AP World Chapters 7 & 8

American Revolution

Successful rebellion against British rule conducted by the European settlers in the thirteen colonies of British North America, starting in 1775; a conservative revolution whose success preserved property rights and class distinctions but established republican government in place of monarchy

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

Charter of political liberties, drawn up by the French National Assembly in 1789, that proclaimed the equal rights of all male citizens; the declaration gave expression to the essential outlook of the French Revolution and became the preamble to the French constitution completed in 1791

French Revolution

Massive upheaval of French society (1789–1815) that overthrew the monarchy, ended the legal privileges of the nobility, and for a time outlawed the Catholic Church. The French Revolution proceeded in stages, becoming increasingly radical and violent until the period known as the Terror in 1793–1794, after which it became more conservative, especially under Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1799–1815)

Maximilien Robespierre

(1758-1794); Leader of the French Revolution during the Terror; his Committee of Public Safety executed tens of thousands of enemies of the revolution until he was arrested and guillotined

Napoleon Bonaparte

French head of state and general (r. 1799–1815); Napoleon preserved much of the French Revolution under a military dictatorship and was responsible for the spread of revolutionary ideals through his conquest of much of Europe

Haitian Revolution

The only fully successful slave rebellion in world history; the uprising in the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (later renamed Haiti, which means “mountainous” or “rugged” in the native Taino language) was sparked by the French Revolution and led to the establishment of an independent state after a long and bloody war (1791–1804). Its first leader was Toussaint Louverture, a former enslaved person

Latin American revolutions

Series of risings in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America (1808–1825) that established the independence of new states from European rule but that for the most part retained the privileges of the elites despite efforts at more radical social change by the lower classes

Hidalgo-Morelos rebellion

Socially radical peasant rebellion in Mexico (1810) led by the priests Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos

Tupac Amaru

Leader of a Native American rebellion in Peru in the early 1780s, claiming the last Inca emperor as an ancestor

Great Jamaica Revolt

Slave rebellion in the British West Indies (1831–1832) in which around 60,000 enslaved people attacked several hundred plantations; inspired by the Haitian Revolution, the discontent of the enslaved population and the brutality of the British response helped sway the British public to support the abolition of slavery

abolitionist movement

An international movement that condemned slavery as morally repugnant and contributed much to ending slavery in the Western world during the nineteenth century; the movement was especially prominent in Britain and the United States beginning in the late eighteenth century

Nationalism

The focusing of citizens’ loyalty on the notion that they are part of a “nation” that merits an independent political life, with a unique culture, territory, and common experience; first became a prominent element of political culture in nineteenth-century Europe and the Americas

Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft, this tract was one of the earliest expressions of feminist consciousness

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Leading figure of the early women’s rights movement in the United States. At the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, she drafted a statement paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, stating that men and women were created equal

Maternal feminism

Movement that claimed that women have value in society not because of an abstract notion of equality but because women have a distinctive and vital role as mothers; its exponents argued that women have the right to intervene in civil and political life because of their duty to watch over the future of their children

steam engine

The great breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, the coal-fired steam engine provided an almost limitless source of power and could be used to drive any number of machines as well as locomotives and ships; the introduction of the steam engine allowed a hitherto unimagined increase in productivity and made the Industrial Revolution possible

British textile industry

The site of the initial technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain, where multiple innovations transformed cotton textile production, resulting in an enormous increase in output

middle-class society

British social stratum developed in the nineteenth century, composed of small businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and other professionals required in an industrial society; politically liberal, they favored constitutional government, private property, free trade, and social reform within limits; had ideas of thrift, hard work, rigid morality, “respectability,” and cleanliness

ideology of domesticity/cult of domesticity

A set of ideas and values that defined the ideal role of middle-class women in nineteenth-century Europe, focusing their activity on homemaking, child rearing, charitable endeavors, and “refined” activities as the proper sphere for women

lower middle class

Social stratum that developed in Britain in the nineteenth century and that consisted of people employed in the service sector as clerks, salespeople, secretaries, police officers, and the like; by 1900, this group made up about 20 percent of Britain’s population

laboring classes

The majority of Britain’s nineteenth-century population, which included manual workers in the mines, ports, factories, construction sites, workshops, and farms of Britain’s industrializing and urbanizing society; this class suffered the most and at least initially gained the least from the transformations of the Industrial Revolution

Karl Marx

1818-1883; The most influential proponent of socialism, Marx was a German expatriate in England who predicted working-class revolution as the key to creating an ideal communist future

Labour Party

British working-class political party established in the 1890s and dedicated to reforms and a peaceful transition to socialism, in time providing a viable alternative to the revolutionary emphasis of Marxism