PROJECT #1

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ONLINE FINAL EXAM

AP/HUMA 1170M 9.0W 2021 THE MODERN AGE: SHAPERS & DEFINERS

DUE DATE: 28 APRIL 2021 @11:59PM TO ECLASS/TURNITIN

Please note: the completed exam will be submitted to Turnitin as a .doc or .docx file. No credit will be given for: (a) materials taken from Wikipedia, Shmoop, Course Hero, Study Mode, Khan Academy, History.com, etc. or (b) general, unspecialized speculation or summary

For each of the following five (5) quotations please provide:

1) an accurate identification of: a. the author/speaker/artist b. the title of the reading/viewing/lecture in which the quotation appears c. the historical time period/movement during which the quotation was

written.

2) a precise and concise close reading/analysis of the quotation with an emphasis on its main ideas. Explain how and why the specific terms, theories, concepts, and/or examples that appear in the quotation “shape and define” the time period to which it belongs.

3) a detailed explanation of how the author of the quotation and his or her ideas confirm, refine, correct or disprove the dominant/traditional/”Eurocentric’ narrative of “modernity”, the historical Modern Age, the modern worldview, modern identity formation, the ‘modern mind’, etc. This explanation should include at least two (2) quotations from other course texts that have not, already, been referenced in other exam responses** and address multiple course themes/theories, i.e. human rights, the liberal democracy, the mechanisms of eurocentrism, science and reason, empire, free-market capitalism, progress, industrialization, coherences, reification, the “imagined community”, the “Other”, religion and secularism, the modern city, “invention”, evolution, etc. Please note: the majority of your grades will come from the course-based critical analyses you showcase. Ultimately, this online, open- book, final exam is designed to reward engagement with the course in its totality.

** A completed exam will reference and engage with at minimum 15 (fifteen) required course readings/viewings. Lecture slides do not count as a course reading/viewing.

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Identification 1 Much of modern social science originated in efforts by late nineteenth- and twentieth- century Europeans to understand what made 
the economic development path of western Europe unique; yet those efforts have yielded no consensus. Most of the literature has focused on Europe, seeking to explain its early development of large- scale mechanized industry. Comparisons with other parts of the world have been used to show that “Europe”—or in some formulations, western Europe, Protestant Europe, or even just England—had within its borders some unique homegrown ingredient of industrial success or was uniquely free of some impediment.

Other explanations have highlighted relations between Europe and other parts of the world—particularly various forms of colonial extraction—but they have found less favor with the majority of Western scholars. It has not helped matters that these arguments have emphasized what Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital through the forcible dispossession of Amerindians and enslaved Africans (and many members of Europe’s own lower classes). While that phrase accurately highlights the brutality of these processes, it also implies that this accumulation was “primitive” in the sense of being the beginning step in large-scale capital accumulation. This position has become untenable as scholarship has shown the slow but definite growth of an investible surplus above subsistence through the retained earnings of Europe’s own farms, workshops, and counting-houses. Identification 2 The bourgeoisie, whenever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’ and has remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers…and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation…All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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Identification 3 For this exclusion [of women from the rights of citizenship] not to be an act of tyranny one would have to prove that the natural rights of women are not absolutely the same as those of men or show that they are not capable of exercising them. Now the rights of men follow only from the fact that they are feeling beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and reasoning about these ideas. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily have equal rights. Either no individual in mankind has true rights, or all have the same ones; and whoever votes against the rights of another, whatever be his religion, his color, of his sex, has from that moment abjured his own rights. It would be difficult to prove that women are incapable of exercising the rights of citizenship. Why should beings exposed to pregnancies and to passing indispositions not be able to exercise rights that no one ever imagined taking away from people who have gout every winter or who easily catch colds? Even granting a superiority of mind in men that is not the necessary consequence of the difference in education (which is far from being proved and which ought to be if women are to be deprived of a natural right without injustice), this superiority can consist in only two points. It is said that no woman has made an important discovery in the sciences or given proof of genius in the arts, letters, etc. But certainly no one would presume to limit the rights of citizenship exclusively to men of genius. Some add that no woman has the same extent of knowledge or the same power of reasoning as certain men do; but what does this prove except that the class of very enlightened men is small? There is complete equality between women and the rest f men; if this little class of men were set aside, inferiority and superiority would be equally shared between the two sexes. Now since it would be completely absurd to limit the rights of citizenship and the eligibility fort public office to this superior class, who should women be excluded rather than those men who are inferior to a great number of women? Identification 4 Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate that from this “Cradle of the Confederacy”, this very “Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland”, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and again, down through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say: “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. And, segregation forever”.

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Identification 5 Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; It then showed how something or somebody had once looked—and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people, Later still the specific vision of the image-maker was also recognized as part of the record. An image became a record of how X had seen Y. This was the result of an increasing awareness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history. It would be rash to try to date this last development precisely. But certainly in Europe such consciousness has existed since the beginning of the Renaissance. No other relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer than literature. To say this is not to deny the expressive or imaginative quality of art, treating it as mere documentary evidence; the more imaginative the work, the more profoundly it allows us to share the artist’s experience of the visible. Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning: Beauty Truth Genius Civilization Form

Status Taste, etc.

Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. (The world-as- it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness.) Out of true with the present, these assumptions obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.