The Big Dates: 1789--1914--1991

• Politics and War

How Do Things Change?

Big Stories

The Rise (and Fall) of the Atlantic Slave System

The Rise of Scientific Reasoning

The Rise of New Forms of Religion

The Origins of Population and Economic Growth

The Decline and Fall of the Old Regime

 Christian: Established Churches

• Parish Church link
• The Protestant Reformation: 1517-
• Outsiders: Jews and Muslims

Control of Knowledge

• Learning: Universities and Schools
• Censorship
• Divine Revelation through Church and Bible

Science: a form of reasoning

• Observation
• Measurement
• Mathematics
• Classical: arithmetic and geometry
  • The importance of Zero
• Algebra: symbolism
• Arabic numerals
  • Al-Khwarizmi: 8th century Baghdad
• Calculus: planetary motion

 Galileo

• Convicted of heresy by Roman Catholic Church 1633

Ideas:

 The Enlightenment

• Skeptical
• Anti-clerical
• Scientific

 Isaac Newton 1642-1727

• Simple Laws of Nature
• Gravity
• Calculus: mathematics of motion
• Human Reason--not Divine Revelation
• Liberal Christian

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

  God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light.

  Alexander Pope's epitaph for Isaac Newton

  •  

A Science of Society

 The Social Contract

• John Locke 1632-1704
• State of Nature

Government by Consent

• Preserve Individual Rights
• Preserve Property Rights
• Slaves

How Do Ideas Spread?

Publishing

Government Censorship

Church Censorship

 Partial Failure of Censorship, especially in France

•  Pierre Bayle
  • Dictionary 1697
•  Diderot
  • Encyclopedia 1751-80

The "Philosophes"

• Montesquieu 1689-1755
• Voltaire 1694-1778
• Rousseau 1712-1778

 (Look Them Up)

U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"

Thomas Jefferson

• (Look Him Up Too)
• Monticello
• Jefferson Bible
• Deism: Natural Religion
• Jesus' teaching as ethics rather than a road to salvation.

Slavery and Natural Law?

• Sally Hemings

   

   

 Religion:

 Evangelical Revival

Established Churches

Salvation: heaven or hell (Bosch paintings)

Roman Catholic or Protestant?

The Church, or Faith?

Personal Religion

• Roman Catholic Mass
• Protestant: Faith in Christ

ENGLAND

Evangelical Revival

• Church of England
• Methodism (new church outside the established Church of England)

• John Wesley 1709-1791
• George Whitefield 1714-1770

Whitefield in America

• Settler Colonies
• Spread of Baptists, Methodist, new denominations

Church as voluntary society rather than a parish

Slavery and Christianity

Abolitionism: England

• The Somerset Case, 1772
• Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade 1787

• William Wilberforce 1759-1833. Evangelical Christian
•  
• Liberal Christians: Quakers and Unitarians
•  
• "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"

• Slave Rebellions

Authority of Old Regime Challenged

• Scientific Knowledge
• Personal Religion 
•  

Review Questions

What were the characteristics of Enlightenment thought?

Why were the churches regarded as the adversary?

How were Enlightenment ideas spread?

What did it mean to have an "established" church?

What were the sources of dissatisfaction with the Old Regime churches?

Why were John Wesley and George Whitefield important people?

How did slavery begin to become controversial in Enlightenment thought, and in some Christian churches?