form Florence upon the collapse of the republican government he had served from 1498 to 1512 and eager to win favor with the Medici now that they had returned to power, Machiavelli penned The Prince, a political treatise that called for the unification of Italy under a powerful and courageous leader. This notorious little book laid out the guidelines for how an aspiring ruler might gain and maintain political power.

In The Prince, Machiavelli argued that the need for a strong state justified the need for a strong ruler. He pictured the secular prince as one schooled in war and in the lessons of history. The ruler must trust no one, least of all mercenary soldiers. He must imitate the lion in his fierceness, but he must also act like a fox to outsmart his enemies. Finally, in the interest of the state, he must be ruthless, and, if necessary, he must sacrifice moral virtue.

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In the final analysis, the end–that is, the preservation of a strong state–justified any means of maintaining power, however cunning or violent. Machiavelli formulated the idea of the state as an entity that remains exempt from the bonds of conventional morality. The advice Machiavelli gives in his handbook of power politics is based on an essentially negative view of humankind: If, by nature, human beings are “thankless,” “fickle,” “false,” “greedy,” “ dishonest,” and “simple” (as Machiavelli describes them), how better to govern them than by ruthless unlimited power that might keep this “sorry breed” in check? Machiavelli’s treatise suggests, furthermore, that personal morality, guided by the principles of justice and benevolence, differs from the morality of the collective entity, the state. It implies, further, that the state, an impersonal phenomenon, is amoral, that is, exempt from any moral judgment. Machiavelli’s political theories rested on an analysis of human nature not as it should be, but as it was. Widely circulated, The Prince was not simply a cynical examination of political expediency, but hailed as an exposé of real-life politics–so much so that the word “Machiavellian” soon became synonymous with the idea of political duplicity. “Politics have no relation to morals” “Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.” “Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved. It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.” “The promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.” “Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot” “He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.” “The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all. “
Machiavelli- The Prince

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Leonardo Da Vinci
Despite numerous intellectual and literary advances, the realm of Art is the most long-lived achievement of the Renaissance. By the 15th century, increase in private wealth and the partial triumph of the secular spirit had largely freed the domain of art from the service of religion. The Church was no longer the only patron of artists. The 15th century also saw the introduction of painting in oil, probably from Flanders. Since oil does not dry so quickly, the painter could now work more leisurely, taking time with the more difficult parts of the picture and making corrections if necessary as he went along. Perhaps the greatest of the Florentine artists was Leonardo the da Vinci. Leonardo of was the

practically

personification

“Renaissance Man”; he was a painter, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, and

inventor. However, if Leonardo had any weakness, it was his slowness in working and difficulty in finishing anything. His approach to painting was that it should be the most accurate possible imitation of nature. He obtained human corpses for dissection (by which he was breaking the Law) and reconstructed in drawing the minutest features of anatomy, which knowledge he carried over to his paintings. Leonardo worshiped nature, and was convinced of the essential divinity in all living things. It is not surprising, therefore, that he was vegetarian, and that he went to the marketplace to buy caged birds, which he released to their native habitat.

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There is generally agreement that Leonardo’s masterpieces are the Last Super and the Mona Lisa.

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Africa, the Americas, and cross-cultural encounter
“… the world is old, but the future springs from the past.” Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali

Global Travel and Trade
The period between 1400 and 1600 was the greatest age of trans-Eurasian travel since the days of the Roman Empire. However, even earlier, and especially after 1000 C.E., long-range trade, religious pilgrimage, missionary activity, and just plain curiosity had stimulated cross-cultural contact between East and West. Arab merchants dominated North trade routes. Islamic converts –especially Turks and Mongols– carried the Muslim faith across Asia into India and Anatolia. Mongol tribes traversed the vast overland Asian Silk Route, which stretched from Constantinople to the Pacific Ocean. Enterprising families, like that of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, established cultural and commercial links with the court of the Mongol emperor of China, Kublai Khan. Boasting that “brotherhood among peoples” had reached a new height during his rule, Kublai encouraged long-distance travel and cross-cultural dialogue. The same roads that brought 13th century Franciscan and Dominican monks into China sped the exchange of goods and religious beliefs between Muslims and Hindus, Confucians and Buddhists.

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By the mid-fifteenth century, new factors fueled the

enterprise of cross-cultural encounter. In 1453, the

formidable armies of the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, renaming it Istanbul and ended a

thousand years of Byzantine civilization. At the height of Ottoman power, as the Turkish presence in Southwest Asia threatened the safety of European overland caravans to the East; Western ruler’s explored two main offensive strategies: warfare against the Turks and the search for all-water routes to the East. Natural curiosity and greed for gold, slaves and spices–the major commodities of Africa and Asia–also encouraged the emerging European nations to compete with Arab and Turkish traders for control of foreign markets. The technology of navigation was crucial to the success of these ventures. Europeans improved such older Arab navigational devices as the compass and the astrolabe. Portugal and Spain adopted the Arab lateen sail and built two-and three- master caravels with multiple sails–ships that were faster, safer, and more practical for rough ocean travel than the oar–driven galleys that sailed the Mediterranean Sea. The new caravels outfitted with brass cannons and sufficient firepower to fend off severe enemy attack.

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By 1498, Vasco da Gama (1460-1524) had navigated around Southern Africa to establish Portuguese trading posts in India. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), an Italian in the employ of Spain, sailed west in search of an all-water rout to China. His discovery of the Americas– the existence of which no Europeans had ever suspected–was to change the course of world history. While the Spanish sought an all-water rout to China by traveling west, that is, across the Atlantic Ocean, the Portuguese sailed eastward around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. These enterprises initiated an era of exploration and cross-cultural encounter, and the era of expansion would mark the beginning of a modern world-system dominated by the West.

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The African Cultural Heritage
Africa, long known to Europeans as the “Dark Continent,” was unaffected by the civilizations of both Asia and the West for thousands of years. Even after the Muslim conquest of North Africa in the seventh century and the impact of Arab trade, many parts of Africa remained independent of foreign influence and continued to preserve local traditions and culture. Diversity has characterized all aspects of history; Africa is a continent of widely varying geographic regions and more than eight hundred different native languages. The political organization of territories over the centuries has ranged from small village communities to large states and empires. Despite their geographic, linguistic, and political differences, they shared some distinct cultural characteristics, including and especially a kinship system that emphasizes the importance and well-being of the group as essential to that of the individual. Historically, the kinship system is a system based on the extended family, a group of people who were both related to each other and dependent on each other for survival. The tribe consists of a federation of extended families or clans ruled by chiefs or elders–either hereditary or elected–who held semi divine status. All those who belonged to the same family, clan, or tribe–the living, the dead, and the yet unborn–made up a single cohesive community irrevocably linked in time and space. While this form of social organization was not unique to Africa - it characterized most agricultural societies in world history – it played an especially important role in shaping the character of society and culture.

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While the tribal structure was traditionally the primary feature of culture, animism–the belief that spirits inhabit all things in nature–was equally characteristic. Perceived the natural world as animated by supernatural spirits (including those of the dead). Though most honoring a Supreme Creator, they also recognized many other lesser deities and spirits. For them, the spirits of ancestors, as well as those of natural objects, carried great potency. Because the spirits of the dead and the spirits of natural forces (rain, wind, forests, and so on) influenced the living, and acted as guides and protectors, honoring them was essential to tribal security. Hence, rituals played a major part in assuring the well-being of the community, and the keepers of rituals–shamans, diviners, and priests–held prominent positions in society.

West African Kingdoms
From earliest times, most of Africa consisted of villages united by kinship ties and ruled by chieftains. However, by the ninth century (encouraged by the demands of Muslim merchants and a lucrative trans-Saharan trade) the first of a number of states emerged in the Sudan (the word means “Land of the Blacks”): the region that

stretches across Africa to the south of the Sahara Desert. The very name of the first Sudanic state, was Ghana, which means “war chief” and suggests the manner in which centralization came to be: A single powerful chieftain took control of the

surrounding villages. Ghana’s rulers presumed to have divine ancestors; regulated the exportation of gold to the north and the importation of salt from the desert fringes.
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These two products–gold and salt–along with iron, slaves, and ivory, were the principal

commodities. After Ghana fell to the Muslims in the eleventh

century, the native kings, along with much of the local culture, came under Arabic influence. The history of Ghana, and other ancient kingdoms, primarily recorded in Arabic sources describes the courts of kings, but for life in areas removed from the centers of power, not much is known. Scholars estimate that in the hands of the Muslims, the trans-Saharan market in slaves–war captives, for the most part–increased from roughly three hundred thousand in the ninth century to over a million in the twelfth century. During the thirteenth century, West African tribesman speaking the Mande language brought much of the Sudan under their dominion to form the Mali Empire. This dramatic development is associated with the powerful warrior-king Sundiata, who ruled Mali from around 1230 to 1255. The wealth and influence of the Mali Empire, which reached its zenith in the early fourteenth century, was due to its control of northern trade routes. On one of these routes lay the prosperous city of Timbuktu, the greatest of the early trading centers and the site of a flourishing Islamic university. In Mali, as in many of the states, the rulers were converts to Islam; they employed Muslim scribes and jurists and used Arabic as the language of administration. The hallmarks of Islamic culture–its great mosques and

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libraries and the Arabic language itself did not penetrate deeply into the vast interior of Africa. There native traditions dominated everyday life. By the twelfth century, Benin dominated most of the West territories north of the Niger delta. The Benin oba (kings) established an impressive royal tradition, built large, walled cities and engaged in trade with other states. Like most rulers, the Oba of Benin regarded themselves as descendants of the gods.

The Europeans in Africa
European commercial activity in Africa was the product of the quest for better trade routes to the East, and for the markets in gold, salt, and slaves that had long made Africa a source of wealth for Muslim merchants. During the sixteenth century, Portugal intruded upon the well-established Muslim-dominated trans-Saharan commercial slave trade. The Portuguese slave trade in West Africa, the Congo, and elsewhere developed according to the pattern already established by Muslim traders: that is, in agreement with local leaders who gained profits from the sale of victims of war or raids on neighboring territories. By the year 1500, the Portuguese controlled the flow of both gold and slaves to Europe. Transatlantic slave trade commenced in 1551, when the Portuguese began to ship thousands of slaves from Africa to work in the sugar plantations of Brazil, a “New World” territory claimed by Portugal. European forms of slavery were more brutal and exploitative than any previously practiced in Africa: Slaves shipped overseas were branded,

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shackled in chains like beasts, underfed, and–if they survived the ravages of dysentery and disease–conscripted into oppressive kinds of physical labor. In their relations with the states, especially those in coastal areas, the Europeans were equally brutal. They often ignored the bonds of family and tribe, local laws and religious customs; they pressured the natives to adopt European language and dress, and promoted economic rivalry among them. Furthermore, in a spirit of missionary zeal and altruism they introduced Christianity and Western forms of education, they also brought ruin to some tribal kingdoms, and, in parts of Africa, they almost destroyed native black cultural life. These activities were but a prelude to the more disastrous forms of exploitation that prevailed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the transatlantic slave trade, now dominated by the Dutch, the French, and the English, reached massive proportions. Between the years 1600 and 1700, the number of slaves taken captive reached over one million.

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The Americas
Native American Cultures
Native cultures in the territories of North, Central, and South America began to develop at least twenty thousand years ago, following nomadic migrations across a land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska at the Bering Strait. During the second millennium B.C.E., these migrant groups established tribal communities throughout the Americas. Like the ancient Africans, the Native Americans were culturally and linguistically diverse; yet, much like the populations, they shared a strong sense of communion with nature and deeply felt tribal loyalties. In the five centuries prior to the first European contacts with the Americas, some one thousand individual tribal societies flourished. In addition, many produced illustrious histories, only a few achieved the status of empire. In Middle (or Meso-) America (present -day Mexico and Central America) and on the western coast of South America, villages grew into states that conquered or absorbed their rivals. Most Native Americans fashioned their tools and weapons out of wood, stone, bone, and bits of volcanic glass. They had no draft animals and no wheeled vehicles. These facts make all the more remarkable the material achievements of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations, all three of which developed into empires of considerable authority in the pre-Columbian era.

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The largest and most complex Native American states were theocratic: Rulers governed on behalf of the gods and rule was hereditary. An elite cadre of priests oversaw the spiritual life of the community–a population consisting of farmers and artisans at the lower end of the class structure and ruling nobility at the upper end. Because the sun gave life to the crops, they honored its sacred presence over all other natural forces. MesoAmericans believed that the sun god was a fearsome deity with a special appetite for human blood. Since they believed that the blood of warriors nourished the sun and ensured its daily course in the sky (thus saving the world from destruction), human sacrifice was central to religious ritual. Accordingly, blood served to feed the gods while gold -thought to contain the brightness and hence the power of the sun–served to glorify the authority of the ruler.

Maya Civilization
The most inventive of the ancient Native American peoples were the Maya, whose civilization reached the classic phase between 250 and 900 C.E. and survived with considerable political and economic vigor until roughly 1600. At sites in Southern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Yucatán Peninsula, the Maya constructed fortified cities consisting of elaborate palace complexes that are hauntingly reminiscent of those from ancient Mesopotamia. Like the Mesopotamia ziggurat, the Maya temple was a terraced pyramid with a staircase ascending to a platform capped by a multi-roomed superstructure. A shrine and sanctuary that served as a burial place for priests or

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rulers, the Maya temple was the physical link between earth and the heavens. The ninety-one steps on each of the four sides, plus the platform on which the temple stands, correspond to the 365 days in the solar calendar. The Maya were the only known Stone Age culture to produce a written language. This ancient script, compromised of hieroglyphs, was decoded during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the survival of some codices and many stone inscriptions, Spanish missionaries and colonial settlers destroyed nearly all of the literary evidence of this people during the 16th century. Perhaps the most important source of Meso-American mythology, however, survives in the form of an oral narrative transcribed into Spanish by a sixteenth-century Maya nobleman. This narrative, known as the Popol Vuh, recounts the creation of the world. According to the Maya, the gods fashioned human beings out of maize – the principal Native American crop–but chose deliberately to deprive them of perfect understanding. As if to challenge the gods, the Maya became accomplished mathematicians and astronomers. Carefully observing the earth’s movements around the sun, they devised a calendar that was more accurate than any used in medieval Europe before the twelfth century. Having developed a mathematical system that recognized “zero”, the computed planetary and celestial cycles with some accuracy, tracked the paths of Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, and successfully predicted eclipses of the sun and moon. The Maya and the various Meso-American peoples that followed them believed in the cyclical creation and destruction of the world, and they prudently entrusted the sacred mission of timekeeping to their priests.

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The Empires of the Incas and the Aztecs
In 1000 C.E., the Incas were only one of many small warring peoples but, by the fifteenth century, they had become the mightiest power in South America. Indeed, at its height in the late fifteenth century, the Inca settlement consisted of an astounding sixteen million individuals.

Located amidst the mountains of the Andes in Peru, the Inca flourished in the rich soils of earlier Peruvian cultures noted for their fine pottery, richly woven textiles, and sophisticated gold work. Like that of ancient Rome, Incan civilization imposed its political might, its gods, and its customs over lands that extended almost three thousand miles from present day Ecuador to Chile.

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The Aztecs (who called themselves “Mexica”) were an insignificant tribe of warriors who migrated to Central Mexico in 1325. Driven by a will to conquer matched perhaps only by the ancient Romans, they created in less than a century an empire that encompassed all of central Mexico and the lands as far south as Guatemala. Like the Romans, the Aztecs were masterful engineers, whose roads, canals, and aqueducts astounded the Spaniards who arrived in Mexico in 1519. Both the Aztec and the Inca civilizations absorbed the cultural traditions of earlier MesoAmericans, including the Maya. They honored the pantheon of nature deities centering on the sun and extended the practice of blood sacrifice to the staggering numbers of victims captured in their incessant wars. The Aztecs carried on the traditions of timekeeping begun by the Maya. Like the Maya, they devised a solar calendar of 365 days and anticipated the cyclical destruction of the world every 52 years.

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The Spanish in the Americas and the Aftermath of Their Conquest
Columbus made his initial landfall on one of the islands now called Bahamas, and on successive voyages, he explored the Caribbean Islands and the coast of Central America. At every turn, he

encountered people native to the area–people he called “Indians” in the mistaken belief that he had reached the “Indies”, the territories of India and China. Other explorers soon followed and rectified Columbus’ misconception.

Spanish adventurers called conquistadores, pursued wealth and fortune in the New World. Although vastly outnumbered, the small force of six hundred soldiers under the command of Hernan Cortés (1485-1574), equipped with fewer than twenty horses and the superior technology of gunpowder and muskets, overcame the Aztec armies in 1521. Following the seventy-five-day siege, the Spanish demolished the island city of Tenochtitlán, from whose ruins Mexico City would eventually rise. While the technology
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of gunpowder and muskets had much to do with the Spanish victory, other factors contributed, such as religious prophecy (that Quetzalcoatl would return as a bearded white man), support from

rebellious Aztec subjects, and the outbreak of smallpox among the Aztecs. The Mexican gold and (after the conquest of the Incas) the Peruvian silver were not the only sources of wealth for the conquerors; the Spanish soon turned to the ruthless exploitation of the native populations, enslaving them for use as miners and field laborers. During the sixteenth century, a result of the combined effects of such European diseases as smallpox and measles and decades of inhumane treatment, entire populations of Native Americans were destroyed. When Cortés arrived, for example, Mexico’s population was approximately 25 million; in 1600, it had declined to one million. Unlike the civilizations of India, China, and Africa, which have each enjoyed a continuous history from ancient times until the present, none of the empires that once flourished in ancient America has survived into modern times. The European invasion of the Americas severely arrested the cultural evolution of native tribal populations. In terms of the humanistic tradition, however, the most important legacy of the European conquest is the creation of new cultures and new peoples that resulted from contact between Old and New World populations.
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The Temper of Reform
The Impact of Technology
In the transition from medieval to early modern times, technology played a crucial role. Gunpowder, the light cannon, and other military devices made warfare more impersonal and ultimately more deadly. At the same time, Western advances in navigation, shipbuilding, and maritime instrumentation brought Europe into a dominant position in world exploration and colonization. By the end of the sixteenth century, European expansion would change the map of the world. Another kind of the technology, the printing press, revolutionized the future of learning and

communication. Block printing originated in China in the ninth century and movable type in the eleventh, but print technology did not reach Western Europe until fifteenth century. By 1450, in the city of Mainz, the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg (ca. 1400-ca. 1468) had perfected a printing press that made it possible to fabricate books more cheaply, more rapidly, and in greater numbers than ever before.

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As information became a commodity for mass production, vast areas of knowledge– heretofore the exclusive domain of the monastery, the Church, and the university– became available to the public. The printing press facilitated the rise of popular education and encouraged individuals to form their own opinions by reading for themselves. Print technology proved to be the single most important factor in the success of the Protestant Reformation, as it brought the complaints of Church reformers to the attention of all literate folk and nourished the growing interest in vernacular literature, which in turn enhanced national and individual self-consciousness.

Christian Humanism and the Northern Renaissance
The new print technology broadcast an old message of religious protest and reform. For two centuries, critics had attacked the wealth, worldliness, and unchecked corruption of the Church of Rome. During the early fifteenth century, the rekindled sparks of lay piety and anticlericalism spread throughout the Netherlands, where religious leaders launched the movement known as the devotio moderna (“modern devotion”). Lay Brothers and Sisters of Common Life, as they were called, organized houses in which they studied and taught Scripture. Living in the manner of Christian monks and nuns, but not taking monastic vows, these lay Christians cultivated a devotional lifestyle that fulfilled the ideals of the apostles and the church fathers.

The devotio moderna spread quickly throughout Northern Europe; joining the dominant strains of anticlericalism. Although Northern humanists, like their Italian Renaissance counterparts, encouraged learning in Greek and Latin, they were more concerned with the study and translation of early Christian manuscripts and studied the Bible and the writings of the church fathers. The Northern Renaissance put Christian humanism at the service of evangelical Christianity.

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The leading Christian humanist of the sixteenth century–often called “the Prince of Humanism”–was Desiderius Erasmus of

Rotterdam (1466 – 1536). Schooled among the Brothers of the Common Life and learned in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, Erasmus was a superb scholar and a prolific writer. He was also a devout Christian who advocated a return to the basic teachings of Christ and criticized the church. Using four different Greek manuscripts of the Gospels, he produced a critical edition of the New Testament that corrected Jerome’s mistranslations of key passages. Erasmus’ New Testament became the source of most sixteenth-century German and English vernacular translations of this central text of Christian humanism.

Luther and the Protestant Reformation
During the sixteenth century, papal extravagance and immorality reached new heights, and Church reform became an urgent public issue. In the territories of Germany, the voices of protest were more strident than elsewhere in Europe. Across Germany, the sale of indulgences for the benefit of the Church of Rome– specifically for the rebuilding of Saint Peter’s Cathedral–provoked harsh criticism, especially by those who saw the luxuries of the papacy as a betrayal of apostolic ideals.

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In 1505, Martin Luther (1483-1546), the son of a rural coal miner, abandoned his legal studies to become an Augustinian monk. Thereafter, as a doctor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, he spoke out against the Church. Luther maintained that humans are saved by God’s grace and that salvation is gained only by faith. The procurements of indulgences, the veneration of relics, making pilgrimages, and seeking the intercession of the saints were useless, because only the grace of God could save the Christian soul.

Justified by faith alone, Christians should assume full responsibility for their own actions and intentions. In 1517, in pointed criticism to Church abuses, Luther posted on the door of the cathedral of Wittenberg a list of ninety-five issues he disagreed with the leaders of the Church of Rome. The 95 theses, which took a confrontational tone, were printed and circulated

throughout Europe. Luther did not wish to destroy Catholicism, but rather to reform it. Gradually he extended his criticism of Church abuses to criticism of Church doctrine. For instance, because he found justification in Scripture for only two of the sacraments dispensed by the Catholic Church–Baptism and the Holy Communion–he rejected the other five. He attacked monasticism and clerical celibacy, ultimately marring a former nun and fathering six children. Luther’s boldest challenge to the old medieval order, however, was his unwillingness to accept the pope as the ultimate source of religious authority. He denied that the pope was the spiritual heir to Saint Peter and claimed that the head of the
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Church, like any other human being was subject to error and correction. To encourage the reading of the Bible among his followers, Luther translated the Old and New Testaments into German.

The Spread of Protestantism
Luther’s criticism constituted an open revolt against the institution that for centuries had governed the lives of Western Christians. With the aid of the printing press, his “protestant” sermons circulated throughout Europe. Luther’s defense of Christian conscience as opposed to episcopal authority worked to justify protest against all forms of dominion. In 1524, under the banner of Christian liberty, German commoners instigated a series of violent uprisings against the oppressive landholding aristocracy.

The result was full-scale war, the so-called “Peasant Revolts” that resulted in the bloody defeat of thousands of peasants. Although Luther condemned the violence and brutality of the Peasant Revolts, social unrest and ideological

warfare had only just begun. His denunciation of the lower classes rebels brought many of the German princes to his side; and some used their new religious allegiance as an excuse to seize and usurp Church properties and revenues within their own domains. As the floodgates of dissent opened wide, civil wars broke out between German princes who were faithful to Rome and those who called themselves Lutheran. The wars lasted for some twenty-five years, until, by the terms of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555; each German prince would have the right to choose the religion to be practiced within his own domain. However, religious wars resumed in the late sixteenth century and devastated German lands for almost a century.

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Luther’s break with the Church affected all of Europe. The Lutheran insistence that enlightened Christians could arrive at truth by way of Scripture led reformers everywhere to interpret the Bible for them. The result was the birth of many new Protestant sects, each based on its own interpretation of Scripture. In the independent city of Geneva, Switzerland, the French theologian John Calvin (15091564) set up a government in which elected officials, using the Bible as the supreme law, ruled the community. Calvinists glorified God by living an upright life, one that required abstention from dancing, gambling, drunkenness, and from all forms of public display. For, although God alone knows one’s status, Christians might manifest that they were among the “elect” by a show of moral rectitude. In nearby Zurich, a radical wing of Protestantism emerged: The Anabaptists rejected all seven of the sacraments (including infant baptism) as sources of God’s grace. Placing total emphasis on Christian conscience and the voluntary acceptance of Christ, the Anabaptists called for the abolition of the Mass and the complete separation of church and state. In England, the Tudor monarch Henry VIII (1491-1547) broke with the Roman Catholic Church and established a church under his own leadership. Political expediency colored the king’s motives: Henry was determined to leave England with a male heir, but when eighteen years marriage to Catherine of Aragon produced only one successor (a female), he attempted to annul the marriage and take a new wife. The pope refused, prompting the king–formerly a staunch supporter of the Catholic Church–to break with Rome. In 1526, Henry VIII declared himself head of the Church in England. His actions led to years of dispute and hostility between Roman Catholics and Anglicans (members of the new English Church).
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The Catholic Counter-Reformation
The Catholic Reformation
In the face of the Protestant challenge, the Roman Catholic Church pursued a path that ensured its survival in the modern world. Between 1540 and 1565, churchmen undertook papal and monastic reforms that eliminated corruption and restored Catholicism to many parts of Europe. The impulse for renewal came largely from passionate Spanish Catholics, the most notable of whom was Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556). As a soldier in the army of King Charles I of Spain, he was injured and his right leg was fractured by French cannonball at the siege of Pamplona. After that, Loyola became a religious teacher and a solitary person, traveling lame and barefoot to Jerusalem in an effort to convert Muslims to Christianity. In the 1530s, he founded the Society of Jesus, the most important of the many new monastic orders associated with the Catholic Reformation. The Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, followed Loyola in calling for a militant return to fundamental Catholic dogma and the strict enforcement of traditional Church dogma and the strict enforcement of traditional Church teachings. In addition to the monastic vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience, the Jesuits took an oath of allegiance to the pope whom they served as soldiers of Christ. Under Loyola’s leadership, the Jesuit order became the most influential missionary society of early modern times. Rigorously trained, its members acted as preachers, confessors, and teachers–leaders in educational reform and moral discipline. Throughout Europe, members of the newly formed order worked as missionaries to win back those who had strayed from “Mother Church.” With the aid of the Inquisition, the Jesuits were successful in stamping out Protestantism in much of France, Southern Germany, and other parts of Europe. However, their reach extended further: As pioneers in learning the languages and customs of India, China, and Japan, the Jesuits were the
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prime intermediaries between Europe and Asia from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. In the Americas, a prime targets for Jesuit activity, missionaries mastered Native American tribal languages and proceeded to convert thousands to Roman Catholicism. Their success in Mexico Central and South America has stamped these parts of the world with a distinctive cultural character. Loyola’s affirmation of Roman Catholic doctrine anticipated the actions of the Council of Trent, the general church council that met three times between 1545 and 1563. The Council of Trent reconfirmed all seven of the sacraments and asserted the absolute and infallible leadership of the pope. It also set clear guidelines for the elimination of abuses among members of the clergy and encouraged the regeneration of intellectual life within Catholic monasteries. Church leaders revived the activities of the Inquisition and established the Index Expurgatorius, a list of books judged heretical Catholic readers. Although the Church of Rome would never again reassume the universal and therefore forbidden to

authority it had enjoyed during the Middle Ages, its internal reforms and its efforts to rekindle the faith restored its dignity in the minds and hearts of its followers.

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The FRENCH REVOLUTION
France in 1789 was an absolute monarchy, an increasingly unpopular form of government at the time. In practice, the power and prerogatives of the nobility and the clergy combined with the remnants of feudalism hindered the king’s ability to act on his theoretically absolute power. The large and growing middle class had absorbed the ideology of equality and freedom of the individual. They attacked the undemocratic nature of the government, pushed for freedom of speech, and challenged the Catholic Church and the Prerogatives of the nobles. Taxation policy played an important role in the circumstances that led to the revolt. Taxation relied on a system of internal tariffs extremely unpopular known by the “Gabelle” and the “Corvé”. The system, excluded the nobles and the clergy from having to pay taxes. A great scarcity of food in the 1780’s, which of course led the high prices for bread compounded these problems.

Three events in the summer and fall of 1789 furnished evidence that the revolution was to penetrate to the very heart of French society.  The electors of Paris formed a provisional municipal government and organized a militia of volunteers to maintain order. Determined to obtain arms, they made their way on July 14, to the Bastille, which symbolizes the hated royal authority, captured the fortress and decapitated the governor.

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 Second Popular revolt occurred in the countryside by the peasants who were afraid that the revolution might not address itself to their problems. Peasants in many areas of France began to set fire to manor houses and the records they contained, destroying monasteries and the residences of bishops.  Furthermore, the third instance of popular uprising in October 1789 occurred because of the economic crisis. This time women, angered by the price of bread, marched to Versailles. The storming of the Bastille helped persuade the King and nobles to treat the National Assembly as the legislative body of the nation. The National Assembly, with one sweep: Abolished the structure of manorialism Abolished Ecclesiastical tithes and the Corvé. Abolished exemption from taxation and eliminated monopolies of all kinds as contrary to natural equality. Annihilate the distinctions of rank and class, and made all French citizens of equal status in the eyes of the law.

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Following the destruction of privileges, the Assembly turned to preparing a charter of liberties. The result was the declaration of the “Rights of man and of Citizen” issued in September 1789. The declaration

guaranteed the natural rights of property, liberty, as well as security and resistance to oppression. In addition, freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and liberty of press became inviolable. It guaranteed equality of all persons and due process of law in the courts. Later, the national Assembly confiscated the Church's land, required the election of Bishops by the people, and subjected them to the authority of the state; their salaries paid out of the public treasury.
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NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
The anti-revolution internal opposition and foreign attacks led to the arrival of the radicals to power in France (1793/1794) who executed the king and proclaimed a republic. The most important result of the revolution’s radical phase was the organization of a new, mass conscript army. The radical phase of the revolution was soon overturned, and in 1799 a military dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, took charge of France. The thirty-year-old Corsican army general pursued a policy of conquest that brought continental Western Europe to his feet. Napoleon abolished serfdom, expropriated the church possessions, introduced French laws, and reorganized the education system. Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor in 1804, conquered Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, and Spain. His attempt to invade Russia in 1812, ended in disaster. As Russian forces retreated, the French armies followed and found themselves in the frozen hold of the Russian winter, where they were defeated. In 1813, a coalition of European powers forced Napoleon’s defeat and exiled him to the Island of Elba off the coast of Italy. A second and final defeat occurred after he escaped in 1814, raised a new army, and met combined European forces led by the English Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo. Defeated, Napoleon again went into exile to the Island of Saint Helen, where he spent the last years of his life.

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The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The industrial revolution is the name given to the massive social, economic, and technological change in the 18th and 19th centuries in Great Britain. The technological and economic progress of the industrial revolution gained momentum with the introduction of steam-powered ships, boats and railways. In the 19th century, it spread throughout Europe, North America and the rest of the world. The causes of the Industrial Revolution were complex: social and institutional changes, end of feudalism, agriculture revolution, colonial expansion, science, etc. The application of steam power to the industrial processes of printing supported a massive expansion of newspaper and popular book publishing, which reinforced rising literacy and demands for massive political participation. The factors of success in Great Britain were:        The elimination of internal borders thus making it easier to move products and goods. Transportation, such as successful shipping lines, created a market for industrial goods. Great Britain, as a whole, a strong economic country, once again created a market for products. The availability of coal and iron made steel production possible. The railroads, in effect, changed the space of Great Britain, making long distances shorter to travel. Great Britain was also involved in much trade with India, Africa and America. Britain was also investing in other countries, which was a big step in becoming a world power.

While Britain was excelling in the Industrial Revolution, the rest of Europe fell behind. Germany was divided into small kingdoms. France occupied with eternal problems and wars, Italy divided, etc. Belgium was the only country at the time that attempted to keep up with Britain’s industrialization process.

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The Global Domination of the West
Advancing Industrialism
Industrialism provided the economic and military basis for the West’s rise to a position of dominance over the rest of the world. The history of the railroad illustrates this process. The railroad is the most important technological phenomenon of the early nineteenth century and one made possible by the combined technologies of steam power, coal, and iron. The first all-iron rails were forged in England in 1767, but it was not until 1804 that the English built their first steam railway locomotive, and several more decades until “iron horses” became a major mode of transportation. By 1830, thousands of miles of railway track linked England’s major cities. The drive to build national railways spread throughout much of Europe and North America. By 1850, 23,000 miles of railway track crisscrossed Europe, linking the sources of raw materials of factories and markets. In the coal mining region of the Ruhr Valley in Northern Germany and across the vast continent of North America, railroads facilitated economic and political expansion. As Western nations colonized other parts of the globe, they took with them the railroad and other agents of industrialism.

By 1880, Western technology included the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, the telephone, the camera, and–perhaps most significant for the everyday life of human beings–electricity. Processed steel, aluminum, the steam turbine, and the pneumatic tire–all products of the 1880s–further altered the texture of life in the industrialized world. These devices, along with more lethal instruments of war such as the

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fully automatic “machine gun”, gave Europe clear advantage over other parts of the globe and facilitated Western imperialism in less industrially developed areas. In the enterprise of empire building, the industrialized nations of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the United States took the lead.

Colonialism
The history of European expansion into Asia, Africa, and other parts of the globe dates back at least to the Age of Renaissance. Between approximately 1500 and 1800, Europeans established trading outposts in Africa, China, and India. However, not until after 1800, in the wake of Industrialism Revolution, did European imperialism transform the territories of foreign powers into outright colonial possessions. Driven by the need for raw materials and markets for their manufactured goods, and aided immeasurably by their advanced military technology, the industrial nations quickly colonized vast parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. So massive was the effort that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the West had established economic, political, and cultural dominance over much of the world. In 1858, the first major landmass subjugated by Britain was India, which officially fell to British rule. In less than century, the British had established control over so much territory across the globe that they could legitimately claim, “the sun never set” on the British Empire. While British policy in India moved from commerce to conquest and rule, France, Belgium, and Germany seized most of Africa. European nations controlled only ten percent of Africa in 1880. By 1900, all of Africa save Ethiopia and Liberia was carved up by European powers who introduced new models of political and economic authority, often with little regard for native populations. Profit-seeking European companies leased large tracts of

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land to extract native goods such as rubber, diamonds, and gold. plantations and mines increasingly forced natives to work there.

White-owned

By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States (itself a colony of Britain until 1776) joined the scramble for economic control. America forced Japan to open its doors to Western trade in 1853. In the Western hemisphere, the United States established its own overseas empire. North Americans used the phrase “manifest destiny” to describe and justify a policy of unlimited expansion into the American West, Mexico, and elsewhere. The result was the United States’ acquisition of more than half of Mexico, control of the Philippines and Cuba, and a dominant position in the economies of the politically unstable nations of Latin America. Although Westerners rationalized their militant expansionism by contending that they were “civilizing” the backward peoples of the globe, in fact their diplomatic policies contributed to undermining cultural traditions, to humiliating and often enfeebling the civilizations they dominated, and to creating conditions of economic dependency that would last well onto the twentieth century.

China and the West
The nineteenth century marked the end of China’s long story as an independent civilization. The European powers, along with Russia and Japan, carved out trade concession in China. Subsequent trade policies, which took advantage of China’s traditionally negative view of profit making, delayed any potential Chinese initiative toward industrialization. still was More the

devastating

triangular trade pattern in opium and tea between India, China, and Britain. Established by Britain in the early nineteenth century, the policy, based on the need to stem the tide of British gold and silver that flowed to China to buy tea, a

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favorite British beverage. The Chinese had used narcotic opium for medicine, but because of Britain’s new trade policies, large quantities of the drug–harvested in India–were exported directly to China. In exchange, the Chinese shipped tea to Britain. As opium addiction became an increasingly severe social problem (and following the opium-related death of Chinese emperor’s son), the Chinese made every effort to restrict the importation of the drug and to stem the activities of opium smugglers. British merchants refused to cooperate. The result was a series of wars between Britain and China (the Opium Wars, 1839-1850) that brought China to its knees. In 1839, just prior to the first of these wars, the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu (1785-1850), sent a detailed communication to the British queen pleading for Britain’s assistance in ending opium smuggling and trade. Whether or not Queen Victoria ever read Lin’s letter is unknown, but the document remains a literary monument to the futile efforts of great Asian civilization to achieve peace through diplomacy in the age of imperialism.

Social and Economic Realities
In global terms, advancing industrialization polarized the nations of the world into the technologically advanced–the “haves”–and the technologically backward–the “havenots.” However, industrialization had an equally profound impact within the industrialized nations themselves: It changed the nature and character of human work, altered relationships between human beings, and affected the natural environment. Prior to 1800, the practice of accumulating capital for industrial production and commercial profit played only a limited role in European societies. Moreover after 1800, industrial production, enhanced by advances in machine technology, came to be controlled by a relatively small group of middle-class entrepreneurs (those who organize, manage, and assume the risks of business) and by an even smaller number of capitalists (those who provide investment capital). Industrialization created wealth, but that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population. The vast majority of men and women lived hard lives supported by meager wages–the only thing they had to sell was their labor. Factory laborers, including women and children, worked under dirty and dangerous conditions for long hours-sometimes up to sixteen hours per day. Mass
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production brought more goods to more people more rapidly, ultimately raising the standard of living for industrialized nations. European industrialism and the unequal distribution of wealth contributed to a dramatic gap between capitalist entrepreneurs– the “haves” of society–and the working classes–the “have-nots”. Beginning in 1848, the lower classes protested against these conditions with sporadic urban revolts. Economic unrest prevailed not only in the cities but in rural areas as well, where agricultural laborers were often treated like slaves–in America, until after the Civil War (1861-1865), most of those, who worked the great Southern plantations were, in fact, African-American slaves. Between 1855 and 1861, there were almost five hundred peasant uprisings across Europe. Reform, however, was slow in coming. Outside of England–in Germany, for instance – trade unions and social legislation to benefit the working classes did not appear until 1800 or later, while Russia’s economic reform would require nothing less than a full-scale revolution.

Nineteenth-Century Social Theory: conservatism, liberalism and socialism:
Among nineteenth-century European intellectuals there developed a serious debate over how to address the social results of industrial capitalism. Matters of social reform were central to the development of nineteenth-century ideologies, or doctrines, which dictated specific policies of political and economic action.

Liberalism
Liberalism was the product of the breakdown of feudalism and the growth, in its place, of a market or capitalist society. Early liberalism certainly reflected the aspirations of a rising industrial middle class. By the early nineteenth century, a distinctively liberal economic creed had developed that extolled the virtues of laissez-faire capitalism and condemned all forms of government intervention. This became the centerpiece of classical, or nineteenth-century, liberalism. Elements of liberalism: Individualism, Freedom, Reason, Equality, Toleration, Consent and Constitutionalism.
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Conservatism
Conservative ideas and doctrines first emerged in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. They arose as a reaction against the growing pace of economic and political change, which was in many ways symbolized by the French Revolution. In trying to resist the pressure unleashed by the growth of liberalism, socialism and nationalism, conservatism stood in defense of an increasingly embattled traditional social order. Element of conservatism: Tradition, Pragmatism, Human Perfection, Hierarchy, Authority and Property.

Socialism
Socialism did not take shape as a political creed until the early nineteenth century. It developed as a reaction against the emergence of industrial capitalism. Its goal was to abolish a capitalist economy based on market exchange, and replace it with a qualitatively different socialist society, usually constructed on the principle of common ownership. Elements of Socialism: Community, Fraternity, Social equality, Need and Social class.

The Radical View of Marx and Engels
The German theorist Karl Marx (1818-1883) agreed with the socialists that bourgeois capitalism corrupted humanity, but this theory of social reform was an even more radical version of socialism, for it preached violent revolution that would both destroy the old order and usher in a new society. Marx began this career by obtaining a degree in philosophy at the University of Berlin. Moving to Paris, he became a lifelong friend of the social scientist and journalist Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels shared a similar critical attitude toward the effects of European industrial capitalism. By 1848 they completed the

Communist Manifesto, which demanded the “forcible overthrow of all existing social

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conditions” and the liberation of the proletariat, or working class. Marx offered an even more detailed criticism of the free enterprise system in Das Kapital, a work on which he toiled for thirty years. The Communist Manifesto is a condemnation of the effects of capitalism on the individual and society. The first section of the treatise defends the claim that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The authors argue that capitalism concentrates wealth in the hand of the few, providing great luxuries for some, while creating an oppressed and impoverished proletariat. The psychological effects of such circumstances, they contend, are devastating: Bourgeois capitalism alienates workers from their own productive efforts and robs individuals of their basic humanity.

Finally, the authors call for violent revolution by which workers will seize the instruments of capitalistic production and abolish private ownership. Despite the fact that Marx and Engels did not provide any explanation of how their classless society might function, their call to revolution would be heeded in the decades to come. Oddly enough, Communist

revolutions would occur in some of the least industrialized countries of the world, such as Russia and China, rather than in the most industrialized countries, as Marx and Engels expected.

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Picasso and the Birth of Cubism
The most influential artist of the twentieth century was the Spanish-born Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). During his ninety-two-years lifespan, Picasso worked in almost every major art style of the century, some of which he himself

inaugurated. In 1903, the young painter left his native Spain to settle in Paris. There, in the bustling capital of the Western art world, he came under the influence of impressionist and postimpressionist painting, and took as his subject café life, beggars, prostitutes, and circus folk. By 1906, the artist began to abandon traditional Western modes of pictorial representation. Adopting the credo that art must be subversive–that it must defy all that is conventional, literal, and trite–he initiated a bold new style. Two major forces shaped that style: Cézanne’s paintings, which had been the focus of two major Paris exhibitions; and the arts of Africa, Iberia, and Oceania. Under Picasso’s hand, the aesthetics of tribal art merged with the lessons of Cézanne to lay the groundwork for an audacious new style that would become Cubism. The first astonishing product of Picasso’s assault
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on tradition was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Les Demoiselles was the first step toward cubism, the style that came to challenge the principles of Renaissance painting as dramatically as Einstein’s theory of relativity had challenged Newtonian physics. With analytic cubism, a multiplicity of viewpoints replaced one–point perspective. Around 1912, a second phase of cubism, namely synthetic cubism, evolved. Picasso and Braque, who thought of themselves as space pioneers (much like the Wright brothers), began pasting mundane objects such as wine labels, playing cards, and scraps of newspaper onto the surface of the canvas–a technique known as collage (from French coller, “to paste”). The result was a kind of art that was neither a painting nor a sculpture, but both at the same time.

Futurism
The intimate relationship between modern science and modern art inspired the Italian movement called futurism. The Italian poet and iconoclast Filippo Tomaso Marinetti (1876-1944) issued a series of manifestos that attacked museum art (and all forms of academic culture) and linked contemporary artistic expression to industry, technology and urban life. The speed and dynamism of automobiles, airplanes, and other products of twentieth-century technology enthralled Futurists. Futurism did not last beyond the end of World War I, but its impact was felt in both in United States and Russia, where futurist

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efforts to capture the sense of form in motion would coincide with the first developments in the technology of cinematography.

Matisse and Fauvism
Another group of modernists, led by the French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954), made color the principal feature of their canvases. This group, named “fauves” (from the French fauve, “wild beast”) was called by a critic who saw their work at the 1905 exhibition in Paris, employed flat, bright colors. Critics who called these artists “wild beasts” were in fact responding to the use of color in ways that seemed both crude and savage. For Matisse, however, color was the font of pure and sensuous pleasure; like smell, color pervaded the senses subtly and directly. Matisse explained that colors and shapes were the equivalent of feelings rather than the counterparts of forms in nature.

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Nonobjective Art
Between 1909 and 1914, three artists working independent of one another in different parts of Europe moved to purge art of all recognizable subject matter. The Russians Wasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935), and the Dutchman Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), pioneers of nonobjective art, had all come into contact with the principal art movements of the early twentieth century: cubism, futurism, and fauvism.

Fauves and Russian folk art deeply influenced Kandinsky, whose artistic career began at the age of forty. He began to assemble colors, lines and shapes without regard to recognizable objects. He called his absolute paintings “improvisations” or “abstract compositions” and numbered them in series.

Kasmir Malevich arrived at nonrepresentational art not by way of fauvism but through the influence of analytic cubism, a style that asserted the value of line over color. Malevich created an austere style limited to the strict geometry of the square, the circle, and the rectangle. Malevich called these shapes “suprematist elements” and his style suprematism.

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The early works of the third pioneer of nonobjective art, Piet Mondrian, reveal this Dutch artist's keen sensitivity to his native countryside as well as his inclination to geometric order. He limited his visual vocabulary to “pure” forms: rectangles laid out on a grid a horizontal and vertical lines, the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), and there values–white, gray, and black.

The Birth of Motion Pictures
It is not coincidental that the birth of motion pictures came at a time when artists and scientists were obsessed with matters of space and time. In 1895, among the first to publicly project moving images on a screen was Thomas Edison. Within a decade, motion pictures became a popular form of entertainment. In 1902, the French filmmaker George Méliès (18611938) completed a storytelling sequence called A Trip to the Moon. One year later, the American director Edwin S. Porter (1869-1941) produced his twelveminute silent film, The Great Train Robbery, which showed the holdup, followed by the pursuit and capture, of the bandits. These pioneer narrative films established the idiom for two of the most popular genres in twentieth-century American cinema–the science fiction film, which conjured up new worlds beyond planet earth, and the “western”, which treated the myth of American frontier life.
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Between 1908 and 1912, D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) introduced to film the use of multiple cameras and new techniques such as close-ups, fade-outs, and flashbacks, all of which expanded the visual potential of the motion picture medium. Griffith's three-hourlong silent film The Birth of a Nation (1915) was an epic account of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed in the South. Unfortunately, despite the film's technical excellence, its negative portrayal of African-Americans contributed to creating an image of them as violent and ignorant savages. Until the late 1920s, all movies were silent –filmmakers used captions to designate the spoken word wherever appropriate. However, well before the era of the “talkies”, cinematographers began to use the camera not simply as a disinterested observer but as a medium for developing the emotional states of the characters. As innovative techniques were refined, film was destined to become one of the major art forms of the twentieth century.

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The Freudian Revolution
Freud and the Psyche
Sigmund Freud (1865-1939) as no other figure in modern Western history has had more influence on our perception of us. Freud, a Jewish intellectual who graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1880, was the first to map the subconscious geography of the human psyche (or mind). Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, a therapeutic method which reveals the sources of emotional disturbance by bringing repressed desires to the conscious level.

Freud theorized that instinctual drives, especially the libido, or sex drive, governed human behavior. According to Freud, guilt from the repression of instinctual urges dominates the subconscious life of human beings and manifests itself in emotional illness. Most psychic disorders, he argued, were the results of sexual traumas stemming from the child's subconscious attachment to the parent of the opposite sex and jealousy of the parent of the same sex. A phenomenon Freud called the Oedipus complex (in reference to the ancient Greek legend in which Oedipus, king of Thebes, unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother). Freud shocked the world with his analysis of infant sexuality and, more generally, with his proclamation that the psychic lives of human beings are formed by the time they were five years old. Of all his discoveries, Freud considered his research on dream analysis most important. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he defended the significance of dreams in deciphering the unconscious life of the individual. However, Freud's investigations that are more speculative were equally significant. In Totem and Taboo (1913), he examined the function of the subconscious in the evolution of the earliest forms of religion and morality. In “The Sexual Life of Human Beings”, a lecture presented to medical students at the University of Vienna in 1916, he examined the
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psychological roots of sadism, homosexuality, fetishism, and voyeurism–subjects that are still taboo in some social circles. Freud's studies proved that neuroses and psychoses were illnesses that required medical treatment. However, Freud's most significant contribution to the development of modern intellectual thought was his insistence that the inner recesses of the mind were valid and meaningful parts of the personality and that dreams and fantasies were as vital to human life as reason itself. In describing the activities of the human psyche, Freud proposed a theoretical model, the terms of which (though often oversimplified and misunderstood) have become basic to psychology (the study of mind and behavior) and fundamental to our everyday vocabulary. This model pictures the psyche as consisting of the three parts: the id, the ego, the superego. The id, according to Freud, is the seat of human instincts and source of all physical desires, including nourishment and sexual satisfaction. Seeking fulfillment in accordance with the pleasure principle, the id is the driving force of the subconscious realm. Freud perceived the second part of the psyche, the ego, as the administrator of the id: The ego is the “manager” that attempts to adapt the needs of the id to the real world, and mediates between potentially destructive desires and social necessities. The third agent is the “Superego”, it is the moral monitor commonly called the “conscience”. The superego monitors human behavior according to principles instructed by parents, teachers, and other authority figures.
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Total War and Totalitarianism
Two fundamentally related calamities have dominated the twentieth century: total war and totalitarian dictatorship. The consequences of both have been so great that the modern world still has not recovered from them. Total war and totalitarianism, facilitated by sophisticated military technology and electronic forms of mass communication, are unique to the twentieth century. They have caused this century to be the bloodiest in world history. Unlike natural disasters–the Black Death or the Lisbon earthquake, for example–the total wars and totalitarian regimes of the modern era were disasters perpetrated on human beings by human beings. Such human-made evils not only challenged the belief that technology would improve the quality of human life; they seemed to validate Freud's theory that base instincts and the dark forces of selfdestruction drive all mortals. The Great War of 1914, the name also given to World War I, and World War II that followed in 1939 were the first total wars in European history. They are Total Wars not only because they involved more nations than had ever before been engaged in armed combat, but also because they destroyed–along with military personnel–large numbers of civilians. Moreover, the wars were total in sense that the mentality was one of a “no holds barred” attitude–utilizing all and any methods of destruction in the name of conquest. The weapons of advanced technology made modern wars more impersonal and more devastating than any previously fought. World War I combatants used machine guns, heavy artillery, hand grenades, poison gas, flamethrowers, armored tanks, submarines, dirigibles and airplanes. From their open cockpits, pilots fired on enemy aircraft, while on land soldiers fought from lines of trenches dug deep into the ground. The rapid-firing, fully automatic machine gun alone caused almost eighty percent of the casualties. The cost of four years of war was approximately $350 billion, and the death tolls were staggering. In all, seventy million armed men fought in World War I, and over eight million of them died. In World War II, airplanes and aerial bombs (including, ultimately, the atomic bomb) played major roles; war costs tripled those of World War I, and casualties among the armed forces alone rose to over eighteen million people.

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The First World War
The underlying causes of these wars were aggressive rivalries between European powers. During the nineteenth century, nationalism and industrialism had facilitated militant competition for colonies throughout the world. The armed forces became the embodiment of a nation's sovereign spirit and the primary tool for imperialism. National leaders fiercely defended the notion that military might was the best safeguard of peace: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”–“if you want peace, prepare for war,” they argued. Nations believed their safety lay in defensive alliances. They joined with their ideological or geographic neighbors to create a system of alliances that, by the early twentieth century, divided Europe into two potentially hostile camps, each equipped to mobilize their armies if threatened. The circumstances that led to World War I involved the increasingly visible efforts of Austria-Hungary and Germany to dominate vast portions of Eastern Europe. Germany, having risen to power during the nineteenth century, rivaled all other European nations in industrial might. By the early twentieth century, German efforts to colonize markets for trade took the form of militant imperialism in Eastern Europe. In July of 1914, Austria-Hungary, seeking to expand Austrian territory to the south, used the political assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand (heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary) as a pretext to declare war on Serbia. Almost immediately, two opposing alliances came into confrontation: the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary,

Germany, and the Ottoman Empire versus the Allied forces of Serbia, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Russia. It became clear that the policy of peace through military

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strength had not prevented war but actually encouraged it.

At the beginning of the war, the Central Powers won early victories in Belgium and Poland, but the Allies stopped the German advance at the First Battle of the Marne in September of 1914. The opposing armies settled down to warfare along the Western front–a solid line of two opposing trenches that stretched 500 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss border. At the same time, on the Eastern front, Russian armies lost over a million men in combat against the combined German and Austrian forces. In the early years of the war, the United States remained neutral, but when German submarines began sinking unarmed passengers ships in 1917, the American president Woodrow Wilson opted to aid the Allies in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” Fortified by American supplies and troops, the Allies moved toward victory. In November 1918, the fighting ended with an armistice.

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The Russian Revolution
One of the last of the European powers to become industrialized, Russia entered World War I in 1914 under the leadership of Tsar Nicholas II. Russian involvement in the war, compounded by problems of government corruption and a weak and essentially agrarian economy, reduced the nation to desperate straits. Food and fuel shortages threatened the entire civilian population. By 1917, a full-scale revolution was under way: Strikes and riots broke out in the cities, while in the countryside peasants seized the land of their aristocratic property owners. The Revolution of 1917 forced the abdication of the Tsar and ushered in a new regime, which, in turn, was seized by members of the Russian Socialist party under the leadership of the Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (18701924). Between 1917 and 1921, by means of shrewd political manipulation and a reign of terror conducted by the Red Army and the secret police, Lenin installed the left-wing faction of the Marxian Socialists–the

Bolsheviks–as the party that would govern a nation of more than 150 million people. By tailoring Marxian ideas to the needs of revolutionary Russia, Lenin became the architect of Soviet communism. Lenin agreed with Marx that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the first step in liberating the workers from bourgeois suppression. According to Lenin, in the first phase of communist society (generally called socialism), private property would be converted into property held in common and the means of production and distribution would belong to the whole of society. However, the reality was otherwise. In nearly twentieth-century Russia, the Bolsheviks would create a dictatorship over rather than of the proletariat. In 1918, when the Constituent Assembly refused to approve Bolshevik power, Lenin dissolved the Assembly. (In free elections, Lenin's party received less than a quarter of one percent of the vote.) He then eliminated all other parties and consolidated the communist part in the hands of five–man elite committee called the Politburo, which Lenin himself chaired. In 1922 Russia was renamed the Union Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R).

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The communist party established the first totalitarian regime of the twentieth century. This totalitarian regime subordinated the life of the individual to that of the state. Through strict government control of political, economic, and cultural life, and by means of coercive measures such as censorship and terrorism, the state imposed its will upon the conduct of the society. Soviet communists persecuted all individuals and religious group whose activities they deemed threatening to the state. Using educational

propaganda and the state-run media, they worked tirelessly to indoctrinate Soviet citizens to the virtues of communism. Under the rule of Joseph Stalin (18791953), who took control of the communist bureaucracy in 1926, the Soviet launched vast programs of industrialization and agricultural collectivization (the

transformation of private farms into government-run units) that demanded heroic sacrifice from the Russian people.

Peasants worked long hours on state-controlled farms, earning a bare subsistence wage. Stalin crushed all opposition: His secret police “purged” the state of dissidents, who were either imprisoned, exiled to gulags (labor camps), or executed. Between 1928 and 1938, the combination of severe famine and Stalin's inhuman policies took the lives of fifteen to twenty million Russians.

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Nazi Totalitarianism
In Germany, widespread

discontent and turmoil resulted from the combined effects of the Great Depression and the results of the humiliating peace terms

dictated by the victorious Allies. Crippling debts forced German banks to close in 1931 and at the height of the depression only one-third of all Germany's workers were fully employed. In the wake of these conditions, the young ideologue Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) rose to power. By 1933, Hitler was chancellor of Germany and the leader (in German, Führer) of the National Socialist German Worker's party (the Nazi party), which would lead Germany again into world war. A fanatic racist, Hitler shaped the Nazi platform. He blamed Germany's ills on the nation's internal “enemies”, whom he identified as Jews, Marxists, bourgeois liberals, and “social deviates”. Hitler promised to “purify” the German state of its “threatening” minorities and rebuild the country into the mighty empire. He manipulated public opinion by using all available means of propaganda–especially the radio, which brought his voice into every German home. In his autobiographical work Mein Kampf (My struggle), published in 1925, Hitler set forth a fanatical theory of “Aryan racial superiority” that would inspire some of the most malevolent episodes in the history of humankind, including genocide: the systematic

extermination of millions of Jews, Roman Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, and other minorities.

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Justifying his racist ideology, he wrote: What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted to it by the creator of the universe. Mein Kampf exalted the totalitarian state as “the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.” “The state is a means to an end,” insisted Hitler. “It’s end lies in the preservation and advancement of physically and psychically homogeneous creatures.”

The Second World War
Less than twenty years after the close of World War I, the second, and even more devastating world war began. The conditions that contributed to the outbreak of World War II included the failure of the peace settlement that had ended World War I and the undiminished growth of nationalism and militarism. However, the specific event that initiated a renewal of hostilities was Hitler's military advance into Poland in 1939. Once again, two opposing alliances were formed: Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungary comprised the Axis powers (the term describing the imaginary line between Rome and Berlin), while France and Britain and, in 1945, the United States and Russia, constituted the major Allied forces. Germany joined forces with totalitarian regimes in Italy (under Benito Mussolini) and in Spain (under General Francisco Franco), and the
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hostilities quickly spread into North Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere. The fighting that took place during the three-year civil war in Spain (19361939) and in the German attack on the Netherlands in 1940 anticipated the merciless aspects of total war. In Spain, Nazi dive-bombers destroyed whole cities, while in the Netherlands, German tanks, parachute troops, and artillery overran the country in less than a week. The tempo of death was quickened as German air power attacked both military and civilians targets. France fell to Germany in 1940, and Great Britain became the target of systematic German bombing raids. At the same time, violating a Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, Hitler invaded Russia, only to suffer massive defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. The United States, though supportive of the Allies again tried to hold fast to its policy of “benevolent neutrality.” It entered the war nevertheless because of Japan, which had risen rapidly to power in the late nineteenth century. Japan had defeated the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. The small nation had successfully invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established in China a and

foothold

Southeast Asia. In December

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of 1941, in opposition to United States efforts at restricting Japanese trade, the Japanese naval air service dropped

bombs on the American air base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The United States, declaring war on Japan, joined the twenty-five other nations that opposed the Axis powers and sent combat forces to fight in both Europe and the Pacific. The war against Japan was essentially a naval war, but it involved land and air attacks as well. Its climax came when America dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August of 1945. The bombing, which annihilated over 120 thousand people (mostly civilians) and forced the Japanese to surrender within a matter of days, ushered in the atomic age.

Just months before the bombing of Hiroshima, as German forces gave way to Allied assaults on all fronts, Hitler committed suicide. World War II came ended with the surrender of both Germany, and Japan in the summer 1945.

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Identity and Liberation
The major types of liberation movement have marked the second half of the twentieth century: the effort by colonial nations to achieve political, economic, religious, and ethnic independence; and the demand for racial and sexual equality. One of the earliest revolts against colonial rule took place in India. During World War I, the Indian National Congress came under the influence of the devout Hindu Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948). Gandhi, whose followers called him “Mahatma” or “great soul,” led India's struggle for emancipation from Great Britain. His program of nonviolent resistance, including fasting and peaceful demonstrations, influenced the course of several subsequent liberation movements throughout the world. Gandhi's leadership was crucial to India's emancipation from British control. Its emancipation came only one year before he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic, who opposed his conciliatory gestures toward India's Muslim minority.

The Quest for Racial Equality The Civil Rights Movement
Well after World War II, racism remained an undeniable fact of American life. The fact that African-Americans had served in great numbers in World War II inspired a redoubled effort to end persistent discrimination and segregation in the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, that effort came to flower in the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders of the 1950’s demanded enforcement of all of the provisions

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for equality promised by the United States Constitution. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation based on race was unconstitutional. That decision and other desegregation rulings met fierce resistance, especially in the American South. In response to that resistance, the so-called Negro Revolt began in 1955 and continued for over a decade. The revolt took the form of nonviolent, direct action protests, including boycotts of segregated lunch counters, peaceful “sit-ins,” and protest marches. Leading the revolt was the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), a civil rights activist who modeled his campaign of peaceful protest on the example of Gandhi.

Another black protest leader of the period took a very different tack: Malcolm Little (1925-1965), who called himself “Malcolm X,” determined that blacks should pursue a very different course from that of Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. African-Americans, argued

Malcolm, should abandon aspirations for integration. Instead, they should separate from American whites in every feasible way. They should create a black nation in which–through hard work and the pursuit of Muslim morality–they might live equally, in dignity, without the daily affronts of white racism. These goals were to be achieved by all available means; violent if necessary (armed self-defense was a first step). Only by fighting for Black Nationalism would African-Americans ever gain power and self-respect in racist America, according to Malcolm X.

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