Transformation of Society: The Age of Optimism (1850-1880)

1. Chapter 23The Age of Optimism, 1850–1880

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3. Industrial Growth and Acceleration • After 1850, the “Second Industrial Revolution” • New sources of energy: petroleum and electricity • New products: chemicals, steel, aluminum • New types of consumption: department stores and mail-order • Expansion of credit and world trade • Science became a partner in industrial development • Transportation and communications • Dramatic expansion of the railway • The Suez Canal (1869) and steamships • Refrigeration • Development of standardized postal systems • Expanding telegraph networks; invention of the telephone in 1879

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5. A Transforming Elite • The declining importance of aristocracy • Landed wealth became less important with the rise of industry • Lines between aristocracy and upper middle class began to blur • Aristocracy nevertheless retained some prestige • The rising middle class, or bourgeoisie • Industrial expansion benefitted entrepreneurs and managers • Growing complexity of society benefitted professionals • A steadily growing number of occupations became “professionalized” • Emphasis on education and qualifications rather than old-style patronage • Lawyers, medical doctors, architects, engineers, scientists, teachers • A distinctively “Victorian” set of values • Emphasis on self-control in public • The “separation of the spheres” • Unlike the aristocracy, a class people lower down the social scale could aspire to join

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8. Workers and the Poor • Confronting the problems of industrial development • Rising standards of living in general, but persistent poverty as well • Poverty generated anxieties among the elite • Fears of worker agitation and popular violence • Concerns about declining birthrates undermining national power • Government responses to poverty • Private and religious responses • The key role of bourgeois women in charity work • Pope Leo XIII and the idea of “social Catholicism” • Changes in rural life • Changes in farming practices raise yields and reduce labor needs • Rural population shrank as urban population grew • Rural areas became more tightly knit into national markets • In Eastern Europe, the pace of change was much slower

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14. Urban Problems and Solutions • Cities grew steadily in this period • Haussmann and the transformation of Paris • Making cities into effective sites of large scale production and consumption • New public services • Developments to improve public health and safety • The introduction of running water • Gaslights and policing • Trams and underground railways

15. PARIS

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17. Education and the Growing Prestige of Science • The rise of public education • After 1870, European nations increasingly offered free primary education • Secondary education expanded as well • Generally limited to middle and upper classes • Played an important role in making professionalization possible • Rise of universities and the professionalization of science • Positivism: the idea that scientific inquiry drives human progress • Key scientific breakthroughs • Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution • Mendeleev’s periodic table • Advances in medicine: Pasteur and Lister

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20. The Impact of Science’s Prestige • Creating “social sciences” • Leopold von Ranke and historical inquiry • Anthropology and the “science” of European superiority • Sociology, the science of society • Religion challenged • The Catholic Church and its reactionary position after 1848 • Growing political challenges to Church authority • The anti-Catholic position of the post-unification Italian Government • Bismarck’s Kulturkampf • The secularism of the French Third Republic • Growing intellectual challenges from science and the “positivist” world-view

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22. Culture in an Age of Change • Modernism in the arts: embracing the new • Painting and the challenge of photography • The Realists • The Impressionists • Literature and the prestige of science • Realism and naturalism adapt the scientific ideal of dispassionate observation • Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola • Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky • Some writers rejected the positivist world-view and its optimistic faith in progress • Thomas Carlyle

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