Chapters 17 and 18 Take Home Essay Test

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Recommended: Enlightenment and the scientific revolution 1700s

1. The Enlightenment was the period in the 18th century when logic and reason were valued over intuition and emotion. It was sparked by the Scientific Revolution in the 16th and 17th century, where scientists and doctors made huge leaps in the fields of medicine, botany, biology, and the like. They showed the power of reason and education. In the enlightenment, thinkers like Hobbes and Locke said that people give up their freedom in order to live in an organized society, but that they have natural rights of life, liberty, and property, that could not be taken away from them. This was also the time in which women began to challenge the status quo. Even though the slogan of the Enlightenment was “free and equal”, that was only for men. Women like Mary Wollstonecraft began to protest for their rights. People began to revere wisdom over instincts in the time of the Enlightenment.
2. The American Revolution was affected by the Enlightenment, especially by the ideas of John Locke. King George III took away the colonists rights, and they realized that they were not being treated right, even though the people in England were given the rights constituted by the new Enlightenment ideas. While the people living in Great Britain were subjects of the king, the colonists were not treated as such, and were given many unfair taxes, all without government representation in England. The Magna Carta wrote that this was not allowed, and the colonists demanded to be treated fairly. They were treated worse and worse, and at last, it was too much, so Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. John Locke’s ideas, which were that everyone had natural rights of life, liberty, and property, were put in the Declaration. Also, Charles Louis ...

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...mely violent before the radicals assumed the leadership positions, and afterwards, it got even more bloody. The French commoners had tried to work with the aristocrats, but because the clergy and the nobles could always outvote the commoners, they were getting nowhere. Jean-Paul Marat called for more violence, and turned in supposed lists of traitors to the crown. Though at the beginning, he advocated peace, Robespierre eventually also called for terror, because he believed that the revolution would get nowhere if the nobles were still around to claim power. Essentially, the commoners believed that they had to eradicate anyone who had even the slightest chance of bringing the government back to the way it was pre-Revolution. With the help of justice craving commoners and merciless leaders, the French Revolution turned into one of the bloodiest wars in all of history.

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