To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. -Friedrich Nietzsche 

After reading the Birth of Modern Thought you should understand:

• The themes of romantic writers and how they responded to the Industrial Revolution and to various political revolutions.

• The developments in the natural sciences such as quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity undermined the primacy of Newtonian physics as an objective description of nature.

• The dominance of scientific thought in this era.

• The conflict between church and state, particularly over education.

• The themes of realist and materialist artists and how their attitudes influenced art and literature as painters and writers depicted the lives of ordinary people and drew attention to social problems.

• The impact of psychoanalysis, and the new physics on intellectual life.

• The rise of nationalistically inspired racism and the resurgence of Antisemitism.

Textbook Reading Sections
Romanticism p. 308- 318
Birth of Modern Thought p.443- 464

Primary Readings 

• Charles Darwin’s Christian Critics p 448 - 449
      Samuel Wilberforce Disputes Darwin’s Claims
      J.H. Gladstone Defends the Theory of Evolution (1872)

• Popular Religion and Pilgrimage (image) p. 451

Secondary Readings

• The Birth of Science Fiction p. 798

Outside Primary Readings

• T.H. Huxley Criticizes Evolutionary Ethics

• Leo XIII Considers the Social Question in European Politics

• Alexis de Tocqueville Forecasts The Danger of Gobineau’s Racial Thought 

• Herzl Calls For a Jewish State

• Virginia Woolf Urges Women To Write

Secondary Supportive Documents

Separate Handout Article-  The Romantic Era,  Steven Kreis, The History Guide,  July 20, 2014 

Potential LEQ Questions

• To what extent did Romanticism challenge Enlightenment views of human beings and the natural world and how did this challenge illustrate changes between the Enlightenment and Romantic views of the relationship between God and the individual?

• Discuss the ways European Jews were affected by, and responded to, liberalism, nationalism, and antisemitism in the 19th century.

• To what extent did Marx and Freud each challenge the nineteenth-century liberal belief in rationality and progress?

• To what extent and in what ways did intellectual developments in Europe in the period 1880-1920 undermine confidence in human rationality and in a well-ordered, dependable universe?