- summarized by IvanF @ http://support.mycrowsoft.com 2000 -

 Y2kk Update (2000): "Okay dokay, if anyone actually is reading this overview of the entire Modern Western Civilization course, it probably means you're one of those who get a kick out of finding out crap info on the internet, printing it, and showing off to your friends how smart you are. Or there is a chance that you could actually be looking for info for the good of yourself, but if you're like me, then you just end up using it to win oral debates over the so-called facts of history. So let me make something clear for all those Y2kk fans out there: history is not set in stone. Who knows if a single word I type in this overview actually happened in history? Unless we are actually there to see the events happen, I suggest you don't go and brag about how your opinion on history is right and others is wrong. I've tried that this year with an unsuccessful debate over the outcome of the Hundred Years' War. Heck, I even spelled the Hundred Years' War wrong on the board. Go figure: in Grade 7, I was feeling all cocky and arrogant about how I could do so-called High School Algebra easily, but I was only hiding how crappy I was in spelling. Sure, I bragged to others how I could spell "lieutenant" properly, but what good is that if I keep spelling the word, "while", wrong or something like that?

The Enlightenment: When Science Actually Turned Smart

-there was a guy called Giambattista Vica or something from Italy in the 18^th century, and he contributed to the Enlightenment's New Science or whatever it's called around 1725; he did not see history as cyclical like Machivelli the Prince did around the same time I think, and he spent his days trying to find the "universal laws of history"
-Giam eventually went out one day and decided that humanity evolves and reaches maturity through oppression, pain, and conflict - oh joy, like we didn’t already know that; my buddy Mark sums that up in one term: "life sucks" (not that I believe that, though - I just think Mark wasn't held enough or was held too much by his mommy…)
-Giam has a famous quote about how civilization progresses by building on the experiences of previous cultures: "Men must first feel necessity, then look to utility, next to attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, then grow dissolute in luxury, & finally go mad" yadda yadda yadda… I don't really have a clue what he's saying, but people who memorize he quote and boast it to me probably do… I think…
-the enlightenment was a time when everyone was looking for new ways of learning, and new ways of thinking; it was a period of reform, a period of science and commerce and economic change, and I'm starting to sound like a boring text-book or something… uggh… anyhew, people at this time were actually starting to go to school, and the majority for the first time in a thousand years actually knew how to read and write, and probably spell a lot better than I can (thank God for spell checks!)
-the enlightenment involved a rise in nationalism, and kinda a rise in violence; the monarchy and the Church began to lose their grip on the peasants, and the mobs began to rise in power; blah blah blah, someone is thinking right now, because I know that I do for info that I already know; yes, whoever is reading this already knows what the enlightenment is, but all because we knew it once doesn't mean we shouldn't remind ourselves of it again; I'm probably just talking to myself, but whenever I read facts I already know, I shrug it off and essentially boast how I already learned it all - and I hope noone out there is doing the same, because should it really matter when you learn something?… heh… now I probably sound like a smart Alec trying to act like a parent, but honestly - I'm just trying to curb my own arrogance…
-moving along, the Italian poet, Francesco Petrarca, declared that the difference between the middle ages and the Renaissance was that the dark ages caused a decline in cultural greatness, while the modern age of the time was renewing it
-I have no clue what this means, but maybe you can figure it out: in the enlightenment, people chose the "new philosophy" over natural philosophy

Y2kk Update (2000): "Well, you're might be wondering why I sound so bitter this good morn. Well, the date today is December 27^th, 2000, and if you check back in the December and November archives of my http://office.mycrowsoft.com site, you'll find that I'm not an avid fan of the trivia team possee that was in my room in the library. I still have a lot of built up hatred at myself for being too arrogant to let myself be arrogant in that room where you prove your intelligence. Just the other day, I was being criticized for how I never answer questions properly, and that no-one knows how smart I really am. Good. That was my plan: to not look smart, and thereby not look arrogant. I've done that my entire life after criticizing so many into tears… Well, too bad my plan has backfired: although I don't look like a complete smart ass, everyone is annoyed at me because they know I'm smart. They know I'm faking it, and so that's my legacy at high school: to not go out as a guy just trying to be nice, but as an annoying, geekish prick that tries to hard to be funny… Then again, maybe I'm just annoyed at myself. Afterall, this is the Christmas season, the time of suicide and joy, and besides - I always act a little extra weird at Christmas…"

-here's a list of 3 major guys during the scientific revolution: Nicolas Copernicus, Galilei Galileo, and Sir Isaac Newton ; I still shudder at the times I bragged in elementary school about knowing who Galileo was, because what real use is knowledge if I'm not using it to help society?
-Copernicus challenged the cosmology of the Middle Ages when he published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies; he argued that the Ptolemaic system or something involving the concept of ever larger circles, was the wrong model for the universe; in normal person terms, he debated that the earth was not the centre of the universe
-instead, he debated that his theory that the universe was heliocentric, with the sun as the middle of the universe, was accurate; and you see? He was right when he argued that the earth was not the centre, but his arrogance then took over and today, he looks sorta like an idiot for arguing so adamantly that he was right - I wish I could learn from his example…
-anyhew, Copernicus then showed that the earth rotated on its axis like every other planet, and therefore the earth wasn't really special amongst the stars; however, he did accept the idea at the time that circular motion was the "true" motion, whatever that means
-Copernicus made his discoveries in astronomy when he was asked by the Pope to revise the Julian Calendar; his new calendar, the Gregorian Calendar, was released in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII
-Galileo is famous for making the first real telescope to watch the stars, which he used to make the startling discovery that the planet Jupiter had moons of its own; he also observed that the Sun was not constant like believed, but rather had little spots that changed; and the moon actually had mountains, which was proof to him that the universe was heliocentric
-however, the Church didn't like his challenging of Church held principles that the earth was the centre of everything, so they brought him to court to denounce him as a blasphemer; Galileo defended himself by saying the Bible did not have just one meaning, but that it was open to interpretation; but alas, poor Galileo was brought before the Inquisition and was accused of holding a treasonable false "doctrine", and he was forced to admit publicly that he was wrong; however, this did not stop him from making the little hypothesis that bodies in motion keep moving until something tries to stop them, which is the modern idea of friction and inertia and stuff; if you want to read something Galileo did, he published something called The Dialogue which I've never heard of, but now you have; he was excommunicated by Pope Urban VIII and I have no clue what happened to him after that except that he published a renunciation of his theories; he died on January 8, 1642 and for almost a year, his body remained unburied in the basement of a Church; the Pope of 1835 asked for forgiveness for Copernicus' trial, but Galileo wasn't pardoned until Pope John Paul II in February of 2000 made apologizes for a whole bunch of Church mistakes
-Isaac Newton, unlike Galileo or Copernicus before him, was praised for his scientific efforts; he published Principia Mathematica which was math about natural philosophy; he gave England the process of synthesis, which we're still using today, I guess; when in his twenties, he developed the theory of gravity that claimed planets moved according to a pull from the Sun, and all this could be calculated through the math he invested: Calculus
-uggh… we've all heard at least one person in our lives who has bragged that they knew Newton invested Calculus… What drives someone to point this little trivia answer out? I feel that I do it to reassure myself that I know something someone else does not, and if they do know it, don't we feel a little weird when they answer back?… But I'll get into my theories on the origin of internal selfishness sometime later…
-Newton spent his time finding links between Galileo's and someone called Kepler and their laws; he then deduced that his principle of gravity also held people to the round earth; Newton was also a theologian, and saw the world as a machine that God welded together in perfect fashion; he believed in Dualism which is the same as Creationism today: God did not do everything, but planned everything out and let it happen through random events we call evolution
-Newton also believed that crystals covered every planet's atmosphere and that everyone was linked to, which reminds me of the theories of the Collective Unconscious that you can read in my English OA notes, but you can probably see why history books leave this fact out…
-so, to sum the note up, people once believed the universe was geocentric with the earth in the middle; Aristotle and Ptolemy were famous for saying everything rotated around the world; the middle ages concluded that the planets did not fall onto the flat earth because angels were holding them up; and people were arrogant like today, and believed that God held earth and her people close to his bosom
-but Copernicus and Galileo brought in the theories of Heliocentric stuff, and Newton showed that everything could be calculated with math… well, everything until Einstein invested Quantum Mechanics and atomic probability, but I'm stop bragging about my useless trivia stuff now…

Y2kk Update (2000): "I'll take the time here to remind myself how much I loved astronomy in the past. When I was in Grade 4, I could list for you every Space Shuttle, every Russian rocket, and every man who walked on the moon in the order they stepped on it (I love thou, Buzz Aldrin!). I did projects on Alpha, which used to be the name of the International Space Station. I dreamt of Planet X, and I was fascinated by how Neptune will soon be the last planet in our solar system because of its weird orbit, and that Pluto was probably its moon at some time. I even knew most of those stupid constellations in the sky, and the names of every comet that would whiz by… But all that info is lost, because I got bored of bragging to my teachers how much I knew. I never used that info to help someone - it was only to feed my ego, and make me feel smarter than the teacher. So now I have no clue what's going on in space besides that neutrino and dark matter stuff we're finding now, so did it really help to study all that useless space trivia? Maybe - it helped me develop my memory, but nothing more. Because now I just pity myself for being so arrogantly naïve back then, and so arrogantly naïve right now for thinking I'm smarter than I was before… I'm not smarter - I'm just a little changed…"

-well, here's a list of some other brainers of the Scientific Revolution: Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) saw that planets moved as if they were in orbit, and tried to find a compromise between the Copernicus and Ptolemaic ideas; Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) discovered that planets orbit the Sun in ellipses and planets seemed to move faster if they were nearer to the Sun; Willebrord Snell (1591-1626) made up triangulation or something and discovered that sine law thingy we had to use a trillion times in Algebra class; Joseph Black (1728-1799) discovered carbon dioxide, found that gases can turn into solids or something, and made up the theory of latent heat which I don't seem to remember right now; William Gilbert (1540-1603) discovered static electricity and magnetism stuff; Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) invented the electric battery thingy and decomposed water; Gottfired Leibnitz (1646-1716), which I'm sure any Calculus student will remember, developed differential integral calculus and invented the first calculating machine; Leonhard Euler (I'm too lazy to write any more dates…) just discovered a load of Alegebra and Finite crap; Joseph Louis Lagrange found stuff on the flow of liquids and something about vibrating strings; Gaspard Monge specialized in 3d geometry; Francis Bacon (woo hoo! A name I actually heard once…) helped make the scientific method we use for labs in chemistry class and stuff; Rene Descartes was the father of modern philosophy, and did a lot of math stuff too; William Harvey discovered how blood circulates through our bodies; Thomas Sydenham was a doctor who thought medicine could only truly be taught at the bedside of a patient; Leopold Auenbregger made up a new diagnostic technique for patients; Rene Laennac invented the stethoscope; Robert Boyle made up Boyle's law about volume and pressure that we learn early in Physics class; Henry Cavendish discovered laws of electricity and hydrogen gas; Joseph Priestley helped discover oxygen; Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier did some explanations of fire, and proved the law of conservation of matter; Anton Van Leeuwenhoek is called the father of microbiology; and a guy called Linnaeus invented the system for classification of animals and plants and thingies
-and now that you've all skipped over all that useless trivia crap I just mentioned, I can now tell you my hands hurt like hell and my back is shriveling like cheese in a microwave or something… God, this orange chair I'm sitting on really sucks…
-in the field of anatomy, Andrews Versallias was a famous anatomist from Belgian and don't quote me on this one, but I think he wrote On the Structure of the Human Body, in which it was outlined that oxygen was being pumped with the blood, and mentioned that God's divine intervention was what was pumping our "vital spirits" or something
-William Harvey was thinking the same thing when he probably wrote On the Motion of the Heart and Blood of Animals which said God didn't pump our blood, but rather that our heart did
-Francis Bacon wrote Novum Organum I think, and graduated from Cambridge University at the age of 13; he was a master of empiricism, which was collecting info and making generalizations; he was an expert at induction which is like making a conclusion about one person, then making the same conclusion about everyone
-Rene Descartes said Cogito Ergo Sum ("I think therefore I am"); he was master at deduction, which made conclusions about everyone as a whole and then said it applied to each person; for instance, he deduced that in order to think, someone must exist first ; and just for the useless trivia book, he tutored the Queen of Swedan

Y2kk Update (2000): "Hi, it's me again. Most of you are probably sick of my little MTV like info pop-ups, but I was just reminded of my stupidity back in Grade 10. In class, I described how in Grade 8, I came to the realization that "I think, therefore I always am" which is outlined in my essay about the Collective Unconscious. However, I made the mistake of saying that Sigmund Freud said "I think, therefore I am". And first of all, must people really correct me in front of the class? I know it makes them feel smarter than me when I make a mistake, but… Well, I'm still pissed at myself for even trying to remember who said that quote. Does it really matter who said it, because everyone knows what it means. I've always hated using quotes in my life. It's just laziness - instead of proving the reasons why we think something is right, we just prove it by saying some big guy in history said the same thing. And so what? All because someone else thought the same thing, doesn't mean we understand what you're saying. But then the person I'm debating would just shrug me off, and leave knowing he's smart enough to memorize a name from history and a little line… God, I sound whiny…"

-with all my annoying whining aside, let's move onto the idea of Absolutism during the enlightenment; absolutism was a part of classicism (which admired the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations); absolutism admired the Roman Empire's stability, order, and fixes standards; supporters of this idea wanted eternal truths that could never be broken
-absolutists believed a good life was one where everyone had a set rules for behaviour and stable institutions; there would be a sense of etiquette, and the idea of all men being equal would not be true because absolutism believed that you must act like the class you were born into
-one of the greatest absolutist rulers, King Louis XIV of France, introduced a forced national language and helped develop a national economy; Louis, le roi soleil's (the Sun King) ideas of national wealth and a national armed force was copied by lesser rulers throughout Europe
-Louis appointed intendants and civil servants to positions that were entirely dependant on the authority of the monarchy, like tax collection and governors of regions; Louis collected taille (land) taxes and put indirect taxes on salt, tobacco, wine, and stuff like that; he introduced a head tax or something, and gave power to his representatives to overrule the authority of local governments
-Louis worked with the economic mininster , Jean Baptiste Colbert, to get more revenues and therefore more military crap; Colbert helped build roads, canals, new industries like glass, tapestries, silk, and stuff like that instead of importing it
-Louis wanted to have just one religion in France, so he revoked the Edict of Nantes from 1598 that gave Protestant Huguenots protection from the law; it didn't take long until most of those Huguenot people emigrated to England
-Louis didn't like the mobs in Paris because of bad childhood experiences, so he built the Palace of Versailles for himself… and geez, my grammar is getting worse as these notes go on… anyhew, he hired the best architects in the country to help build something grander than the pyramids of Egypt; many of the rooms in the palace are named after Roman Gods and goddesses like Venus, Mercury, and Apollo; it has a grand hall of Venetian mirrors that stretched 73 metres or something
-because of Louis, the old nobility lost control of its feudal like military and even were forced to pay taxes; he changed the people from giving loyalty to the ruler to giving loyalty to the ruling institution; his motto was Ne pluribus impar, which means none is his equal (he compared himself to Emperor Augustus a lot, me thinks); some claim he used to say l'ete c'est moi, which means he is the state, but there's no real proof or blah blah that he said this
-Louis believed that a state must expand in order to prosper, and after realizing that the Coalition of the Dutch, English, and Swedes were more powerful than France, he invaded Austria in 1688 in what is called the War of the League of Augsburg unless I spelled it wrong… in 1686, Austria was allied with Holland, Swedan, and Spain, and England joined the fight in 1689
-this didn't go very well for France, and in 1697, they signed the Treaty of Ryswick which forced Louis to recognize William the Orange as king of England… and yes, we all know there is no word yet in the English language that rhymes with orange (you won't believe how many in class brag how they know this fact…); William was a Dutch prince who had beaten the pro-Frenchie James II to the throne of England
-Charles II was the last Hapsburg ruler of Spain because he had no heirs, so Louis decided that Spain should be inherited by his grandson; this led to the War of Spanish Succession in which Willaim III of England formed the Grand Alliance of Holland, England, and Austria
-this was followed by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 which forced France to never be united with Spain; Spain was then stupid enough to give up Gibralter and Minorca or something to England, and give a lot of possession crap to Italy and Austria
-what was really important was that Spain gave up the asiento or something to England, which controlled the slave trade in Spanish America; France then gave two colonies in the Americas to England: NewFoundland and Acadia, and recognized English control over Hudson's Bay; Louis died in 1715, and from that point on, France was never as large as it used to be
-and what was the whole point of the scientific revolution? Britain and France conquered the world thanks to their astronomical discoveries helping their ship navigation; their math led to inventions like map-making, gunnery, and better medical thingies like the stethoscope
-humanity now realized that they were not the centre of the universe, and people started to doubt faith because of science; people started to believe more in themselves and in human progress than in prophecies; basically, the enlightenment paved the way for the industrial revolution
-people finally started to question the authenticity of authority, and whether having a cruel prince or king on the throne should be tolerable or not; people lost some of old tradition in exchange for order, stability, and etiquette
-people became proud of modernization, and nationalism began to rise
-it saw the rise of absolutism, which were kings thought to have divine authority or blah blah blah, I know I already went through this, but even though it annoys our arrogance, it shouldn't be wrong to remind someone or something
-courts finally completely replaced the so-called barbaric trial by ordeal, and income taxes were introduced; trade began to focus overseas outside of places like Genoa and Pisa and over to China and India, where the British basically took over everything that had opium; navies were created for really the first time (unless you look up that cool Spanish Armada on the internet); tariffs were introduced to protect businesses, and companies like the East India Company were formed
-national armies replaced feudal ones, and King Louis ruled with an iron fist, forcing all laws to only be passed if he liked them and thus deprived the nobility of their former control; in 1682, Louis even made a law that stripped the Church in France of all its power; however, after the Sun King's death in 1715, his country was left with such a huge debt of which France was never to fully recover
-authority proclaimed their divine right through bible quotes they would pay clerks to find for them; they even gave tax breaks and stuff like that to Protestants who would convert to Catholicism, which doesn't sound really good, but I'll get into a Church debate later
-the enlightenment gave rise to a public awareness of freedom, rights, equality, and blah blah blah, and philosophers began debating over what should the relationship be between the authority and its people
-there were several men during the enlightenment that stood out because of their demand for human rights; Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan, if that's how you spell it, which rejected the idea of divine right and bloodlines; be believed politics should be based on logic and rational thought and not traditional crap, but thought people were too stupid and panicky to be trusted, and thus a monarchy was not bad; he argued the government was to preserve the life, society, and property of its citizens, and that all men are equal under this great nation… sniff, sniff - these words may make me groan today, but they were revolutionary back then; Hobbes took a page out of my book and thought that government was simply there to protect the public from their own selfishness; without government, people would kill each other over food and money; though Hobbes thought democracy would never work because politicians would kill each other for power, he was the one who coined the phrase "a voice for the people", so what did Hobbes really want? A monarchy that actually cared for the people like God would
-John Locke made up philosophies based on how our senses are affected by environment; he wrote Two Treatises of Government which argued that rationalism was cool, but tradition should be preserved too or something; Locke wanted to give power to the people, but not cause chaos like it eventually would in the French Revolution; Locke debated that humans have natural rights, like life, liberty, property, and you might as well stick into there the pursuit of happiness; unlike Hobbes, Locke wanted a democracy because he couldn't stand how "divine right" was tricking all the people; Locke is also famous in the feminist book because he was basically the only one at the time that thought women deserved to have equal rights like a man; as long as a person had a logical brain, they deserved equal rights
-Baron Charles de Montesquieu didn't just have a really long, French name; he went on his ways determining what the roles of law and government should be in the world; he declared that there were 3 types of governments: republics like Rome once was, monarchies, and something called despotism (I have no idea what it means, but it has something to do with Empires); Montesquieu wanted a balance between the three, so every little person could be happy with their government; he loved the English's system of a monarch limited by its barons or whatever they had at the time (when the heck did English steal the Parliament system from France anyhew?)
-then comes Jean Jacques Rousseau, who wrote The Social Contract, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, and something called Emile; he commented that "mean was born free, and everywhere he is in chains"; he wanted government to restore the public's lost sense of community, like I guess so many Grade 10s to 12s wish we could all become nature freaks living in massive families once again; Jean believed in the "general will", in which the will of the community counts more than the will of the few, but unlike Marx later on, Rousseau wanted a democracy because it would link the public with the authority; to understand Rousseau, you have to realize he had a really rough childhood, and ran away from home at the age of 16; if you read my philosophy online course like my upcoming English OA, I sort of prove a bit how a hatred of parents leads to a mistrust of an adult's parent: the government
-we know Francois Marie Arouet as the man known as Voltaire; he praised English liberty, and hated how his own country of France was ruled by absolutism; Voltaire's books were burned for his heresy, and Voltaire spent a whole bunch of his life in exile in Switzerland (a place that's somehow neutral in war, yet makes the best assault rifles on the face of the planet…); he wrote The Age of Louis XIV, which condemned his age of enlightenment, but accepted that it was better than the medieval ages; he even claimed Louis XIV helped make France into something as great as Rome, Athens, and Italy during the Renaissance
-Voltaire finally acknowledged that there was evil in the world when he was caught off-guard by an earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal in 1755; he then wrote Candide which starred an innocent character who saw so many vile things in life that his story became a satire of optimism; Voltaire finally settled in the middle and claimed "we must cultivate our own garden… Don't seek the Garden of Eden", but rather make our own
-Voltaire became famous for saying "ecrasez l'infame" which means something like crush the infamous thing"; he then published Treatise on Tolerance in which he condemned the hatred for religion and asked everyone for universal tolerance; though he viewed the public as uneducated barbarians, he viewed himself as their hero
-Voltaire was a hypochondriac, whatever that means, who got into a lot of crap for writing satires about the government system; I'm not sure if Voltaire wrote Hansel and Gratel, but I do know that story has a lot to do with the social issues at his time; and don't ask me how, but so did Little Red Riding Hood
-it was during this time that Denis Diderot and his other editors were making the Compendium of Knowledge, which was probably the first or something encyclopedia; despite being persecuted by the Church and the state for making them look kinda stupid, the 38-volume book set was released in 1772; Denis did the same thing as I try to do with my web-pages: he outlines the past as much as possible so maybe someone out there, in either his age or the next, could learn from it; I like Denis' comment about the fanaticism around the time, how it reminds him of superstition out of place - I should remember that if I become a fanatic about being smarter than the next guy again…

Y2kk Update (2000): "I guess I'll take this time to remind myself of something that happened in Grade 11. I was making a joke about communism, and then the girl behind me from Europe started to correct me, saying we North Americans have completely the wrong idea about communism. I corrected myself just to shut her up; I told her what socialism and Marxism was, and she just nodded and sat back down. But what do I really think of government? I try not to complain to it; I don't have enough money to help everyone in school, so why would I expect my government to be able to help everyone in the country? I don't hate my government; I had a nice childhood, so even though I have all these conspiracy theories of the government, I still trust that they are doing a reasonable job of trying to keep their jobs. I understand that they don't kiss our hands and feet because they don't know us; we all know how hard it is to love somebody that you've never seen. And I can here blast away at everyone who watches those TV shows asking for donations for Green Peace or something, how that is only a way of trying to replace your parents, but I'll get into that really offensive stuff in my English OA course. So I like democracy - I don't think anyone can complain if they don't vote. Before killing the system, try to use it for your own advantage. If everyone in the country voted, then I'd bet the communist party would get into power. There are so many poor people out there, but they hate their parents and government so much that they're too timid to use the system. And remember that politicians are people - not Gods. If you don't vote, why should they care about you? I think most of us would cater to those who are keeping our jobs, and if you love Green Peace out there, please don't say you would care about all if you were a politician, because most nature lovers like I once was (yes, I'm quite bitter at myself…) hate government too much to be seen as one. And as for politicians being dumb, keep in mind they went through 4 or more years of law school to get where they are. Most of us can't even pass the SAT to get into law school, for Christ's sake, so to me, if I complained about government stupidity, I would know I'm really just bitter at myself for not being smart enough. And my view on communism? I can't comment - I'm too bias on that one. My great-grandparents were decently rich landowners in China, but when the Civil War hit, they were forced into hiding because of the new communist dictatorship. Thanks to them, my grandpa is somewhat mentally disabled from his constant fear of death, my grandmother is dead because the crappy food she was fed caused her asthma to flare up and help result in a stroke, and my dad keeps blasting socialism everyday for stripping him of every toy and joy he had when he was young. Communism, as my dad puts it, sounds beautiful, but as long as men or something made from men are the ones in power, something is going to go wrong. And it's unbelievable how quickly socialist lovers claim they're not communist, and yet most of the principles they debate over to me are exactly the same - not just the idea of love, but the idea of centralized power. It's almost like the debater wishes he or she was the one ruling the government. But I'm sure any Green Peace lover will deny that charge… well, they'll deny it until they become part of the existentialism movement, but that's a story for the OAC English course…"

-a lot of French reforms were copied by the Prussian state to the east; Austria followed suit next, with Frederick II (well, I think Frederick was Austrian… no wait, he's supposed to be Prussian) and Joseph II changing around civil laws and criminal codes (and even though I won't mention her yet, Catherine the Great of Russia did a lot of good crap too); but even though the new constitutions talked about equality between all men and that not even the Church or nobility was outside of the justice system, serfdom still remained in certain areas; governments were reformed and centralized, and civil services were far more efficient all over Europe
-the tolerance for other religions was beginning to form despite the end of that Edict of Nantes thing or something earlier; Frederick II declared all Prussians were citizens, regardless of faith; Joseph II gave full, Austrian rights to Jews, Protestants, and Greek Orthodox people; they put the Church under state authority and turned the clergy into paid, government officials in a way; they paved the way for better hospitals, and better education, even for serfs
-Prussia developed an economy based on salt and coffee and tobacco and stuff, though he stayed clear of the laissez faire economic policy, in which government should not intervene with business; Frederick encouraged immigration, and loved his national army that quickly rose to be one of the strongest in Europe
-the enlightenment was the time of salons, which were pubs where certain hostesses would entertain their mail guests, whether middle or upper classed; they were sort of like today's coffee shops, in which we would complain about our lives, complain about governments, yadda yadda yadda
-etiquette replaced those buffet meals men loved to have in the middle ages; for a dinner part of 8, 3 courses were served with at least 7 dishes per course, and, well - that's a hell of a lot of food to me; instead of having women at one end of the table and men at the other, men and women now sat side by side in an alternating pattern thingy
-people were finally rich enough to have their own plates and silverware stuff, rather than all having to share the same cup; it was rude if people saw you go to the washroom so you'd have to slip away unnoticed; food really was improved during this age, since meat could now be served all year round thanks to preservatives, spices started streaming from the east, and the Earl of Sandwich invested the sandwich sometime in the 18^th century
-the role of women didn't change much; they were either housewives or low paid servants; sexual abuse was widespread, and if a girl got pregnant, their master would fire her and she'd be forced into prostitution to survive
-marriage changed a lot, because instead of marrying at 13 in fear of death, most married around 27 years old, while some didn't marry at all to pursue intellectual things; however, infant death rate was still really high thanks to such crap as the, uh, crap that was pooped onto the streets, spreading malaria and other crap diseases; children wore tight bonnets to protect from the cold, and something called wet nurses were hired often because breast feeding wasn't seen as being civilized enough
-though education was finally given to most 7 to 12 years by the 18^th century, because of poverty, most boys chose to be apprenticed by 12 and girls left to become whore servants, so to speak
-while the richer people read books and almanac thingies in salons, the poorer people watched blood sports down below like bull baiting where dogs would chew apart a tied bull, and cockfighting; sometimes kids would even roast cats on a pole for both dinner and delight
-and despite the better justice system thingy, jails remained horrible because there was no segregation or separation by sex or how disgusting was the crime; public hangings were still popular, and if people were really bored, about 30000 of them would show up with lemonade to see a famous criminal die; and after James Cook discovered Australia around the 1770s, England began sending their criminals away to that tribal island to rot and form a weird accent
-the enlightenment was also the time when satires of society and government became really popular, and people like William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift just couldn't get enough of writing wacky stories and articles that secretly made fun of institutions and stuff like that; Hogarth developed a form of art that used engravings, and made pieces of art as in series, sort of like how each page of a children's book has a drawing; Hogarth liked to criticize in his works politics, class structures of England, Parliament with its courts, and the Anglican Church; in his Rake's Progress, Hogarth makes fun of marriage, greed for wealth, and how stupid ambition sort of is; in Industry and Idleness, he makes fun of how people don't follow their morals, I guess; despite his criticism, Hogarth liked the merchant class and their values, and I'm not sure if he didn't make fun of them, but I do know he made fun of them the least
-Jonathan Swift was sort of insane and finished his life in a mental hospital that is now named after him; his satire of A Modest Proposal talked about how logical it is to sell babies for food to get rid of poverty, and I think he was sort of trying to point out how his fellow Irishmen may be using logic by trying to fix their economy, but was not using their hearts by destroying their traditions or something; we all know Swift's Gulliver's Travels (although I liked his modest proposal…), in which Gulliver, who represents the average fool, takes 4 voyages, and somehow, this story that I've never read or seen talks how greed and pride blinds men from their own faults; Swift believed humans were not rational, and tried to tell everyone that, believing that if everyone knew their limitations, society could function better; Jonathan talked about stuff like how to deal with power, resources, and how to communicate well with neighbours and crap like that; he argued that values should come before logic, and A Modest Proposal really made that came out when everyone in the class when we read that was disgusted by Swift's logic, yet was not disgusted with their own
-in the economy sector, mercantilism, in which governments used business to strengthen the state, was still more popular than laissez faire policies; the money of trade was mostly bullion metal stuff, and countries thought they could only get that crap through effective trading with other countries; one way of getting extra crap was to make colonies in useless places like America, and this imperialism was called something like commercial capitalism; when trade expanded, stuff like banks and joint-stock companies grew too into something that resembles a modern economy
-in the 18^th century, French philosophers called Physiocrats, led by Francois Quesnay and A.R.J. or something Turgot used natural science (and perhaps an early form of Darwinism) to think up the laissez faire system, in which commerce should be free of government intervention crap; Adam Smith, who's a big guy in my OA Economics class, wrote An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations and really supported the idea of businesses running themselves; he wanted to increase free trade and company competition because it would crate lower product prices, make more jobs, make supply by creating more market demand, blah blah blah, and make the world a more joy-joy place to live; he wanted government to go to hell and do what he thought it should only do: concentrate on: build an army, police the nation, administer justice, and shoot itself if it makes taxes; Smith's book is still used today as the premise of American and British capitalist philosophies
-I'll finish off the enlightenment with some crap about Catherine the Great (1729-1796) and Wolfgang Mozart; Czarina Catherine II of Russia was born in Germany, but took the throne after her impotent or something husband, Peter III; she had plenty of children though, after picking out 12 lovers without any regrets; she's said to be courageous since she was injected with one of the first smallpox vaccines by Dr. Thomas Dimsdale; when she was young, she was a beautiful brunette with blue eyes, but later on in life, got sort of fat and had swollen legs
-I don't know what she did for Russia, but I know how she died; on November 5th of 1796, her guards were wondering why she was taking so long to take a dump on her toilet, if they had toilets back then; so after 10 or so minutes, one of her guards checked her washroom and found her dead from a stroke (her second in her life); her body was embalmed; her son, Paul, ordered Peter III to be dug up and his body was beside Catherine's at her funeral; her tombstone was sealed with a white marble slab and a golden cross
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was the Austrian composer that everyone knows; though many considered his music to be of genius sort of level, he was always poor because of his bad business sense and because of his wife, Constanze's poor household skills; near his death, when he was dying from overwork and some sort of disease, Mozart reluctantly took on the project of the Magic Flute but soon loved it, and even sang one of its melodies of his deathbed

Y2kk Update (2000): "When I was small, my sister loved the piano. My mommy even paid her to teach me piano, but considering I've never listened to music and my hands, along with the rest of my body, are as uncoordinated as possible, the lessons didn't get very far. I can still play 3 blind mice, and my own version of chopsticks, but nothing more. I would never practice the stupid piano; I was either too jealous of my sister to compete, or I was still sick of her because she was my teacher. I was scarred for life from all instruments from that point on. And what happened to my sister? When she went to university, she dropped piano. She left her baby grand piano at home, and became one with the business freaks at Western University. And now she can barely play any kind of music on the piano at all. She was having trouble with Christmas carols the other day. Is that sad? No - we all forget useless stuff after a while. How many of us are actually going to remember a single name in this history online course?"

-anyhew, when I was young, I remember my sister watching a movie called Amadeus and I had no clue what it was; I don't recall much of it, but I do remember I got pretty freaked out when Mozart's competitor paid him to make a weird requiem or something while Mozart was dying; today, the only piece of classical music that I like is one of Mozart's requiems - I wonder if that movie had anything to do with it?
-well, in real life, no-one knows who showed up at Mozart's door late one night and asked him to write a requiem; around November 18, 1791, Mozart was in bed, writing the Requiem while suffering headaches, and fevers, and swellings, and crap like that; in the movie, Mozart's nemesis is helping Mozart write the Requiem when Amadeus dies, but in real life, all we know is that on December 5^th, Wolfgang fell into a coma and died at around 1am
-few people attended Mozart's funeral; his wife didn't show up because of grief, and I read something once about how the only one following his coffin was a small dog; Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave on the 7^th, and a monument to him was finally erected around his burial spot in 1859
-now onto that guy that sat with Mozart on his deathbed in the movie: his name was Antonio Salieri, a successful composer jealous of Mozart's skills, and Wolfgang suspected that he had been poisoned by him; Salieri attended Mozart's funeral in real life, and when in a mental hospital, made a full confession to the murder of Mozart which no-one in his age believed; however, though because of the movie, I like to think Mozart was murdered, doctors would suggest that he died of something of rheumatic origin or something when you analysis how sick Mozart was as a child
-and so wraps up chapter 1 of OA Modern Western History, so please keep on reading and I guess keep on bragging; you already made it this far, you might as well learn more to brag some more, and you probably hate me now for being so cynical, but in a way that's good, because I feel you can only hate the truth

OAC History: Modern Western Civilization, Part 2
- summarized by IvanF @ http://support.mycrowsoft.com 2000 -

Y2kk Update (2001): "Well, welcome to section deux of the OAC Modern Western European History course. This section deals mostly with the French Revolution we all know and love. You know, that little Reign of Terror time when the French tried to copy the actions of the Americans, but not really successfully? The French Revolution screwed them up so bad that it’s no wonder the French got pummeled in both World Wars. Okay, so maybe Napoleon had something to do with that later on, but that’s another unit, another time. I personally had an affinity for the French Revolution because I forced myself to do my OAC French ISU on that. You can check my http://office.mycrowsoft.com archives if you’re actually desperate enough to find out what happened during that presentation. And for the two of you who are actually interested in the history lesson of today, let the games begin."

Causes of the French Revolution

-we all know that for everything in life, there’s a cause and effect; in France around the Eve of their revolution, they started to hate absolutism, the poor peasants were becoming poorer and pissed, famine was spreading to a bunch of places, the pissed poor people hated paying tithe taxes and other annoying taxes like the one on salt, and the drought probably had something to do with it as well; immigration was also a factor, because more and more people kept moving to the cities where they became unemployed and pissed; more and more were getting pissed at the monarchy for their wars and refusal to change the price of bread or something
-I think we’d be pretty pissed if our country was completely put in debt by war and 70% of the money we earned went to the king; and what really pissed Frenchies off was that the nobility got tax exemptions and didn’t have to pay a cent or something; the 1787 drought led to rioting just for grain to feed their families; people were pissed at Louis and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette, who was known for wasting royal resources and stuff like that
-Louis IV was smart for limited the power of the parlementaires (lawyers and judges) so they wouldn’t try to take him out; Louis XVI was completely stupid for giving them practically full power over him, which they of course used to turn the public against him later on
-after refusing a bunch of proposed tax reforms, Louis XVI decided to play nice and summoned the Estates-General for a meeting in May of 1789; he asked the people to draw up their cahiers de doleances, or list of grievances (I would’ve spelled the thing right in French if I knew how to on my computer…)
-so this is how the dates go for what is called the Moderate Phase of the French Revolution: in May of 1788, Louis abolished the rights of parliament just so he could raise more taxes, and I think that action was called the May Edicts or something; on August 8, 1788, Louis summons the Estates General; he soon gets annoyed by a guy called Abbe Sieyes who calls for reform, so Louis lets the people make up their cahiers/lists of grievances; on June 17 of 1789, the Third Estate of that General thingy proclaims itself the National Assembly and on July 14^th, a Paris mob storms the fortress of Bastille, and what does Louis do after all this? He drinks a cockade of red, white, and blue (the tricolour of the Revolution), just because he thought the Paris mob people had no chance at success
-but as always, Louis predicted wrong, and the Radical Phase began; that summer was called the "Great Fear" or something because every city was being terrorized by mobs and riots and stuff like that; on August 26, the Assembly passed a very important document: the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (in French, I think that is les driots des hommes et des citoyens or something, but you can correct me if you can find me…), and I remember talking a lot about that in my OAC French presentation; well, just to rap up the Radical phase, a mob of women marched on Versailles on October 5, probably because that French Declaration sort of left them out in the cold; and on October 6^th, Louis XVI runs away to the Tuileries Palace in Paris
-even though the National Assembly abolished feudalism, the common peasant still felt helpless; riots were everywhere, stealing food and land, even from the Church, and people were very pissed that the Pope was losing so much power over France
-anyhew, I’m going to backtrack for a second now, and describe what each of the 3 Estates of the Etats-General were like; the first estate consisted of the clergy who supported the old regime, and thought it was just plain, great that the peasants were taxed for the good of the Church; the second estate consisted of about 200 000 noble people, either of swords (warriors or feudal Lords and knights like that) or robes (civil servants like those parliamentaires I talked about earlier) or the common noble guys like princes, dukes, counts, viscounts, and something called marquises; and the third estate was 27 million large, meaning it consisted of all those worthless peasants and somewhat important bourgeoisie
-basically, only the first and second estates had any say to the King, so 97% of France felt left out to rot in the gutters; Louis XVI was an idiot, I’m sure we all know, and it certainly didn’t help keep order in France when he kept giving more and more power to the nobles and clergy; in 1788, Louis and his finance minister Calonne called the assembly of Notables to give tax reforms to the people, but the first and second estates refused and the peasants weren’t exactly jumping for joy
-so I bet we’re all pissing in our pants, panting to find out what happened at the Estates General meeting; well, the 1^st and 2^nd estates were willing to start some tax reform, but that wasn’t good enough for the third, who wanted a new constitution formed; they wanted an end to the corruption in the government, and they wanted the Estates to vote by representation (before, each estate had 1 vote, so the 3^rd estate always lost 2 to 1); that Abbe Sieyes guy who wrote the book, What is the Third Estate?, wanted to strip privileges away from the nobles; and thinking that he was a genius, Louis gave in to many of the 3^rd estate’s demands, claiming they can now vote by estate; but there was still one problem: the reps of the third estate were mostly bourgeois, and therefore the peasants still didn’t really have any power or voice
-well, on June 17^th, 1789 as it stated above, the 3^rd Estate thought that they represented all of the French peasants so they renamed themselves the National Assembly, and Louis got so pissed that he kicked them out of the meeting hall; and the beginning of the revolution began with the Tennis Court Oath, in which the National Assembly met in secret in an indoor tennis court and promised to keep meeting there until a new constitution was announced
-in the storming of Bastille, the mayor of Paris was killed, the hall was captured, prisoners were released, and several soldiers were sort of left dead; then when Louis heard about what happened, he said those famous words, "It is a revolt", followed by Duc de Liancort or something’s more famous lines, "No, sire – it is a revolution"; Louis had no choice but to recognize the existence of the National Assembly, and combined all 3 Estates together so all the power would go to the bourgeois, thinking that it would appease the crowds

Cahiers de Doleances

-just because I know you’re all craving it, I’ve got a somewhat, sort list of the grievances at the 1788 Estates General meeting
-these are the grievances of the first estate: in terms of religion, they wanted to maintain the integrity of the Roman Catholic religion such as keeping all the feast days and Sunday as being special; the people didn’t really like the liberty movement going on in the world, and wanted instead for Rome to get more respect, devotion, and authority; in terms of the constitution, the clergy wanted a fairer monarchy that fights for love, respect, and happiness, and other wishful crap like that; for civil administration, they wanted reduced taxes but to keep most of their free privileges; they wanted an end to the public debt, and the wanted to curb the corruption in the tax collectors by separating the tax agents from their Estates or something
-they wanted to preserve Catholicism and make the people loyal to the monarchy; they believed in absolutism, but agreed that loans can be approved by the National Assembly
-the second estate wanted a set salary for the clergy and for sacraments to be more liberal by being administered freely; they liked the monarchy and wanted the legislative power to remain in Louis’ hands; they wanted to keep the voting by order process (each estate has one vote), but introduced the idea of a veto, where one estate can overrule the others; and they also were desperate enough to agree that taxes cannot be implemented with the legislative body agreeing on it
-as for the third estate, they liked the church but thought there should be a limit on how much land they own; they still believed in a monarchy at this time, but they wanted more power in parliament and wanted to vote by population; they wanted an end to unfair taxes like that one on salt, and for a standard tax to be taxed everyone, whether poor or not; they wanted education and medicare for all, and welfare if families needed it
-and if you want some more boring stuff, here’s some of the points under the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: men are born equal and free and distinctions between them are only based on how useful they are; every man has the rights of liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression; that the power resides in the nation as a whole, and not in a single person or group; the law can only forbid actions that injure society, and blah blah blah; it’s quite a copy of the American Declaration of Independence, but the Frenchies sure didn’t act the same as their North American counterparts
-and now for the better stuff: the end of the Revolution’s Moderate Phase: on June 19, 1790, the National Assembly, after moving into Paris, ended the tradition of hereditary nobility and stuff like that; on June 12, 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy is made, followed by Louis and the royal family unsuccessfully trying to flee to Varennes the night of June 20^th, 1791; on August 27^th, Austria and Prussia announce the Declaration of Pillnitz, which said that if Marie Antoinette or any member of the royal family of France was hurt, that they would intervene; and on September 3^rd, the National Constituent Assembly finalized the Constitution of 1791
-on April 20^th, Hitler’s and my birthday, 1792, France declares war on Austria, and Prussia joins Austria in beating the Frenchies to hell; on August 10^th, a Paris mob takes over the Tuileries and soon, the September Massacres begin which is a pleasant, little bloodbath of all the nobles; on September 21^st, 1793, the National Convention abolishes the monarchy, and France is declared a republic
-the National Assembly must’ve had the best time in hell as they reformed the Church and the government; with all Frechmen now equal, their property was now protected under the law; the Civil Constitution of the Clergy gave the Church’s land to the nation of France, and the priests not only were now paid by the state of France, but had to take an oath to them too
-after Louis was captured at Varennes, the Pope got pretty pissed off and condemned the revolution; many nobles left in what is called the émigré, which spelled itself properly thanks to Word97’s spellcheck; these nobles left for somewhere, and plotted to return to restore order back to the monarchy
-the people of European countries like England saw France’s new government as the future of the continent, while of course, the monarchies of these countries felt threatened and was determined to show that the liberty of France was doomed to failure; two books became popular during these revolutionary times: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, although I have no clue what either book is really about
-there were six main parts of the National Assembly of 1790; there were the Jacobins who wanted nothing less than a republic, the Girondins who wanted all of Europe to have liberte, egalite, and fraternite (liberty, equality, and brother-hood like quality crap); then in the middle were the Moderates and the Marsh, who were upper bourgeois who just wanted some power in parliament; there were the Feuillants who liked the Constitution of 1791, and then there were the nobles who wanted the monarchy to be restored to almost its full power
-but not everyone was impressed with the new government; after the Jacobins and Girondins declared war on all the enemies of liberty (which was basically all of Europe, including Britain, Austria, and Russia), Parisians revolted, took over Paris, captured the king, and ordered a new constitution to be drawn up, and so begins the peasants’ days in power known as the Radical Phase (1792-1794)

The Radical Phase

-on January 21^st, 1793, Louis is executed by a guillotine; February 23^rd, food riots happen all over Paris; on March 10^th, the Jacobins felt threatened and set up the Revolutionary Tribunal, which was sort of like a Inquisition that killed and jailed anyone who they thought was against the Revolution or the new government; then on April 6^th, the Jacobins try to appease the people by establishing the Committee of Public Safety which ended slavery, gave women the right to divorce, and stuff like that
-on May 21^st, Robespierre, leader of the Jacobins and with the nickname of Incorruptible, decides to get rid of the Girondins, and begins the Reign of Terror in which powerful figures such as Marat and Charlotte Corday were assassinated in cute, little places like bath-tubs
-on August 23^rd, conscription is enforced and a whole bunch of Frenchmen lose their rights in order to fight off whoever the government thinks is the enemy of the new government; on September 17^th, the Law of Suspects was made, in which anyone even suspected of crime was arrested on the spot; September 29^th, the Jacobins actually did something that the people liked and introduced the Law of General Maximum, which put a price ceiling on bread to make it affordable
-on October 16^th, the terror continued with the execution of Marie Antoinette; on October 31^st, the Girondins were executed; on April 5^th of 1794, some guy named Danton and his followers were executed as well, and finally the Reign of Terror ends on July 28^th, when Robespierre, his followers, and his Republic of Virtues are all executed, so to speak
-during the Reign of Terror, 12000 died in prison and that same amount died in the protests; in total, 40000 died in some happily gruesome way or another
-and by the way, when Rebespierre was captured, he tried to commit suicide but somehow blotched that up by striking his jaw instead of his brain; he was tortured after as a punishment for being so damn stupid
-but then a light came shining out of some sort of tunne; during the Thermidorian Phase; after Robespierre’s execution, émigrés begin to return and freedom of the press and stuff like that was finally restored; they abolished the made up religion of the supreme being (in which the Jacobins even made up their own calendar) and thousands of prisoners were released; this didn’t really help much, though, considering the suicide rate was at its highest ever, famines were everywhere, and bread was still raising in price from all the droughts
-France finally made peace with Prussia, Holland, and Spain in the spring of 1795; in the May of that day, starvation was rampant and the Sans-Caullottes march began, in which the peasants demanded that the National Convention reintroduce the bread and the constitution of 1793 or something
-on August 22^nd, the Constitution of 795 was announced, and non October 6^th, a happy little newbie called Napoleon defeats a royalist riot in Paris and helps give the government over to the Directory; well, only until November 9^th of 1799, when he overthrows the National Convention in a coup d’etat, but that’s a story for another day
-so let’s backtrack a bit to finish off this history lesson; after Louis was tried for treason and executed, there was a power struggle between the Jacobins and the Girondins, which wasn’t really settled until the arrival of Maximilien de Robespierre; he was nicknamed Incorruptible because he would not change his mind on how France should be a republic; after getting power in the National Assembly, he suspended the Constitution with his emergency decrees and by setting up the Committees of Public Safety and General Security for the people’s own good, me guess; he acted like a cute, little dictator by taking over law courts, taking control over the grain supply and feeding it to the army and stuff like that
-he really pissed people off with his conscripting / drafting thing called lavee en masse, which I can’t spell properly because I can’t do accents in MsWord97 yet (except if I copy and paste the e from émigré, but I’m too lazy for that)
-Robespierre’s Republic of Virtue had a new calendar that said 1792 was the first year ever or something; they had a new religion too, which demanded conformity in what people wore, read, and sang; the education system was used for propaganda, and everyone was called citizen/citoyen (I thought it was cool how all people were addressed with "tu" which was informal instead of the formal "vous"); the Jacobins were happily written into history as being the first government that stood for liberty while starting up a totalitarian regime where freedom doesn’t exist; they killed up to 18000 with the guillotine, not including Robespierre, of course
-so France had by then two revolutions: one to overthrow the monarchy, and one to overthrow the Jacobins, so now the Directory and the Thermodians, if that’s how you spell it, came into power; it was ruled by the bourgeois who never really sided with the Jacobins, and they made a new constitution in 1795 known as the Rule of the Directory
-France was governed mostly by 5 top Directors who were chosen from two parties of parliament, to make sure no single party like the Jacobins came into power and turned into a group of tyrants; however, the new system was immediately rejected by royalists, clergy loyal to Rome, and those pesky republican extremists that just wouldn’t go away
-so what happened after that? Well, the Party of Order started up, in which people were sick of republican extremists, royalists, and the inept government that was ruling over the fallen country of France; they wanted partial equality, but still a distinction between nobility and the peasant class; so this party wanted a strong general to step up to the plate and make France a force again, and, well – I wonder if it was a good thing or a bad thing to have picked Napoleon Bonaparte for that role?…

OAC History: Modern Western Civilization, Part 3
- summarized by IvanF @ http://support.mycrowsoft.com 2001 -

 Y2kk Update (2001): "Okay dokay, after a year of complete procrastination on this support.mycrowsoft.com, I’m finally at a the final part of this little, ol’ history lesson. And what have we learned here, boys and girls? That A – I can’t type properly. That B – I can’t spell properly. And C – I only write these notes as a way of getting out of real homework. That last point kind of says something, doesn’t it? That I love history way more than most other school courses. God, I so regret not taking a politics or geography or history course in my last year of high school. No, wait… I wanted to take Law and Philosophy too, and I would’ve taken every psychology course if my school even offered one… I’ve always have a dream to be completely learned or something. I’ve never been good at anything. I’m okay at writing, but not the greatest. I’m good at math, but not the greatest. I have fun with computers, but there’s no way in hell that I’m the greatest. I’ve got some ideas about psychology, but I’m not the greatest. And I’m okay at history, but I’m just not the greatest. Is there a pattern forming there? The fact is, I’m not that damn good at anything that I like. But at least I’m good. I’m at least good at a lot of things. I can do a lot of crap – just not well. I’m general – I’m versatile, but not talented, so to speak. And it’s too bad there’s no university course that caters to guys like me – who’ll struggle when they try to specialize in something, but excels when the whole world is in front of them. I’m the guy who can piece together pieces of the puzzle from all parts of life and society. Then again, whenever my sister brought home a 1000 piece puzzle, I could never finish any of it. Hell, I had trouble with a measly, 100 piece puzzle set of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles eating a pizza or something. But that’s another story for another day, and now onto possibly the final history course that I’ll ever get to type up…"

The Revolution of 1848

-around the 1820s, the industrial revolution along with nationalism had sparked revolutions all over Europe; King Louis-Phillippe of France was one of those old guys who weren’t in on the hip, and he refused to go along with the industrial revolution; he even ordered his prime minister, Francois Guizot to suspend the rights of the political assembly; on February 22^nd 1848, Louis cancelled something called the banquet or something to silence the opposition; and just for the record, banquets were the meetings held by republicans to demand more rights and stuff like that
-now that they were pretty pissed off, all of the revolutionaries agreed that they’d set up a republican government until an election could be called, and the February Revolution happened with nationalists all over Europe; Vienna revolutionaries challenged the conservative policies of Austria, Hungary revolutonaries led by Louis Kossuth, me thinks, demanded a constitution for the Magyar people, and meanwhile, King Charles Albert of Italy waged war on Austria on hope of uniting the two peoples
-March 1848, Emperor Ferdinand dismissed Metternich (whoever the heck that guy was), gave a constitution to Austria, and gave a constitution to Hungary in April, and by June, this emperor had fled from his capital; soon, Germany wanted some autonomy too and while Germany waged war on Austria, the people of Berlin followed Prussia’s example and demanded a constitution or something which was known as the revolution of the intellectuals; and in March of 1848, King Frederick William IV promised Germany a constitution
-soon, the peasants of Italy supported the rebellions and tried to stop their king from attacking Austria; afterall, the constitutions that were made were still unfair to workers and still didn’t put an end to foreign leaders ruling countries, and thus the people demanded new constitutions to be formed; due to the poor harvests and massive unemployment of that year, governments started to set up national workshops to employ the peasants, but this did not work very well, as Victor Hugo described the chaos in France during this era
-General Cavaignac was soon called in to suppress the riots in June of 1848, and this resulted in Paris having bloody "June days" in which the workers/social republicans were beaten down and defeated by force; by December 1848, an election showed that most France preferred the order of Napoleon over radicalism, and even hailed General Cavaignac as a gero; Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon, then tried to overthrow Louis-Phillipe and tried to kill the republican regime; in December of 1852, he called a plebiscite after declaring himself emperor
-in Austria, the Hapsburg royal family started to regain control, and King Charles Albert soon won his war against Austria; the once liberal Pope Pius IV soon left Rome thanks to the chaos spreading around the city and declared himself a conservative, despite republicans such as Mazzini and Guiseppe Gribald trying to convince him otherwise; 1849, Austria, Spain and Naples joined forces, defeated Mazzani, and restored Pius as the Pope, and thus, the conservatives had won yet again for now
-liberalism was abandoned and people started believing in what they called realistic policies; however, liberalism stayed strong in countries like Britain, France, US, and Belgium; tons of republicans were exiled and stuff like that, and most of them ended up migrating to Britain since only the English and the US tolerated their values; Italy, Germany, and Austria were now pretty much united, and thus became the central power in mainland Europe

The Crimean War 1854

-1854, a small war began between Russia and Turkey over whether Russia or the Ottoman Empire owned Romania or not; now, Britain and France didn’t want Russia to get that land, otherwise they might become a naval power or something, so they joined Turkey’s side against the Russians; Austria finally decided to join Russia, but it was too late and Russia was immediately crushed
-1856, the Congress of Paris was formed, in which Russia formally surrendered and agreed to never send war ships through the Mediterranean again and to respect the territory of the Ottoman Empire; but as short as this war was, it resulted in a huge amount of technological advances, like the machine gun by Sir Gatling from America
-now, we seem to have forgotten about the Piedmont or something, and since I don’t know how to spell that word properly, I’ll just called them Italians because they sort of are; Count Camillio di Cavour led the parliament under king Victor Emmanuel and spread word how Italy wanted to become a world power like England and France; if you remember Mazzini from before, his secret societies known as from before, his secret societies known as Young Italy were still committed to having a republican government, and of course, his trusty sidekick, Guiseppe Giribald or something was always at his side; they didn’t like how Cavour was controlling the economy and demanding a financial growth by building railways; and just for the definition man,. Risorgimento meant that diplomacy and war would bring strength to Italy, and the Real politik or something meant the politics of reality, whatever that means
-Louis Napoleon, who was then known as Napoleon III, did what his uncle did and supported Italy; July 1858, the Pact of Plombieres was formed and France and Italy declared war on Austria yet again; however, I don’t know if this was a good thing or not, but Giribald and his red shirts soon invaded Sicily and took control of it with guerilla warfare; this didn’t phase Italy, though, and thanks to the help of Prussia, Austria was crushed yet again; and I don’t know why, but in 1870, the Franco-Prussian war began and France eventually lost control of Rome or something, and the Italians just waltzed back into that city; however, the papacy didn’t like the Italians liberalist point of view and a lot of resentment started to grow
-1862, King William I of Germany, or Prussia, or one of them, me thinks, dissolved his parliament and a more liberal one was elected, and he soon asked Otto Van Bismarck or something to be his first minister; Bismarck was a truly conservative, and hated republicans and liberals; in 1864, Bismarck sided with Austria instead of Germany over a war with Denmark; Denmark was soon defeated, but Bismarck’s choice led to a lot of debates over whether countries should have autonomy or not
-Bismarck then made an alliance with Italy and took control of Venetia, made peace with France by giving them some useless land, made peace with Russia by claiming they’d helped them get power in the Mediterranean again, and he knew England would not attack Germany as long as Germany didn’t interfere with their imperialism
-1866, the Austro-Prussia war lasted 6 weeks over the occupation of some place called Schleswig-Holsten; Prussia killed Austria in this war, again… I mean, don’t those Austrians ever win anything? This was called the Seven Weeks War, and Prussia wanted to destroy Vienna, but Birmarck said no, and rather decided to unify Austria with Germany; the Augsleich or something compromise gave Austria autonomy while under German control, and the new country, Austria-Hungary, was given a dual monarchy under the Hapsburgs; but Bismarck wasn’t done yet, and he wanted to completely unify all of Charlemagne’s old empire by taking over France as well
-1870, no-one could decide who would be the new king of Spain and France was not very pleased when King William of Prussia planned to put one of his cousins in the Hollenzollen family onto the Spanish throne; France eventually convinced King William to withdraw his candidate, which resulted in another Franco-Prussian war, this time lasting from July to September of 1870; Napoleon III was defeated at Sedan, and that wasn’t all; Bismarck changed a telegram to make it look like France was insulting Germany; Germany soon decided to side with Prussia, and the combined forces soon smashed apart the forces of France
-Napoleon III realized how much he sucked in comparison to his uncle, and fled to England where he died in exile in 1873; it wasn’t long until Germany took over Paris and formed the new German Empire; the king of Prussia soon became the hereditary emperor of the German Empire on January 18^th, 1871 at the palace of Versailles, and thus not only did this signify the end of French rule in Europe, but he also now had an empire that consisting of Prussia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, and France, and thus he and Bismarck now owned more land than Charlemagne, Louis XIV, or Napoleon I ever had

The Transforming World: The Breakdown of Classical Science

-it all started thanks to Charles Darwin, whom I all know we know; I won’t talk about his much now, but if you want to know more about him and his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of the Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life, then you might as well wait or something for my notes on Grade 11 ancient history, or just look up that book title on the internet somewhere else
-now, more controversy formed when an Anglican bishop declared that the earth was formed exactly in 4004BC, while a guy called Charles Lyell declared that the earth was at least a few million years old; and I’m sure we know how Darwin described Natural Selection, while the Church at that time still believed that we exist as God’s chosen ones, and if you want to know more about these debates and my quite bias view on them, go check my Grade 12 religion and OAC English notes, and, well… actually, those notes don’t actually tell my views on science and religion. They actually tell how I feel about people who believe in either science or religion…
-anyhew, the term survival of the fittest was coined by Herbert Spencer who sort of described nature as a neutral thing that let species fight amongst themselves, and we all know that people just couldn’t stand the idea of evolution, in which we humans evolved from lower life forms since that sort of makes us look as bad as animals
-Thomas Malthus soon made the idea of scarcity popular, in which he kept telling the public how few resources like food and water there was left in the world; this led to Social Darwinism, and I won’t go into it much since I’ll explain it in my Grade 12 History notes, but basically, it’s the idea that some humans are smarter than others and should extort the poor to make themselves richer; this led to the age of the robber barons, where guys like Andrew Carnegie and Rockefellar started to extend the gap between the rich and the poor
-now here comes my favourite guy in the whole wide world besides everyone else: Sigmund Freud; if you want to know a bunch of info on him and his theories, see my Grade 12 Religion notes and my OAC English notes, but if you want a basic idea of his ideas right now, he pretty much started our fascination with the conscious and the subconscious; we know that he coined those phrases, although it’s debatable whether he was the one who found the subconscious or whether he stole that idea from someone else
-anyhew, we know that he came up with the idea of the ego, superego, and the id, in which the are always three annoying guys in your brain; the ego is your mind and your thoughts, the superego is your conscience and controls you just like a parent (it’s the angel on your right shoulder), while the Id is that little kid inside of you that wants every selfish thing in the world (the little devil that pokes you on your left shoulder); and what was so important about his theories? That it showed that not only are we all innately selfish, but that deep down inside, we’re as aggressive and sexual as every other animal on earth, thus complimenting Darwin’s ideas that we are not special in the eyes of God
-one of the big-time philosophers of that time was the German Frederick Nietsche, who claimed that God didn’t help people to be great, but rather people developed their own talents without the help of God; he hated Christianity because it was so communist; he called it the religion of the weak, because it helped the poor and the useless and told the strong and rich to keep babying the poor bastards; he categorized people as either the "noble man" who follows his own rules and becomes great, or the "common man" who follows society and amounts to nothing; he was afraid that the sheep-like nature of people would make society sterile and pathetic
-he said basically that God is dead and doesn’t do anything; he rejected the values of society such as religion and materialism, and called of new ones, although I’m not sure if he actually came up with any solutions to these problems he kept talking about; anyhew, he helped start the whole Existentialist movement which I know a bit about; if you want to know more, you might want to check my OAC English notes for guys called Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (and Simone de Beauvoir did a lot too), who all made the Existentialist movement popular around the world
-and now we get into the breakdown of classical science, in which people simply did not believe in guys like Newton, Dalton, Avogadro, Kepler, and Maxwell anymore; these three said that physics is completely predictable and were run by simple laws made by God; however, modern scientists such as Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Prince de Broglie, E. Shrodinger, Something Heisenberg, Dirac, and Niels Bohr helped developed nuclear physics and quantum wave-mechanics and stuff like that, which basically shows that every atom is chaotic, and that we only exist by a one in a quadrillion chance; however, Einstein never truly believed in that, and even said that God does not play with dice, which means that we simply haven’t figured out yet how to predict quantum mechanics; I mean, Einstein is one of my heroes because he spent his last 30 years of his life looking for God’s laws to the universe, but never found that unified theory he was hoping to find; as you can see, this is the most exciting thing in history to me: to history of quantum mechanics; I just hope that I’ll be able to play with quantum computers in the future, in which each quark inside of an atom can hold 6 types of data: up, down, strange, charmed, beauty, something else, and blah blah blah blah… I think I’ve bored you enough with modern science, but if you’d like to read more on this, I might one day put my crappy OAC Chemistry notes on the internet or something for those 2 of you who actually read my notes
-anyhew, I’ll move onto some more notes on Nietzche; he was an anti-Semite but did not agree with Hitler’s view on nationalism, and even hated how Hitler kept quoting him or something; his ideas on how people should strive to beat others became known as the Superman Theory or something, and he was very much against fads, trends, and democracy; he was huge because he questioned all of classical, Western philosophy, just like Freud challenged traditional psychology, and Einstein challenged traditional science (by the way, here’s a quick tip: Einstein could not talk until the age of 5, but it’s not true that he flunked out of math; he failed Calculus because it was too easy, and he instead spent his high school time working on university thesis stuff with Algebra)

Social Darwinism and Social Classes

-despite Social Darwinism, the gap between the rich and the poor was still shrinking, and the status of women in society was improving; education became mainstream, and eventually the middle class could afford to have recreation time; women eventually got the right to vote, mostly during the roaring twenties after World War I, but they still could not own any property
-1903, Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPN) started petitions, rallies, disrupted mass meetings, chained themselves to lampposts, slashed art galleries, refused to pay taxes, and had hunger strikes to get themselves heard
-unions started to pop up everywhere, demanding equal pay, max number of work hours, sick days, better housing, training, improved safety, and stuff like that
-the Age of Anxiety refers to the dawn of Existentialism, in which people felt like God had abandoned them; people saw life as meaningless, and uncertainty arose everywhere about whether civilization was worth anything at all
-this age also led to a change in clothes, in which men before the French revolution wore women-like clothes and long hair, while afterwards they started the modern trend to a business suit with short hair; this became popular since this was what Napoleon liked to make his army wear; as for women, their dresses became more slender, and they started wearing bonnets more often, although I don’t know why
-now, I’d get into World War I and Imperialism, except that I’ running out of time; right now, I’ve got 3 Chemistry projects or something due, and I can write those World War notes anytime I feel like it; if you want to actually read what I say about WWI, keep an eye out for my Grade 10 and Grade 12 History notes whenever I get a chance to post them online

The Russian Revolution

-I’ll keep this section brief too since I get into it a bit in my article about the history of Russia, but… January 9^th, 1905 was Bloody Sunday, in which troops fired into the crowds at St. Petersburg; they wanted an end to the rule of the czars since the rest of Europe seemed to be getting rich from liberalism; 1861, the Emancipation Edict ended feudalism in Russia, although peasants still had no freedom of mobility outside of their village
-1881, czar Alexander II was assassinated, and the next Alexander despised the radicals; he started to outlaw certain groups, and was met with pissed off peasants who disregarded the law and started stealing land for themselves; they set up a provisional government or something and on October 17^th, 1905, the October Manifesto began a constitutional rule in Russia that resulted in the constitution of 1906, and in 1907, a law was made that only people who owned property could vote
-many Russians turned into "Westerners" by turning against the autocratic system; radicals became known as intelligentsia, and in 1860, the first revolutionary movements started prancing around with the slogan, "to go to the people"; George Plekhanov was a true Marxist and realized that Russia could not turn communist until after Russia had developed a democratic, bourgeois society (Karl Marx claimed that communism can only work after a republican country becomes rich); Plekhanov pleaded for patience and asked the Russian people to progress slowly; the Social Democratic Party was soon formed by Marxists; it was an underground group that demanded democracy and had Russia’s first congress in 1898
-1905, the Constitutional Democrats were formed; they were a liberal group that loved the constitutional ideas of the West; they talked of universal manhood suffrage and communist stuff like that; Vladimir Ilyvich Ulyanov, who later adopted the name Lenin, came from a middle-class family with an inspector as a father; his older brother was a member of a Social Revolutionary terrorist group and was hanged by the czar; this really pissed off Lenin, but he stil graduated from the university of St. Petersburg in 1891, and joined a Marxist group in 1895
-he was exiled to Siberia from 1897 to 1900, and when he returned, he joined that Social Democratic Party I talked of earlier; but he hated democratic socialism, because it wasn’t fully socialist; he handed out a pamphlet called What is to be Done? In 1912, and his new goal was to eliminate all political forces in Russia besides his own; he then invented the idea of a single totalitarian party ruling the entire state of Russia
-1903, Lenin split his party in two, with the supports of Bolsheviks believing in Lenin’s ideas that a revolution and socialism was necessary to help all peasants, and the other group was called the Mansheviks who wanted Russia to slowly industrialize into a power; when World War I broke out, the Bolsheviks condemned the government for imperialism, and Lenin was exiled to Switzerland

The March and November Revolutions of 1917

-by the way, Russia was still using the old calendar, so the March Revolution was actually the February Revolution, and the November Revolution was really Red October
-anyhew, back to 1917, when riots broke out in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg); March 4^th, the czar dissolved the Duma parliament thingy, and then came along the Sovietsl back then, the Petrograd Soviets called themselves the Soviet of Workers and were a workers committee that included soldiers; they were pretty pissed at the czar and set up a provisional government; Alexander Kerensky (me thinks that’s his name…) was a moderate socialist who wanted support from the West (by winning WWI) to turn Russia into a democracy, but in April, Lenin returned and laid down a program called the April Theses that forced Russia to back out of World War I; Lenin’s slogan was "all power to the Soviets"
-Kerensky didn’t know what to do since Lenin was stealing all his power; in September, General Kornilov or something tried a coup d’etat, although I’m not sure who he tried to overthrow…but in that same month, a lot of parties such as the Social Democratic thingy withdrew support for WWI and Kerensky was feeling pressured to end the war; Lenin was soon joined by Leon Trotsky who became head of the Petrograd Soviets on October 3^rd; on November 7^th, Trotsky had a congress meeting in which they agree that it was time to attack Kerensky’s government; that same day, Lenin attacked and was given control of Russia
-Lenin immediately got rid of the democracy that Kerensky had set up, and formed a one party state; his secret police called the CHEKA was sent out to suppress everyone, including the press, who went against the revolution; March 15^th, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litorsk was signed, in which Russia made a peace pact with Germany by giving up 26% of its land, 75% of its coal mines, and its richest grain area in the Ukraine
-this pissed the Russians off, and civil war began in 1918 between the Red Bolsheviks and the White Social Revolutionaries; Trotsky named the Reds the Red Army, which managed to fight off not only the White troops, but troops from England, Japan, Canada, and the US
-1921, Lenin discovered that Russia did not have the resources to be completely communist, so he invoked his New Economic Policy which gave Russia a mixed economy; he soon renamed the Bolsheviks to the Communist Party and the Republic of Virtue soon became Russia’s state religion

 Y2kk Update (2001): "And so, that’s all I really have about Russia. Not much, is it? I mean, where’s those Stalins? Where’s those Gorbachovs, and Cuban Missile Crisis stuff, or how that spy plane was shot down? And I do love the Cold War, but that’s not where this course took me. You might find some info in my Grade 12 History notes, but that’s about it. And that about wraps up my OAC Modern Western History notes. And I’ve gotta remind you all that I never took this course. All the info I have is either from memory, or from my friend’s notes. I hope I didn’t sound too stupid or something as I kept spelling weird sounding names wrong, and I hope you stick around and read some more of my notes somewhere else on this web-page that no-one looks at. Until then, I’ll see you on the beach. God speed, good will hunting, and God bless us, everyone…"