Foundresses week

During Foundresses week I was able to attend the art show. It consisted of various art pieces that had been submitted by members of the Belmont community. Each art piece was significant in its own way and had its own story behind it. I enjoyed attending this event, because the various meanings of each art piece captured and celebrated the diversity of the person who created it. Overall, it was a successful event and directly connected to the mission of Notre Dame de Namur learning institutions.

ch 16 pt 1

• The Atlantic revolutions were distinctive in that they were closely connected to one another. 
• The Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) had argued, the "social contract" between ruler and ruled should last only as long as it served the people well.
• Nationalism, perhaps was the most potent ideology of the modern era, was nurtured in the Atlantic revolutions and shaped much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history.
• By effecting a break with Britain, the American Revolution marked a decisive political change, but in other ways it was a conservative movement, because it originated in an effort to preserve the existing liberties of the colonies rather than create new ones. 
• The American Revolution grew not from social tensions within the colonies, but from a rather sudden and unexpected effort by the British government to tighten its control over the colonies and to extract more revenue from them. 
• On the eve of the French Revolution, a Paris newspaper proclaimed that the United States was "the hope and model of the human race." This was referencing the political ideas and practices of the new country.
• In France, the people had been awakened by the American Revolution.
• The third estate organized themselves as the National Assembly, claiming the sole authority to make laws for the country. 
• The famous French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau had told them that it was "manifestly contrary to the laws of nature...that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superficialities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities." 
• These social conflicts gave the French Revolution, especially during its first five years, a much more violent, far-reaching, and radical character than its American counterpart.
• Nowhere did the example of the French Revolution echo more loudly than the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, later renamed Haiti.
• Socially, the last had become the first. In the only completely successful slave revolt in world history, "the lowest order of the society-slaves-became equal, free, and independent citizens."
• Politically, they had thrown off French colonial rule, creating the second independent republic in the Americas and the first non-European state to emerge from Western colonialism. 
• To whites throughout the hemisphere, the cautionary saying, "Remember Haiti" reflected a sense of horror at what had occurred there and a determinism not to allow political change to reproduce that fearful outcome again. 
• Despite their growing disenchantment with Spanish rule, creole elites did not so much generate a revolution as have one thrust upon them by events in Europe. 
• 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 royalty now in disarray, Latin Americans were forced to take action. The outcome was the independence of various Latin American countries by 1826.

ch 16 pt 2

• England and New England were among the most prosperous regions of the Western world in the early nineteenth century and both were based on free labor.
•  The Great Jamaican Revolt of 1831-1832 was particularly important in prompting Britain to abolish slavery throughout its empire in 1833.
• The end of Atlantic slavery during the nineteenth century marked a major and rapid turn in the world's social history and the moral thinking of mankind.
• Newly freed people did not achieve anything close to political equality, except in Haiti.
• Europeans imposed colonial rule on Africa in the late nineteenth century, one of their justifications was that they needed to emancipate enslaved people.
• It was very ironic that they claimed that they needed to end slavery in a continent that they had extracted slaves from for more than four centuries.
• Some nineteenth century Muslim authorities opposed slavery claiming that it went against the Quran's ideals of freedom and equality. 
• Nationalism proved to be an infinitely flexible and enormously powerful idea in the nineteenth-century Europe and beyond.
• A third echo of the Atlantic revolutions lay in the emergence of a feminist movement.
• An organized and substantial group of women called into question the most fundamental and accepted feature of all preindustrial civilizations-the subordination of women to men.
• In the twentieth century feminist thinking transformed "the way in which women and men work, play, think, dress, worship, vote, reproduce, make love and make war"
• From the beginning, feminism became a transatlantic movement in which European and American women attended the same conferences, corresponded regularly, and read one another's work 
• By 1914, some 10,000 women took part in French feminist organizations, while the National American Woman Suffrage Association claimed 2 million members.
• Feminists were viewed as selfish, willing to sacrifice the family or even the nation while pursuing their individual goals.

Ch 15

• The Ottoman Siege of of Vienna in 1529 marked a muslim advance into the heart of central Europe. 
• The Reformation began in 1517 when a German priest, Martin Luther, nailed a document called the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. 
• This document opened up a debate about the various abuses within the Roman Catholic church. 
• What made Luther's protest potentially revolutionary was its theological basis.
• Luther believed that salvation came through faith alone. 
• Although a large number of women were attracted to Protestantism, Reformation teachings and practices didn't offer them a substantially greater role in the church or society.
• In Protestant-dominated areas, the male Christ figure was the sole object of worship.
• The culmination of European religious conflict took shape in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), a Catholic-Protestant struggle that began the Holy Roman Empire but eventually engulfed most of Europe.
• New religious orders such as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), provided a dedicated brotherhood of priests committed to the renewal of the Catholic Church and its extension abroad.
• Christianity motivated European political and economic expansion and also benefited from it.
• In 1535 the bishop of Mexico proudly claimed that he had destroyed 500 pagan shrines and 20,000 idols.
• Throughout the colonial period and beyond, many Mexican Christians also took part in rituals derived from the past, with little sense of incompatibility with Christian practice. 
• Many Jesuits learned Chinese, became thoroughly acquainted with confucian texts and dressed like Chinese scholars.
• They aimed to show people the commonalities between Confucianism and Christianity rather than introducing something new and foreign to them. 
• Missionary efforts over the course of some 250 years (1550-1800) resulted in 200,000 to 300,000 converts, a minuscule number in a Chinese population approaching 300 million by 1800.The early modern era likewise witnessed the continuation of the "long march of Islam" across the Afro-Asian world. 
• Continued Islamization was usually dependent on the wandering of holy Islamic men or Sufis, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders, none of whom posed a threat to local rulers. 
• What they offered in short was a connection to the wider prestigious, and prosperous world of Islam. 
• Islamization extended modestly even to the Americas, where enslaved African Muslims practiced their faith in North America, particularly in Brazil, where Muslims led a number of slave revolts in the early nineteenth century. 
• Al Wahhab emphasized the rights of women within a patriarchal Islamic framework. 
• These included the right to consent to and stipulate conditions for marriage, to control her dowry, to divorce, and to engage in commerce. 
• He did not insist on head-to-toe covering of women in public and allowed for the mixing of unrelated men and women for business or medical purposes.
• Although an Egyptian army broke the power of the Wahhabi control in 1818, the movement's influence continued to spread across the Islamic world.
• At the level of elite culture, the Mughal ruler Akbar formulated a state cult that combined elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.