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. 

ch 14 (second half)

• Fur trade was a highly competitive enterprise.
• The Dutch and British were frequent rivals for the great prize: North American furs.
• Native Americans would bring skins and furs to their fortified trading posts in the interior of North America.
• Native Americans represented a cheap labor force in this international commercial effort, but they were not a directly coerced labor force.
• With no prior experience of alcohol and little time to adjust to its availability, these drinks caused binge drinking, violence among young men, promiscuity, and addiction. 
• The fur trade offered women a mix of opportunity and liability.
• The international sale of furs greatly enriched the Russian state as well as many private merchants, trappers, and hunters. 
• Slavery came in many forms.
• The slavery that emerged in America was distinctive in several ways.
• This New World slavery was largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, lacking rights in the society of their owners.
• By the seventeenth century, slav trade became highly competitive with the British, Dutch, and French contesting the earlier Portuguese monopoly.
• Enslaved Africans often resisted their fates in a variety of ways. 
• One common act was to flee. 
• Since more men than women were shipped to the Americas, the labor demands on those women who remained increased substantially.
• The unbalanced sex ratios also meant that men could marry multiple women. 
• For much smaller numbers of women, slave trade provided an opportunity to exercise power and accumulate wealth.

ch 14 (first half)

• In the fifteenth century, Europe's population grew and countries like Spain, Portugal, England and France started learning how to tax their subjects more efficiently. 
• Those European countries also learned how to build substantial military forces equipped with gunpowder weapons.
• Europeans were required to pay cash (gold or silver) for Asian spices or textiles. 
• Portuguese voyages along the West African coast were seeking direct access to African goldfields. 
• Most Indian Ocean merchant ships were not heavily armed and lacked onboard cannons.
• The Portuguese saw this as an opportunity to outgun and outmaneuver competing naval forces.
• The Portuguese created a "trading post empire" in the Indian Ocean and aimed to forcefully take control of commerce. 
• They were unable to take control of commerce so they began assimilating themselves to Asian and African cultures.
• Spain was the first to challenge Portugal's position.
• The Dutch and English both entered the Indian Ocean commerce in the seventeenth century.
• The Dutch controlled the shipping and production of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace.
• Both the Dutch and English became heavily involved in trade within Asia.
• Japanese traders began operating in Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century.

ch 13

• Europeans extended their empires to encompass most of the Americas by the mid-eighteenth century.
• Impoverished nobles and commoners alike found opportunity for gaining wealth and status in the colonies.
• One Spanish conquistador declared: "We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich."
• When Native Americans came into contact with Europeans and African diseases, such as smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, and yellow fever they died causing them to lose 90% of their population.
• The Great Dying reminds us that the climate often plays an important role in the shaping of human history. But it also reminds us that human activity also helps shape the climate.
• The Great Dying and the impact of the Little Ice Age created an acute labor shortage and did not make room for immigrant newcomers.
• Europeans and Africans brought their crops with them. Crops like wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes and many garden vegetables and fruits. This made the European diet possible in the Americas.
• They also brought their animals with them. Animals like horses, pigs, cattle, goats, and sheep. These animals made ranching economies and cowboy cultures of both the North and West possible.
• Spanish women shared the racial privileges of their husbands, but in terms of gender they were seen as subordinate and in need of male protection.
• For a century (1570-1670), Portuguese planters along the northeastern coast of Brazil dominated the world market for sugar.
• Puritans in Massachusetts and Quakers in Pennsylvania sought to escape aspects of an old European society rather than re-create it.
• By 1720, some 700,000 Russians lived in Siberia, which reduced the native Siberians to 30% of the population.
• The Russian Empire represented the final triumph of an agrarian civilization over the hunting societies of Siberia and over the pastoral peoples of the grasslands.
• Like other colonial powers, the Chinese made active use of notables-Mongol aristocrats, Muslim officials, Buddhist leaders-as they attempted to govern the region as inexpensively as possible.
• Chinese or Qing officials didn't seek to assimilate local people into Chinese culture and showed respect to Mongolian, Tibetan, and Muslim cultures. 
• The Ottoman Empire took over many countries in the Middle East and North and Southeastern Europe.
• Many Christians had welcomed the Ottoman conquest because taxes were lighter and oppression was less pronounced than under former Christian rulers.
• Should we need a motto for world history, consider this one: in world history, nothing stands alone; context is everything.