World History

Unit 5: Industrialism and Nationalism

Chapter 20: Life in the Industrial Age

Mon, Feb 10, 2014

42. Tue, Feb 11, 2014

This is another chapter covering so many different things that it really doesn't have a chance to do any of them well. Still, it does bring up a number of important ideas, and a good range of facts you should probably know. Take its generalizations with a large grain of salt, however, since almost any fact that can be said about life in 1800 is going to have changed — subtly or massively — by 1928, which is the nominal range of this chapter. It's hard to fault the authors here: they face an impossible task, and unsurprisingly fail to accomplish it.

Overall, the chapter covers the modern development in a number of areas: science, technology, social sciences, literature, music, and art. To get a satisfactory grasp on any of these will require significant study beyond the scope of this class. But this can at least buy you some anchor points from which to define others.

Please note: the quiz for this chapter does not even attempt to cover everything in it: it mostly focuses on identifying the principal contributions of certain physical, biological, and social scientists. Even attempting to make sense out of the complex cultural phenomena of art, music, and literature by this means seemed counterproductive. Experience some of the art, music, and literature: then you can know something about it. Merely identifying names is probably not going to do you much good.

For this first class on the chapter, I'd like to focus on the scientific issues raised by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

• Consider the idea of progress: as a piece of intellectual history, what does it do to a culture when it comes to expect things from science and technology that perhaps it didn't expect before? Which of these expectations are reasonable or significant in the genuine human perspective? Which are not?
• Everything comes at a cost. What are the costs — real or imagined — of a society increasingly preoccupied with technical achievement and practical mastery of the environment?
• What are some of the implications of turning the lens of scientific analysis on ourselves? Does it enhance us or diminish us as human beings, or is there a proper or improper way of doing so? Some would question whether the social sciences are actually sciences at all — but whether they are or not, what do they tell us?

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