Socialism and Marxism DBQ

**In Europe, the artistic period after Romanticism was one of much change.  In this period, Realism, artists and authors started to move away from the idea of nature and instead focused on life itself.   Realism as a genre of art was one of the first types of paintings to show Europe as it really was.  By studying the paintings done in this time period, one can easily see the lives of the working and middle class.  However, Realism did not necessarily show how the middle class had changed.  Rather, the art of the Realist period showed the middle class as it always was, along with documenting the truth of how industrialized Europe had become.
**In past artistic movements, the main focus of art had often been religious figures or important political figures.  Even though they might have shown common people, one could tell that the scenes themselves were of great importance without having to read too much into them.  In Eugene Delacroix's painting of French revolutionaries lead by a women carrying the revolutionary flag, this was clearly a pivotal point in French history.  This scene depicted in this painting was of great significance to France as a whole.  On the other hand, Fig. 1 shows simple people riding on a train.  The train itself is not very important, nor are any of the people in it.  These are the true common people.  There was a small majority of middle-class men or women who actually participated in the fight for rights in the French Revolution.  Fig. 1, being a Realistic painting, showed these people as they really were: folk with simple lives and simple tasks to do, tasks that do not involve fighting in glorious wars.  Fig. 2 is another simple painting.  The people in this are merely taking a merry stroll down the street as the rain is clearing up.  There is nothing truly extraordinary going on.  In one painting of the previous Romantic era, The Raft of the Medusa, every person on the shipwrecked raft is doing something, the picture is busy and full of action.  This is hardly ever the case in reality.  Real life is often slow paced and leisurely, not as hectic as that painting portrays.  Fig. 2 instead shows how real life is often as easy as a stroll down the street, nothing too exciting.
**One specific way the paintings of the Realistic era convey the truth is that they convey the truth as the artist sees it him- or herself.  The painter of Fig. 1 saw the common people more sad and downtrodden.  Weary people on a crowded train, thinking about all the things that need to be done.  There are people talking and there are people sleeping -- both adults and a baby.  Maybe the artist took a ride on a train one day and was inspired to paint exactly what he saw.  What he saw turned out to be a troubled middle class, but only troubled by their own troubles, petty day-to-day troubles, little troubles that everyone is worried about, making this painting seem even more realistic.  The painter of Fig. 2 seemed to see the world in a different way.  He shows the people in his art as possibly more esteemed, judging by their fancy garb and top hats.  He saw a finer side to the common people, and this is the message he tried to convey in his piece.  In artistic periods prior to this, common people were common people, all pretty much the same and represented how artistic law told painters to represent them.  The Realistic period is when the truth comes out, that even within a social class people can be different -- and so can the way that different people interpret them -- and this fact was represented in both Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.
**Another bit of truth that paintings of the Realistic era convey is indeed one of change: change in technology and industry.  In Fig. 1, the people are riding on a train, possible a steam engine or maybe an electric one, to get to their destination.  Trains were invented much before the Realistic era, but this was the time that technology like this started to appear in paintings.  In Fig. 2, one can see signs of industry mostly from the buildings in the background.  These large structures are well on their way to becoming skyscrapers.  Often in times before this, paintings had not had clear, detailed images of buildings of this time.  Both Delacroix's painting and The Raft of the Medusa do not have any clear buildings in them.  But even through all these changes in industry shown through these Realistic paintings, the middle class is the middle class in the middle class.  The world changed around them, maybe their jobs changed, maybe their pay changed for better or for worse, the both Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 convey the truth that the middle class stays the same throughout all of these new developments.
**The time of Realism was indeed a time in which artists could show real life as it was in actuality.  This was an even farther step forward than Romanticism in stepping away from the once-customary Church commissioned paintings.  Realism, as the name suggests, was real.  Realism was one of the first types of art to show the middle class as it really was; a middle class that, even through the industrializing world, had not really changed.  Of course, there were people in the middle class that rose up, for example the Third Estate becoming the bourgeois factory owners, but there was just another middle class -- the proletariat, in this case -- to take their place.  Through both Fig. 1 and Fig 2., the respective artists show the middle class as it was, is, and shall be: a working, sometimes struggling class, with ordinary problems living their ordinary lives, even through all of the change.

Italian and French Revolutions FRQ

**Joseph Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi were two revolutionary leaders in what would become known as Italy supporting the poor and downtrodden working class.  Likewise, in France during the time of their revolution, the peasants in the Third Assembly were the ones who revolted from the Estates General and King Louis.  However, in Italy there was no absolute monarch that the people were revolting against.  The main difference between the revolutionaries in Italy and the revolutionaries in France was that in France their main purpose was to break away from their current monarchy, whereas in Italy their main purpose was to help the poor to a better life by first establishing a government, not by revising one that was already there.
**In France in the late 1700s, there was to be an Estates General with the nobility of the First Assembly, the clergy of the Second Assembly, and the common people of the Third Assembly.  However, thinking they deserved more rights than they were being offered, the people of the Third Assembly rebelled, refusing to attend the Estates General, locking themselves inside a tennis court building, and writing their Tennis Court Oath.  The people of what was now being called the National Assembly wanted a new kind of government, which was the main reason that they revolted.  They wanted King Louis to overturn the throne, or at least establish some sort of unicameral or bicameral assembly so that power would be evenly distributed within the country.  They wrote various documents including a new constitution to try and get their current leaders to see that something must be changed.
**Mazzini and Garibaldi and their followers revolted because of almost the exact opposite reason.  In the loose confederation of city-states that would become known as Italy, there was nothing that united them like the King united France.  Lombardy and Venetia were owned by Austria, Piedmont-Sardinia was its own independent state, the Vatican had its own territory in the papal states, etc.  In this convoluted conglomeration of lands and people, there was no direct order.  In this boot-shaped mess, the poor people often got left behind or neglected.  In France, the people were neglected because the king and his nobles went off to enjoy a life of luxury in Versailles, not because there was no nobility to take care of them and their needs.
**Mazzini and Garibaldi led their revolutions not because they wanted to change the governmental structure from something they did not like, but because they wanted to have some sort of concrete governmental structure in the first place.  Just like Victor Emmanuel and Count Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia wanted Italy to be united, Mazzini and Garibaldi also wanted some sort of order.  They wanted someone to represent the poor, to make their lives better.  The closest thing they had was the Vatican, but the Pope and his bishops were too involved in religion to be true governmental leaders.  They could not help the poor in the same way that a King or some political leader could.  France revolted because they had a real leader that they wanted to overthrow; Mazzini and Garibaldi revolted for the people, so that a new leader would come and let a new world rise up like the sun.
**Though revolutions can sometimes blend together and all seem the same, the difference between the revolution of Mazzini and Garibaldi and the French Revolution was that the former occurred in the lack of the government to help the common people, whereas the latter occurred to change the current government to help the common people.  France, obviously, was at least a nation when the people revolted; Italy was not even its own independent country.  In the end, both France got its constitutional monarchy and Italy got its government under King Victor Immanuel, though neither worked out exactly like the revolutionaries had imagined it.

Kaplan Unit Four Review

1.  C
*2.  B
*3.  C
*4.  B
*5.  E
*6.  C
*7.  C
8.  B
*9.  C
*10.  E
*11.  C
12.  A
*13.  E
*14.  D
*15.  B
*16. C
17.  A
18.  B
*19.  E
20.  A
Total score: 6/20

Romanticism FRQ

**The period of Enlightenment was a time for people who developed ideas for the good of humanity.  Various philosophers brought about ideas about God and his plans for humankind and what He would want humans to do on Earth.  However, the period of thinking that followed was very different.  During the period of Romanticism, individualism became more important than thinking of God and society as a whole.  The period of Romanticism eradicated the effects of the period of Enlightenment by lessening the importance of God through  increasing the importance of the individual and what the individual feels.
**The majority of Enlightenment thinkers strove to determine what God's plan was for humankind.  Leibniz was a philosopher who believed that everything that happened must have been the very best thing that could possibly happen because God was eternally powerful and would not let anything bad happen to his people.  This was a theory of great optimism, one which Voltaire mocked in his satire Candide.  There were many more philosophers like Leibniz and pieces like Candide during the Enlightenment; religion-based works were the main product that came out of this time period.  Even Rousseau's work, The Social Contract, talked about the good of humanity as God would want it.  The period of the Enlightenment was mainly focused on God and humanity and how the two were related.
**The period that followed the Enlightenment was Romanticism.  In Romanticism, there were many controversial writers who branched away from the restrictions of writing such things that had to do with God.  Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been the most controversial when he got expelled from Oxford for writing a discourse on atheism.  At this time, because of the Enlightenment, stating that there was no God at all was one of the biggest crimes one could commit.  This philosophy of Godlessness led to a somewhat lackadaisical lifestyle and Shelley's breaking of the very social contract which Rousseau had written in disrespectfully leaving his first wife.  Even so, Shelley was one of the big influences of future authors, who also decided to stray from strict religious guidelines.  William Wordsworth, though less radical then Shelley, wrote a poem called Tintern Abbey, which talked about nature being the true "god" that ruled all and brought every living thing together.  John Keats was a surgeon-turned-writer who began to question God because of all the pain he had been through in his life.  His father had died when he was eight, and, during one of his operations, he truly felt the pain that his patient's screams expressed, so he decided to stop causing the pain and instead write about it in his poems.  Especially towards the end of his life, as he was dying of tuberculosis, John Keats wondered why there had to be such suffering in the world, and if it was God causing it all.
**Not only were there Romantic writers who strayed away from religious images, but there were also painters.  Up until this time, much art had been done for the Church.  Since much before the Enlightenment, in the time of Michaelangelo for example, paintings were commissioned by those who were rich enough to afford them, which was often the Vatican.  Even if the paintings were not religious, they all followed the realistic style up until Romanticism.  During the Enlightenment, paintings were very mathematical in their proportions and their technique of oil painting.  In the age of Romanticism, new techniques that had never been experimented with before started to arise.  One painter, Eugene Delacroix, used blending watercolors to try and put the same emotion into his paintings as poets like John Keats put into their poems.  Similarly, music was less mathematical.  Baroque music and music before the Romantics was also very mathematical in its counting and its dynamics.  During the age of Romanticism, one composer, Johannes Brahms, was able to deviate from the formula of writing music in order to convey more emotion in his pieces.
**Though the Enlightenment and the era of Romanticism were nearly consecutive, their products were not similar at all.  The products of the Enlightenment, being more focused on religion, helped to unravel the mysteries of God's plan as people thought God would want it.  Romantics, on the other hand, strove to let people be themselves and do things for themselves as opposed to God.  With this freedom, came emotion, emotion that can still be seen in writings, paintings, and compositions today.  Though the religious and humanitarian findings of the Enlightenment were still important, they were overshadowed by the benefits of individuality, emotion, and freedom that can be found in Romanticism.

Industrial Revolution and Nationalism FRQ

THESIS:  This struggle for workers' rights inspired many governmental and national revolts during the years 1815 - 1848, and it was really the unity that emerged that would make these revolutions successful.
- Industrial Revolution revolts and rights
- Greek Independence
- Germany as a country (unsuccessful)


**During the Industrial Revolution, farming took a back seat to industry as new discoveries made mass-producing goods faster and more efficient.  John Kay produced a loom where two people could weave at the same time instead of one.  To keep up with that, the spinning jenny was invented to spin even more thread.  With more machines to produce more goods, the demands for goods grew, and so did the demand for workers.  In no time, these workers' rights started being taken away so that the employers could receive as much profit as possible.  As a result, the people rebelled to try and get their own rights.  This struggle for workers' rights inspired many governmental and national revolts during the years 1815 - 1848, and it was really the unity that emerged that would make these revolutions successful.
**Workers in the Industrial Revolution were not happy with the way they had to live.  They worked longer hours than they ever had for less pay.  Women and children even were forced to work excruciatingly long days in order to match the large quota their employer wanted.  As a result of this, the people formed things like labor unions and went on strike to try and get their rights back.  On top of this, Corn Laws were put in place to outrageously tax food.  The people were not getting paid enough to work ridiculous hours, and they had to give up a decent chunk of that hard-earned money in order to pay the tax on their grains.  People protested to both get rights for workers and to repeal the Corn Laws.  They used their unity to get their government to grant their wishes.  This strategy did end up working:  the government made factory owners give the workers decent pay, or minimum wage, laws were put in place to restrict the amount of hours women and children could work in a day, and Corn Laws were repealed with the help of Robert Peel.
**The Greek people echoed these thoughts of wanting their own rights later in the era of nationalism.  For the longest time, the Ottoman Turks had occupied and controlled Greece, but now the Greek people wanted their own freedom.  Fortunately for Greece, people in England, France, and Russia were not on very good terms with the Turks, so they were willing to side with Greek nationalists. Eventually, in 1832, Greece received its independence.  Three of the most powerful countries of that time had helped the Greeks to gain this independence.  By working together, they were able to kick the Ottoman Turks out and gain independence.  Similar to the Industrial Revolution, these different people banding together for a common cause and accomplished it with teamwork.
**Similarly, Germany tried to gain a legal unity within it separate states, left detached since the Holy Roman Empire dissipated.  They met at the Frankfurt Assembly to decide whether or not the German states should converge into one nation.  There were naysayers in Prussia called the Junkers, though, and a whole Germany was decided against in the Berlin Assembly.  Though this revolt did not succeed, this happened because of the lack of unity and agreement within Germany.  The Austrians were on one side of the debate, the East Prussians were on another, and the rest of the Prussians had yet another different opinion, while all the smaller principalities, though not as significant, also had their own opinions.  Though the same intent of the Industrial Revolution protests and the fight for Greek independence was there, the unity was not, therefore this was not  a successful attempt at nationalism.
**Through the power of teamwork, many groups throughout both the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Nationalism were able to overcome boundaries to gaining their own rights, whether they be workers or nationalists.  Other revolts of this time, on the other hand, were not successful because of the lack of unity.  The period from 1815 - 1848 was one littered with revolt after revolt, but the key to a successful revolt, as was started in the time of the Industrial Revolution and carried throughout liberalism, conservatism, and nationalism was agreement and togetherness.