HIS 102 WEEK 8: NATIONALISM
Reading Assignment for the week:
- Read the appropriate chapters in the
textbook (chapter 23 and 25 in the 7th or 6th ed. of Perry).
- Read the excerpt from Bismarck's
memoirs (You may wish to participate in an Online Discussion of this reading.).
-
Listen to some further information about nationalism
as a Realaudio file
or as a wav file. You can also read the information as
a txt file.
Questions to
Consider while studying this week's material:
- What was the settlement
at the Congress of Vienna?
- How did Germany and Italy
come into existence?
Key Terms to study
while reading the textbook:
- Concert of Europe
- Crimean War
- Risorgimento
- Otto von Bismarck
- Camilio Cavour
Suggested Websites for further study:
- For extra credit please suggest to your instructor a
relevant website for this unit of the course. Send the title of the site, the url and a
brief explanation why you find the information interesting and applicable to
the material being studied this week.
Submit the Bismarck Paragraph:
Read the excerpt from Bismarck's
memoirs (along with the document background notes
and the questions to consider).
Answer the following
question in a paragraph: What were the main features of Bismarck's conservative
ideology?
Your paragraph should be about
one-half page in length, double-spaced with one-inch margins, font size 10 or 12; it should
contain a concise topic sentence that directly responds to the assigned
question (no need to define terms or cite a dictionary) and use
direct, quoted material to support your points. Do not spend time repeating
what happened in the document; spend your time providing analysis to
answer the assigned question.
This assignment should be sent by e-mail according to the Electronic Submission
Information instructions.
Please remember to consult
Charlie's History Writing Center for
specific information on the writing requirements of this course.
You may also wish to post or respond in the
Blackboard online discussion forum
for this assignment. Please review the instructions for
Using the Blackboard
Discussion Forums, if necessary.
The Bismarck Paragraph is worth a maximum of
25 points.
Notes:
Yet another force unleashed by the French
Revolution was the idea of nationalism. After 1789, each citizen now owed
a higher allegiance and duty to his/her country, not just to the king. Further,
it was no longer just a country or state,
but the "nation," a spiritual/mystical concept of a community of people bound together by
ties of language, culture, religion and history. The ultimate duty of citizens of
a nation, in addition to paying taxes, was military service to defend the nation. In
the nineteenth century, a series of nations emerged in Europe,
ranging from large and powerful like Germany to small and weak like Albania (really the
early twentieth century). In most cases, the creation of a nation was accompanied
by military conflict. In all cases, the new nations discovered that
it was really not that easy to "create" a nation with
people who had no idea that they were part of a nation.
After the Napoleonic wars, diplomats in
Europe tried to maintain order on the continent. This effort is usually
termed the Concert of Europe. Historians often credit the concert system
with sparing Europe from major war for a century (from 1815 to 1914), but
on closer examination that was hardly the case. There were revolutionary
uprisings in 1830, 1848 and 1863 that required the intervention of armed
forces. There were also a number of wars that involved the great powers:
1853-55 Crimean War, 1866 Austro-Prussian War, 1870-71 Franco-Prussian
War, 1877 Russo-Turkish, 1903 Boer War and the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. There
was also a series of Balkan conflicts and the 1863 Russian intervention
in Poland. In other words, the nineteenth century was far from being a
peaceful century.
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