History Lessons

Imagine you are an 8th grader in a so-called Honors class at an urban school that has seen much better days (the wealthy are now two towns over in their flight from the hey-day of your district and eyeing ways to make their colonies in some previously rural areas even further out.  Schools will need to be built.  Teachers will need to commute). 

You don't know any of this, of course, because you don't know anything about how the adult world works... Also, all but seven of you fall into three broad camps 1) girls want to mope around and then self-medicate with gossip or K-pop bullshit or 2) boys who are possessed by their gamer memes (or perhaps memes downwind of gamer means; I don't give a shit) and will talk across the room at any point with argument about how your "friends" are trash at either basketball or a video game...  (again, I don't give a shit about the specifics; I just wish you'd shut the fuck up) and 3) those who won't work now, but will try to cheat later.  (Don't get me wrong -- the other two groups often do that too.  This group just does it quietly).

You probably care about your grade.  This is honors, after all.  But you have no idea how to show anyone basic decency, let alone respect. You're going to whine down the road and then do whatever bare minimum the teacher lays out for you.

Your teacher, who is clearly often very angry with the class, gives you the following... on paper... 

Why can't it be on google slides?  Why is all of it full sentences?... Why the FUCK is it in full paragraphs? This asshole really wants me to takes notes over this? 

And here's what that bastard hands you. He claims he wrote it himself.  I bet he just printed out something from ChatGPT.

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1800-1850 Background. 

"IS THIS ON THE TEST?" Yes, any of the ideas from this document can end up on the test. 

Now, the test will be open note -- but no ipads nor can you have this out... But while you are reading this, you can underline things, make highlights, that kind of thing: just make sure you transfer the important information to notes on a separate sheet of paper. 

 

In retrospect, I wish I had assigned the time period a little differently, maybe starting in 1789, and if I am going to go that far, I could just as well have started in 1776, with our American Revolution. 

Because, if you think about it, it's kind of weird to start talking about history anywhere other than the earliest records we have, as anything you say has something that came before it. But when it comes to 1800 there are three broad patterns that were revolutionizing the West -- here meaning Europe and the United States -- that make this a pretty good place to start... It just happens that capturing 20 or 30 more years would help us trace how these developments started a little better. 

We can see all three of these patterns as revolutions of sorts. To give each of these a name we will call them 1. The Industrial Revolution 2. The Emotional Revolution 3. Political Revolutions. 

I. The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in England. Broadly speaking, two new things happened:

1. Machines of greater precision were developed and, for the first time, could be mass-produced.

 

2. Portable and concentrated energy—especially coal powering steam engines—was harnessed, providing more power and freeing industry from dependence on areas with strong wind or flowing water. (For example, the Dutch windmills were used for industry, but they weren't as powerful or as portable as what England came up with in the Industrial Revolution). 

In time, the Industrial Revolution would change nearly every aspect of human life, and would do so for the entire world. Around 1800, however, the changes were mostly happening in England. 

The railroads would start to move goods and people at a faster speed than had ever occurred in history up to that point. Cars, i.e. automobiles, would only happen about a hundred years later. 

More people would end up living in cities, though those early conditions in cities were crowded, polluted, and gave terrible working conditions for the vast majority of people. To follow this trend -- what is called urbanization-- it would be about a hundred years until the majority of people in the United States lived in cities. And following the trend even further, the United Nations estimated that around 2008 is when the majority of human beings on earth lived in cities. 

In other words, all through history up until approximately NOW more people have lived in the country than in the city... And the trends that started all of this began with the Industrial Revolution in England. 

II. The Emotional Revolution (Revolutions?). 

To introduce this revolution, I am going to go back in time to Shakespeare for a moment. In "Romeo and Juliet," the reason why Juliet feels like she has to escape is because her father is telling her that she has to marry someone she doesn't want to (in fact, by then she had already married Romeo in secret... but that's another story for another time). In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," likewise, a character named Hermia is trying to run away because her father told her to marry someone she doesn't want to marry. In fact, the notion of the father being able to arrange who their daughter will marry shows up in the plot of 10 of Shakespeare's plays, a little over a fourth of the plays. 

Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616, about 200 years before the time period we are researching (and, of course, we in turn live about 200 years after the time that we are researching). The key point here is that marriage used to be decided by families, particularly fathers, not the people choosing to get married. (The people getting married could be asked for their input, but they were not the ones to decide). 

And it was only around 1800 that this notion of "let the couple decide" was solidified as a social ideal in the West. With that said, the book my daughter is named after, Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813, has a character who believes Mr. Darcy should have to marry her daughter because of an agreement she had made with his mom... when Darcy and the girl in question were infants.

So not only is Pride and Prejudice a timeless love story because of how it is told, it is a great document showing the emotional revolution (or revolutions). It was a revolution towards individuality in taste and away from community, duty, and following authority. 

The emotional revolution is often called the "Romantic Revolution," and I really wish it wasn't, but that is the term you will see in textbooks, so I feel obligated to share it. 

Why do I not like the term "Romantic" for this shift in sensibilities? 

1. The word romance now means things like dating and kissing and such, so using the term a different way just causes unnecessary confusion.  

2. The writers we have assigned as "Romantic" represent several different movements, and many would not have liked to have been grouped together. 

3. While the Germans had a movement called Romantic (actually Romantik/Romantisch in German), the English did not use that term to refer to a movement; it was only afterwards that these diverse authors all got called by the same label. 

III. Political Revolutions.

I am going to leave the politics mostly to your history classes, both present and future, but the combination of the American Revolution and the French Revolution (started in 1789) left intellectuals with the notion that ideas could be used to transform societies, which is not what people thought during the Roman Empire, during the Medieval times that followed, or even during much of the early Renaissance.

 

This is why it is incorrect to say Shakespeare had "progressive" ideas; during Shakespeare's time it wasn't thought that society could progress. Instead, it was more of a matter of having good or bad monarchs, or failing that, different ways the problem of human sin could be dealt with. 

It is more accurate to say that Shakespeare was able to imagine a great deal of different perspectives, and was able to write scenarios where characters found creative ways to make their own lives better, even if that meant bending or breaking rules. But there is no notion of social reform in Shakespeare. Keep in mind that around the time Shakespeare first came to London (as Shakespeare grew up in a country town) we have historical records of the heads of Catholics cut off and put on display on the roads as a warning to those who would have the wrong beliefs.  And be aware that Shakespeare's older relatives had been Catholic before such a thing became illegal. In other words, Shakespeare did not live in a free society.  

When our "Founding Fathers" wrote the Constitution (1787), they were operating under the belief that you could design a society from scratch. And when the French Revolution occurred in 1789, their changes were even more drastic. By 1800, the chaos had led to Napoleon, a soldier who had guided the French forces to some key victories, to becoming a military dictator. While this began to plant the seeds of doubt in the success and stability of political revolutions, the fact remained that it was clear that society could be changed, even redesigned. And many of the writers we are looking at believed that in this era of experimentation with society itself art could also reshape the world.

And it was in this context that Percy Shelley, the poet and husband of Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein) would write: 

"poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

 

To him, poets had a power to shape society's values, morals and thoughts through their art, and that in turn would change the world.