Prelim Exam

Question 1

What was the Enlightenment?

Answer 1

• intellectual movement
• 18th century
• new world view on government, education, church etc.
• scientific revolution, new methods and discoveries
• move away from religion and based knowledge on logic, observation and reason (secular)

Question 2

What was the Enlightenment about?

Answer 2

• Liberty = individual human rights, new type of government (sovereign), representative assembly, written constitution
• Equality = rights, civil liberties, law, opportunity, no special privileges for the rich
• Tension between liberty and equality

Question 3

John Locke’s philosophy

Answer 3

“Essay concerning human understanding”
Tabula rasa- the blank slate
Knowledge is gained by each individual from experience
Government as a means to protect “life liberty and estate”
Deeply influenced the US’s founding documents
Essay on religious tolerance early model for separation of church and state

Question 4

How did the French Revolution start?

Answer 4

• Enlightened thinking ideas
• class system outdated, taxes
• Liberty and equality
• “all men are created equal”
• influence from America and constitution
• more influential than America, most powerful state in Europe, worldwide impact

Question 5

French Revolutionary Ideas

Answer 5

• Tax refusal
• failing monarchy
• 3 estates: clergy, nobility and all others
• revolution dominated by middle class, used lower class for numbers
• middle class moving up, lower stays same
• motivations: poverty, hunger, low wages, unemployment
• storming of Bastille leaves the question what can’t the revolutionaries do?
• “Liberte, equalite, fraternite!”

Question 6

What Sparked the American War of Independence?

Answer 6

• mid 1700s - 1763
• stamp act (1765) annoyed US
• no representation in parliament, tax had no benefit, not represented to voice annoyance

Question 7

Actions of American war of independence

Answer 7

• 1773 Boston tea party, tea dumped, lose trade and economics
• boycotts
• committees forced people to comply and created policies like a government
• Declaration of Independence
• patriots funded by France who were fighting with Britain
• colonists saw themselves as American by the late 1770s
• slaves often loyal to the British who promised freedom

Question 8

What was the trans-Atlantic slave trade?

Answer 8

• 1500-1880
• 10-12 million Africans forcibly removed for slavery
• 15% died in transit
• chattle, bought and sold as property
• to Caribbean, US and Brazil
• worked in sugar plantations (made rum, tobacco, coffee, hemp), mass produced= luxuries
• trade weapons and goods for slaves
• life expectancy was 23
• treated just well enough to grow new slaves (babies)
• justified by enlightenment and bible

Question 9

When and what was Bloody Sunday?

Answer 9

• March 7th 1965
• 600 SCLC activists take part in an 80k march from Selma to Montgomery
• March for voting rights
• 23 out of 19000 registered to vote
• Police attacked crowd at Edmund Pettus Bridge with clubs and tear had

Question 10

How did the enlightenment contribute to the slave trade?

Answer 10

• were not seen as people
• natural selection, race’s level determined by genes
• survival of the fittest, white superior
• huge profit made, used to build new world