newly independent nations attempted to strike out on their own and act as moral barometers to the developing Cold War
A Troublesome Brew: The Road to World War I
Lecture Series Overview
These small one-thousand-words or less “written” lectures were created for an online World History course. History 5, or Modern World History went online at Butte College in the Spring of 2019. This in and of itself is not news, community colleges throughout the state of California are offering more and more courses online. What made this online course newsworthy (at least to me) was what happened just prior to the Spring 2019 semester. Fire.
Early Modern Political Economy of Labor
As opportunities presented by the New World, and new occasions to take advantage of “old world” trading routs settled into some sort of European normalcy, how best to do so became hotly debated. Indeed, the riches of the New World and Asia via new routes of trade became politicized issues within and amongst European powers.
The Equality of Murder: Seventeenth-Century Conceptions of Western Liberty
…he laid down an immediate truth. “…how easy a matter it is, even for the weakest man to kill the strongest.” From here Hobbes presented the next axiom, a sort of philosophical geometry, if the weak can kill the strongest with ease, then no man is more than any other, and if no man is more, then men are ‘by nature equal.”
A Tin Box, Several Sabers, and Newspapers: The Rise of the West in the 19th Century
Pulled from the depths of a coal mine in Northern England in 1815 was a small tin box tucked into the shirt pocket of a dead seventeen-year-old male, William Thew. The young man used his pocketknife to etch the following words into the back of that tin: “Fret not, dear mother, for we were singing while we had time.”
World War I: Agent of Massive Change
The bodyguard, Count Franz von Harrach, described how a “thin stream of blood spurted” from the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s mouth and how his wife, Sophie, fell, slumped “with her face between his knees.” The June 28th, 1914 assassination of this husband and wife team, destined as the next in line to take the throne of the Austrian Empire, rapidly disassembled ninety-nine years of constructed peace in Europe, however tenuous the détente.