World History II - Spring 2018

"In broad terms, the Industrial Revolution marks a human response to that dilemmas as nonrenewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas replaces the endlessly renewable energy sources of wind, water, wood, and the muscle power of people and animals. It was a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions that made available for human use, at least temporarily, immensely greater quantities of energy."  The Industrial Revolution was again another European event. But it's truly amazing to see all the change that was brought because of this one event. One change that happened because the Industrial Revolution was having Industrial Societies. Britain became the first industrialized society due to the fact that it was the most commercialized country in Europe at the time. This brought lots of changes, and as Strayer puts it, "not everyone was affected the same way." "The social transformation of the Industrial Revolution destroyed their old ways of...

Reading Chapter 16 for me was extremely interesting to me because it was a time where all these now countries were fighting to be free from Europe. The textbook named this chapter Atlantic Revolutions, and I think it's the perfect name for this time period and everything that was going on. Naturally being hispanic the Spanish American Revolutions of 1808-1825 really caught my attention. For many reasons this part in our textbook was one that caught my attention. For one, Strayer says that they didn't necessarily generate a revolution, "as have one thrust upon them by events in Europe." One event that really got this started was the fact that in 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal, deposing the Spanish king Ferdinand VII and forcing the Portuguese royal family into exile in Brazil. With legitimate royal authority now in disarray, Latin Americans were forced to take action. Another thing that I found super interesting was the fact that the Spanish American Revo...

"The early modern era of world history gave birth to two intersecting cultural trends that continue to play out in the twenty-first century. The first was the spread of Christianity to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, some of whom now seem to be returning the favor. The second was the emergence of a modern scientific outlook, which sharply challenged Western Christianity even as it too acquired a global presence." One of the important things that Chapter 15 talks about is the spread of the Christian faith. For a long time Christianity was very limited to Europe only. Things started to really change around the 1500's when the globalization of Christianity really began. It was during this time that it started to stretch out to different parts of the world.  "The world of Christendom stretched from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east, with small and beleaguered communities of various kinds in Egypt, Ethiop...

I truly enjoyed reading about Notre Dame's Foundresses. It was very interesting to read about both Francoise Blin de Bourbon and Julie Billart. It's amazing to me how these two women lives were completely different but at the end of the day that difference didn't matter because the two women ended up developing a deep bond of mutual support and friendship. I found it to be very special that till this day their "loving mutuality of spiritual friendship continues to evolve today in response to the realities of the 21st century, acting as an energizing force in the lives and work of the SNDs throughout the world. I definitely admire both sister for not letting their struggles affect the vision and plan they had for the SNDs. Francoise Blin de Bourdon was born in 1756 to an aristocratic family in Gezaincourt, France. Francoise had a very different upbringing than most aristocratic people, from the time she was an infant she was raised by her maternal grandpar...

All of Chapter 14 is based on the international networks of exchange that helped shape human interactions during the centuries between 1450 and 1750. There was lots of different commerce going on around this period in history, for example The Spice Trade, Silver Trade, The North American Fur Trade, but one that really impacted me when reading, and impacted the world itself is The Atlantic Slave Trade. "Of all the commercial ties that linked the early modern world into a global network of exchange, none had more profound or enduring human consequences than the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1500 and 1866, this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slaves." Slaves would often be sold several times on their journey, sometimes even branded, and h...

The Great Dying: Like I mentioned in my last blog post, there are many things that happened during The Early Modern Era, but that we don't usually think of when we think of that period in history. The Great Dying is one of those events that we know happened, but we don't talk about much. It's truly sad that it isn't talked about more because it had a HUGE impact on Native American societies. There are many different factors that contributed to this event happening. For one "the lack of most domesticated animals meant the absence of acquired immunities to Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, malaria, and later, yellow fever." The last thing anyone thought would be the huge impact it would have on Native Americans because they had never been exposed to all the things they were suddenly being bombarded with.  When Native American people came into contact with the European and African diseases, they died in appalling numbers, ...

"For the sake of clarity and coherence, historians often characterize a particular period of time in a brief phrase -- the age of First Civilizations, the age of empires, the era of revolutions, and so on. Though useful and even necessary, such capsule descriptions leave a lot out and vastly oversimplify what actually happened. Historical reality is always more messy, more complicated, and more uncertain than any shorthand label can convey." It's interesting to me that the author would start the beginning of chapter 4 with this, because it definitely is true! We like to label certain events, which makes it easy to remember but those labels leave out a lot of information. This is especially true when speaking about The Early Modern World.  The Early Modern Era, was spanning from the years 1450 - 1750. It's during these times that we can find signs of the modern world; "the beginnings of genuine globalization, elements of distinctly modern societies, a...