Chapter 15: Cultural Transformations

I found it important to read about how religion and scientific thinking spread globally during the Early Modern Era. As Christianity started to spread to areas such as Asia, Africa, and the Americas, a more modern scientific outlook was also developing, which challenged these spreading Christian views. In the 1500, "the world of Christendom stretched from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east, with small and beleaguered communities of various kinds" (Strayer, 644). In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation began, with Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517), which began to threaten the unity of the Roman Catholic Church. As Protestantism gained popularity in Europe it added to the class divisions and fractured political system, leading to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). After the war, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was constructed. However, the Protestant Reformation helped contribute to a Catholic Reformation, during which the Council of Trent (1545-1563) reaffirmed what made Catholicism unique. Outside of Europe, the Spanish and Portuguese established missionaries in the Americas. Christianity also attempted to spread in China, but never gained much popularity and was eventually opposed by the Emperor. Islam on the other hand continued its influence across the Afro-Asian world. Islam was even brought to the Americas by African Muslim slaves who continued to practice their faith, paving the way for several slave revolts in the early nineteenth century. The Early Modern Era brought Hindu India closer to the ruling Muslim Mughal Empire. These interactions created new forms of religious expression.
As Europe continued its quest to spread Christianity the Scientific Revolution was also emerging as a "vast intellectual and cultural transformation that took place between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries" (664). One of the most important development from this Revolution was the autonomy of the universities and the contributions to a cultural climate that challenged authority, encouraged mass literacy, and affirmed secular professions. Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, was the scientific thinker that made the breakthrough for the Scientific Revolution. The spreading of the Scientific Revolution was accelerated by the advancements in printing and bookmaking, by a popular press, by the growing literacy, and scientific societies. The Enlightenment was occurring with the Scientific Revolution and was rooted in the idea of progress. The Enlightenment however, went against the reliance on human reason, challenging the ideas of the Scientific Revolution. The Church gradually began to accept the new ideas presented during the Scientific Revolution, but resisted them as well. The Church compartmentalized these new ideas and, "science might prevail in its limited sphere of describing the physical universe, but religion was still the arbiter of truth about those ultimate question concerning human salvation, righteous behavior, and the larger purpose of life" (670) at this time. The Scientific Revolution offered more globally than did other aspects of European culture, such as Christianity, democracy, socialism, or literature.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 14: Economic Transformations

Commerce In People: The Atlantic Slave Trade The Atlantic slave trade impacted the early modern era so greatly that its commercial ties contributed to a global next of exchange. The Atlantic slave trade is the most recent owning and exchange of human beings that existed on a large scale. Between 1500 and 1866, “this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slave” (Strayer, 620). The slave trade added African descent into the European and Native American mix of the Americas. Slavery came in many forms, because before the 1500, the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean basins were where most of the Old World slave trade occurred. This means that the slavery practices that grew in the Americas varied greatly from the Old World practices. The first way was the huge size of...
Read more

Chapter 23 Capitalism and Culture Since 1945

Globalization, to most people, is referring to the acceleration in international economic transactions that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, the conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 created a set of agreements and institutions that laid the foundations for postwar globalization. Technology contributed to the acceleration as well. In the 1970s this type of economic globalization was known as neoliberalism. Following the contractions of the 1930s a "reglobalization" occurred; money as well as goods increased global mobility in three ways. The fist was foreign direct investments. The second was short-term movement of capital. The third forms of money movement involved the personal funds of individuals. Central to this was the global businesses known as transnational corporations (TNCs), which produced goods or delivered services simultaneously in many countries. There were also new patterns of human migration that occurred ...
Read more

Chapter 16: Atlantic Revolutions, Global Echoes(Introduction To Part Five and First Two Section)

I found the Introduction to part five, The European Moment In World History, interesting because it discusses European advancement in a way that in not Eurocentric. It talks about the "long nineteenth century" (Strayer 689), which lasted from 1750 to 1914. This time period saw the creation of "modern" human society that emerged from the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions. The long nineteenth century also saw the influential power of these new modern societies. This was also the beginning of a new era called the Anthropocene or the age of man. This is because humans had an increasing impact on the environment and rapidly reshaped the planet. Since the Europeans gained so much power they rewrote geography and history, placing themselves at the center. This section also explained how it was going to avoid an Eurocentric view. First, is to remind the readers that the European movement occurred only recently and it was brief; other countries around the world ...
Read more