Western Historical Eras’ Acceptance of “Subjectivity”…or Not

1. Western Historical Eras’ Acceptance of “Subjectivity”…or Not

2. Your task: You will choosefive events from this slideshow -- and be randomly given five more -- and will have to place these and explain their placement amid your History of Subjectivity/Objectivity analysis. Some of these are likely to “fit” your graph better than others…but, then again, History is not neat. As budding historians, consider how you would have us look at these events in the context of their times, and how we have come to judge them.

3. 12th-13th cent.: Primogeniture Population continued to rise in the 1200s, primogeniture became more established and there were many younger warrior sons looking for lands and glory. - Prof. Tom James, from BBC’s “British History: The Middle Ages”

4. 1490s: The Spanish Inquisition [The] Spanish Inquisition was established with papal approval in 1478 at the request of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I. This Inquisition was to deal with the problem of Marranos, Jews who through coercion or social pressure had insincerely converted to Christianity; after 1502, it turned its attention to similar converts from Islam, and in the 1520s to persons suspected of Protestantism. Within a few years of the founding of the Inquisition, the papacy relinquished virtually all supervision of it to the sovereigns. Thus, the Spanish Inquisition became more an instrument of the state than of the church, although churchmen, especially Dominicans, always functioned as its officers. - Encarta.com

5. 1572: St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of French Protestants (Huguenots), on the Queen’s orders • So it was determined to exterminate all the Protestants and the plan was approved by the queen. They discussed for some time whether they should make an exception of the king of Navarre and the prince of Condé. All agreed that the king of Navarre should be spared by reason of the royal dignity and the new alliance. The duke of Guise, who was put in full command of the enterprise, summoned by night several captains of the Catholic Swiss mercenaries from the five little cantons, and some commanders of French companies, and told them that it was the will of the king that, according to God's will, they should take vengeance on the band of rebels while they had the beasts in the toils. Victory was easy and the booty great and to be obtained without danger. • - historian De Thou, who witnessed this when he was 19

6. 1649: Execution of Charles I of England; Oliver Cromwell ascends to head of state What is beyond dispute is that the confrontation between monarch and subject, pitting against each other political and economic epochs, theories of state and power, rates as one of history's most captivating courtroom dramas. Charles refused to answer the court's charge of treason, occasioned most particularly by the king's fomenting the Second Civil War while already a defeated prisoner of parliament following the first Civil War. He rested firmly on royal prerogatives against what some interlocutors take to be an almost desperate plea by his judges for some hint of acknowledgment that could open the door to compromise: [A] King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth. But it is not my case alone -- it is the freedom and the liberty of the people of England. And do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties -- for if the power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or anything that he calls his own. Therefore, when that I came here I did expect particular reasons to know by what law, what authority, you did proceed against me here. It must be borne in mind that the trial of a king was a completely unprecedented event. Charles might be forgiven his attitude, even if it smacked of the impolitic high-handedness that had forced this deadly test of powers. - commentary at ExecutedToday.com

7. 1792: A Vindication of the Rights of Women After considering the historic page…I have sighed when obliged to confess, that either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial. I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools, but what has been the result?--a profound conviction that the neglected education of my fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women, in particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes, originating from one hasty conclusion…. My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists--I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt. - Mary Wollstonecraft

8. 1798: Publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads The Preface deserves its reputation as a revolutionary manifesto in the theory of poetry. Like most radical statements, however, it claims to go back to the implicit principles which informed the great poetry of the past but have been perverted in recent practice. Most discussions of the Preface, following the lead of Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, have focused on Wordsworth’s assertions about the valid language of poetry, on which he bases his attack on the “poetic diction” of 18th-century poets…. It is apparent…that Wordsworth undertook to overthrow the basic theory, as well as the reigning practice, of neoclassic poetry. That is, his Preface implicitly denies the assumption that the poetic genres constitute a hierarchy, from epic and tragedy at the top down through comedy, satire, pastoral, to the short lyric at the lower reaches of the poetic scale; he also rejects the traditional principle of “decorum,” according to which the subject-matter (especially the social class of the protagonists) and the level of diction of a poem must conform to the status of the literary kind on the poetic scale. When Wordsworth asserted in the Preface that he deliberately chose to represent “incidents and situations from common life,” he translated his democratic sympathies into critical terms, justifying his use of peasants, children, outcasts, criminals, and idiot boys as serious subjects of poetic and even tragic concern…. - M.H. Abrams (general editor), on William Wordsworth and the Preface of the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads

9. 1848: Revolutions Across the European Continent The Revolution of 1848 was an international event and, apart from the world wars, the only such event in the West. But it did not affect all of Europe. At least two states - England and Russia, at opposite ends of the continent - remained unscathed. What made these two countries different from the others? The Revolution of 1848 shook those countries in which a bourgeois elite led the opposition against more or less reactionary governments. But Russia had no bourgeoisie and, after the electoral reform of 1832, the English bourgeoisie was no longer in opposition…. In the first place, then, the Revolution of 1848 was the act of bourgeois liberals. All over the continent, from 1815 to 1848, they sought to defend the privileges they had acquired under the French Revolution and the Empire against a reactionary nobility bent on recovering its former position. These advantages did, of course, vary in importance from country to country. In France equality before the law was no longer an issue; the struggle now centered on property qualifications. Although large-scale industry did not yet exist, progress in production and exchange had been great enough to create a national market. Books and ideas traveled along with the merchandise and united the bourgeois and the artisans from one end of the country to the other. - Prof. Gerhard Rempel

10. 1855: Leaves of Grass Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from; The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer, This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds. - Walt Whitman (ll. 526-528) 1882: America’s premier literary magazine (The Atlantic Monthly) on the new edition of Leaves of Grass Fortunately, however, the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature; for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass, that the book cannot attain to any very wide influence.

11. 1859: Origin of Species Darwin’s first sketch of an evolutionary tree (1837)

12. 1860s-1880s: Impressionism Claude Monet’s “Impression: soleil levant” (1874) -- Webmuseum, Paris. Rejected by the Salon even into the 1890s, the Impressionists were by 1903 widely considered to have produced the main 19th-century revolution.

13. 1905-1920: Theory of Relativity Who would imagine that this simple law [constancy of the velocity of light] has plunged the conscientiously thoughtful physicist into the greatest intellectual difficulties? - Albert Einstein

14. 1919: Wilsonian Idealism Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America, my fellow citizens -- I do not say it in disparagement of any other great people -- America is the only idealistic nation in the world. - Woodrow Wilson, speech supporting the League of Nations

15. 1940-50s: Red Scare I would have no fears if more Americans possessed the zeal, the fervor, the persistence and the industry to learn about this menace of Red fascism. I do fear for the liberal and progressive who has been hoodwinked and duped into joining hands with the communists. I confess to a real apprehension so long as communists are able to secure ministers of the gospel to promote their evil work and espouse a cause that is alien to the religion of Christ and Judaism. I do fear so long as school boards and parents tolerate conditions whereby communists and fellow travelers, under the guise of academic freedom, can teach our youth a way of life that eventually will destroy the sanctity of the home, that undermines faith in God, that causes them to scorn respect for constituted authority and sabotage our revered Constitution. - from the testimony of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (pictured above) before the House Un-American Activities Committee, March 1947. Note that the Red Scare is generally considered to have begun in 1919, but reached its highest pitch between 1947 and 1954.

16. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz... - Allen Ginsberg (ll. 1-4) 1955: “Howl” 1956: The New York Times reports on the San Francisco scene The most remarkable poem of the young group, written during the past year, is “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg.… This poem has created a furor of praise or abuse whenever read or heard. It is a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning. Ginsberg thinks he is going forward by going back to the methods of Whitman. - Richard Eberhart

17. 1962-65: Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”) "I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in." - Pope John XXIII Pius IX, a conservative, convoked the First Vatican Council; John XXIII, a liberal, convoked the Second -- which Evelyn Waugh and our other literary converts considered “a betrayal of the principles of Pio Nono,” a surrender to modernism with the “home improvements” that the Council proposed. How can we reconcile these two opposites? Was the spirit of Vatican II the work of the Heilige Geist (the Holy Ghost), or the Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times)? - Fr. Eugene Dougherty (Seattle, WA) • A Few Selected Issues • Enhanced the role of lay Catholics (not just priests, nuns, etc.) • Increased ecumenism • Mass could be said in the vernacular, not only in Latin • Jews were deemed not responsible for the death of Jesus

18. 1968: Black Power Salute during the Olympics The two men were Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Teammates at San Jose State University, Smith and Carlos were stirred by the suggestion of a young sociologist friend Harry Edwards, who asked them and all the other black American athletes to join together and boycott the games. The protest, Edwards hoped, would bring attention to the fact that America's civil rights movement had not gone far enough to eliminate the injustices black Americans were facing. Edwards' group, the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), gained support from several world-class athletes and civil rights leaders but the all-out boycott never materialized. ... While the protest seems relatively tame by today's standards, the actions of Smith and Carlos were met with such outrage that they were suspended from their national team and banned from the Olympic Village, the athletes' home during the games. -- John Gettier

19. 1970s-present: Multiculturalism As recently as the early 1970s, the MLA [Modern Language Association] still was adhering to the American canon, dappled with the likes of Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway, and a few contemporary male Jewish writers such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. At one annual meeting, a group of young scholars pressed unsuccessfully the case for a panel session on multicultural literature; rejected, they reconvened in a hotel hallway for an impromptu discussion on African American writing…. Of course, the MLA has a totally different cast today. [In] December 1999, the schedule encompassed sessions on ethnicity, hybridity, transnationalism and many other subjects related to multiculturalism. Then, too, the American Studies Association, an important professional group for teachers of U.S. literature and U.S. history, has also created conferences around themes such as multiculturalism dynamics and the impact of borderlands. - John Lowe, in the USINFO Government journal

20. 2005-present: “Web 2.0” Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences. - Tim O’Reilly (organizer of the conference responsible for defining “Web 2.0”)

21. Sources (p.1 of 2): “About Woodrow Wilson.” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=about.woodrow>.Abrams, M.H., general ed. “Headnote: Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. 159-160.“Charles Darwin.” Wikipedia.org. 24 Feb 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin>.De Thou. Histoire des choses arrivees de son temps (Paris, 1659) in J.H. Robinson, 2 vols. Boston: Ginn, 1906. 2:180-183. “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, 1572 .” Apr 1998. Internet Modern History Sourcebook. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1572stbarts.html>. Dougherty, Fr. Eugene. Rev. of Literary Converts, by Joseph Pearce. Reprinted from The Latin Mass Magazine. 11 Oct 2004. Seattle Catholic. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20041011.html>. Eberhart, Richard. “West Coast Rhythms.” The New York Times 2 Sep 1956. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851 - 2004),BR4. 24 Feb 2008 <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb>.Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Trans. Robert Lawson. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. Bartleby.com. 2000. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.bartleby.com/173/>.Gettings, John. “ Civil Disobedience: Black medalists raise fists for Civil Rights Movement.” Infoplease.com. 29 Mar 2006. <www.infoplease.com/spot/mm-mexicocity.html>.Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Norton Anthology of American Literature: Literature Since 1945. Ed. Nina Baym. 6th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 2865. Headsman. “1649: Charles I.” Online posting. 30 Jan 2008. ExecutedToday.com. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.executedtoday.com/2008/01/30/1649-charles-i/>.James, Tom. “Overview: The Middle Ages, 1154-1485: English Nationalism.” 14 Sep 2006. BBC Online. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/middle_ages/overview_middleages_02.shtml>.

22. Sources (p.2 of 2): “Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman.” Rev. of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. The Atlantic Monthly (Jan 1882). Theatlantic.com. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/classrev/whitman.htm>.Lowe, John. “Multicultural Literature in the United States: Advent and Process.” U.S. Society and Values (Feb 2000). USINFO. 24 Feb 2008 <http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itsv/0200/ijse/lowe.htm>. O’Malley, John W. “Inquisition.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Encarta.msn.com. 24 Feb 2008 <http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761552909_2/Inquisition.html>. O’Reilly, Tim. “Web 2.0: Compact Definition?” Online posting. 1 Oct 2005. O’Reilly Radar. 24 Feb 2008 <http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/web-20-compact-definition.html>.Pioch, Nicolas. “Impressionism.” 19 Jun 2006. WebMuseum, Paris. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism/>. Rempel, Gerhard. “The Revolution of 1848.” Western New England College. 24 Feb 2008 <http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/rev1848.html>.“Second Vatican Council.” 22 Feb 2008. Wikipedia.com. 24 Feb 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council>.“Testimony of J. Edgar Hoover before HUAC (Excerpts).” Cold War. CNN Interactive. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/06/documents/hoover/>. Thavis, John. “Forty yearslater, Vatican II continues to reverberate through church.” 12 Oct 2005. Catholic News Service. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0505787.htm>.Wikipedia. 24 Feb 2008. 24 Feb 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page>.Whitman, Walt. “Leaves of Grass [Song of Myself].” Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1865-1914. Ed. Nina Baym. 6th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 53. Wollstonecraft, Mary. “A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2. Gen. ed. M. H. Abrams. 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. 112-114.YouTube. 24 Feb 2008. 24 Feb 2008 <http://www.youtube.com>.