Studied by 2 people
Edwin Chadwick
A public health official who wrote reports on the poor living conditions of the cities and believed that poverty was caused by illnesses. He believed that government could help prevent disease by cleaning up the urban environment. He collected detailed reports from local Poor Law officials on the "sanitary conditions of the laboring population" and published his hard-hitting findings in 1842. His report became the basis of Great Britain's first public health law, which created a national health board and gave cities broad authority to build modern sanitary systems.
Jeremy Bentham / Utilitarianism
His approach to social issues, called utilitarianism, had taught that public problems ought to be dealt with on a rational, scientific basis to advance the "greatest good for the greatest number."
Miasmatic Theory
The belief that people contract disease by breathing bad odors and decay and putrefying excrement
Louis Pasteur / Germ Theory / Pasteurization
A French chemist, this man discovered that heat could kill bacteria that otherwise spoiled liquids including milk, wine, and beer. His theory stated that disease was caused by the spread of living organisms that could be controlled.
Robert Koch
German country doctor who developed pure cultures of harmful bacteria and described their life cycles with his coworkers.
Joseph Lister / Antiseptic Principle
English surgeon who saw the connection between aerial bacteria and the problem of wound infection. He reasoned that a chemical disinfectant applied to a wound dressing would "destroy the life of the floating particles," by which he meant germs. His principle worked wonders.
Napoleon III (r. 1848-1870)
Nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became president of the Second Republic of France and elected himself emperor from 1852-1870; he invaded Mexico when the Mexican government couldn't repay loans from French bankers. He sent in an army and set up a new government under Maximilian. He refused Lincoln's request that France withdraw. After the Civil War, the U.S. sent an army to enforce the request and Napoleon withdrew.
Georges Haussmann
Associated with the rebuilding of Paris. Made it "revolution-proof," more sanitary and hospitable. He built the streets broad enough for revolutionaries to be able to barricade them. New importance was given to trains, as well.
White-Collar Employees
Part of the lower middle class; they were a mixed group of traveling salesmen, bookkeepers, store managers, and clerks who staffed the offices and branch stores of large corporations. They owned little property and often earned no more than better-paid skilled or semiskilled workers. Yet they were fiercely committed to the middle-class ideal of upward social mobility.
Labor Aristocracy
The highly skilled workers, such as factory foremen and construction bosses, who made up about 15 percent of the working classes from about 1850 to 1914.
Sweated Industries
Poorly paid handicraft production, often carried out by married women paid by the piece and working at home.
Illegitimacy Explosion (1750-1850)
The number of illegitimate births soared between about 1750 and 1850 as much of Europe experienced an "illegitimacy explosion." Fewer young women were abstaining from premarital sex and more importantly fewer young men were marrying the women they got pregnant.
Separate Spheres
The nineteenth-century gendered division of labor and lifestyles that cast men as breadwinners and women as homemakers.
Sigmund Freud / Defense Mechanism
Austrian neurologist who originated psychoanalysis; Said that human behavior is irrational; behavior is the outcome of conflict between the id (irrational unconscious driven by sexual, aggressive, and pleasure-seeking desires) and ego (rationalizing conscious, what one can do) and superego (ingrained moral values, what one should do). In psychoanalytic theory, the defense mechanism is the ego's protective methods of reducing anxiety by unconsciously distorting reality.
Thermodynamics
A branch of physics built on Newton's laws of mechanics that investigated the relationship between heat and mechanical energy. It deals with the relationship of heat transfer between other forms of energy. It's the study of the effects of work, heat and energy on a system, the transfer of energy through heat, and the way heat is used as an energy resource.
Dmitri Mendeleev
Russian chemist who developed a periodic table of the chemical elements and predicted the discovery of several new elements.
Jean Baptiste Lamarck
He asserted that all forms of life had arisen through a long process of continuous adjustment to the environment, a dramatic challenge to the belief in divine creation of species. helped prepare the way for Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin / On the Origin of Species / Natural Selection
British naturalist whose theory of evolution, in particular, the principles of natural selection and adaptation, and his theory of animal man, left an indelible and enduring transformational influence upon science in general and psychology in particular. He was the most influential of all nineteenth-century evolutionary thinkers. He carefully collected specimens of the different animal species he countered on the voyage. His observations led him to conclude that all life had gradually evolved from a common ancestral origin in an unending "struggle for survival." His theory of evolution is summarized in the title of his work On the Origin of Species by the Means of Natural Selection (1859).
Social Science
A field that studies people and the relationships among them.
Auguste Comte / Positivist Method
French positivist philosopher, who was a founder of sociology. In response to the scientific, political, and industrial revolutions of his day, Comte was fundamentally concerned with an intellectual, moral and political reorganization of the social order. Adoption of the scientific attitude was the key, he thought, to such a reconstruction. Comte argued that an empirical study of historical processes, particularly of the progress of the various interrelated sciences, reveals, a law of three stages that govern human development. He analyzed these stages in his major work, the six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy.
Evolution
The idea, applied by thinkers in many fields, that stresses gradual change and continuous adjustment.
Herbert Spencer / Social Darwinism
English philosopher who saw the human race as driven forward to ever greater specialization and progress by a brutal economic struggle that determined the "survival of the fittest." The poor were the ill-fated weak; the prosperous were the chosen strong. Social Darwinism was a body of thought drawn from the ideas of Charles Darwin that applied the theory of biological evolution to human affairs and saw the human race as driven by an unending economic struggle that would determine the survival of the fittest. It gained adherents among nationalists, who viewed global competition between countries as a grand struggle for survival, as well as among imperialists, who used these ideas to justify the rule of the "advanced" West over their colonial subjects and territories.
Realism (1840s-1890s)
A literary movement that, in contrast to romanticism, stressed the depiction of life as it actually was.
Émile Zola
A giant of the Realism movement in literature, articulated the key themes. This man depicted life as it was, everyday life, rejected romantic search for exotic and sublime. He wrote about typical and commonplace, focused on middle class and then working class. He believed that human action were caused by unalterable natural laws, heredity and environment determined human behavior. He wrote Germinal (1885).
Gustave Flaubert
He wrote, Madame Bovary (1857), which is far narrower in scope than Balzac's work but unparalleled in its depth and accuracy of psychological insight. Flaubert portrays the provincial middle class as petty, smug, and hypocritical.
George Eliot
Under her pen name, Mary Ann Evans, wrote Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871-1872) in which characters are disillusioned by the self-deception and deception of others that they see around them.
Leo Tolstoy
He combined realism in description and character development with an atypical moralizing, especially in his later work. In War and Peace (1864-1869), a monumental novel set against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812,
Putting-Out System
The eighteenth-century system of rural industry in which a merchant loaned raw materials to cottage workers, who processed them and returned the finished products to the merchant.
Cottage Industry
A stage of industrial development in which rural workers used hand tools in their homes to manufacture goods on a large scale for sale in a market.
James Hargreaves - Spinning Jenny
He invented a simple, inexpensive, hand-powered spinning machine in 1765 called the spinning jenny.
Richard Arkwright - Water Frame
He created a spinning machine that had a capacity of several hundred spindles and used waterpower; it therefore required a larger and more specialized mill — a factory.
Edmund Cartwright - Power Loom
He invented the power loom in order to save on labor costs. But the power looms of the factories worked poorly at first, and did not replace handlooms until the 1820s.
James Watt - Steam Engine
He invented a more efficient steam engine, patented in 1769. It superseded the early models. The steam engine was a breakthrough invention by Thomas Savery in 1698 and Thomas Newcomen in 1705 that burned coal to produce steam, which was then used to operate a pump.
Henry Cort - Puddling
In the 1780s, he developed the puddling furnace, which allowed pig iron to be refined in turn with coke. He also developed heavy-duty steam-powered rolling mills, which were capable of spewing out finished iron in every shape and form.
George Stephenson - Locomotive
British, who built the first successful steam locomotive. By 1829 his Rocket traveled on the world's first railroad line from Manchester to Liverpool at average speed of 24 miles per hour. By the 1840s the era of railroad construction had begun in Europe and the US.
Crystal Palace
The location of the Great Exhibition in 1851 in London; an architectural masterpiece made entirely of glass and iron.
Thomas Malthus / Essay on the Principle of Population
A skeptic of the industrial revolution who believed population would exceed production; an eighteenth-century English intellectual who warned that population growth threatened future generations because, in his view, population growth would always outstrip increases in agricultural production.
David Ricardo / Iron Law of Wages
He proposed the iron law of wages, which was a theory proposed suggesting that the pressure of population growth prevents wages from rising above the subsistence level.
Friedrich List / National System of Political Economy
German who wrote National System of Political Economy in 1841. He thought political economy as advocated in England was self-serving to England but that other economies need to build economies — infrastructures and cities to compete. Therefore they would need to erect tariff barriers to protect themselves from competition while getting started. He was inspired by H. Clay's American System in which he advocated a national system of political economy. He also said there was no universal theory of economics which applies to all countries at all times. He advocated industrialization by railroad building and protective tariffs.
Economic Nationalism
A term used to describe policies which emphasize on domestic control of the economy, labor and capital formation, even if this requires the imposition of tariffs and other restrictions on the movement of labor, goods and capital.
Protective Tariff
A government's way of supporting and aiding its own economy by laying high taxes on imported goods from other countries, as when the French responded to cheaper British goods flooding their country by imposing high tariffs on some imported products.
Limited Liability
A form of business ownership in which the owners are liable only up to the amount of their individual investments.
Crédit Mobilier
This was a fraudulent construction company created to take the profits of the Union Pacific Railroad. Using government funds for the railroad, the Union Pacific directors gave padded construction contracts to Congress members.
Capital
An economic system in which individuals own and operate the majority of businesses that provide goods and services. Competition, supply, and demand determine which goods and services are produced, how they are produced, and how they are distributed.
Labor
Human effort directed toward producing goods and services
Class-Consciousness
Awareness of belonging to a distinct social and economic class whose interests might conflict with those of other classes.
Luddites
Group of handicraft workers who attacked factories in northern England in 1811 and later, smashing the new machines that they believed were putting them out of work.
Robert Owen
British cotton manufacturer, who believed that humans would reveal their true natural goodness if they lived in a cooperative environment. He tested his theories at New Lanark, Scotland and New Harmony, and Indiana, but failed.
Separate Spheres
A gender division of labor with the wife at home as mother and homemaker and the husband as wage earner.
Factory Act of 1833
English laws that limited the workday of child laborers and set minimum hygiene and safety requirements.
Mines Act of 1842
English law prohibiting underground work for all women and girls as well as for boys under ten.
Combination Acts of 1799
British laws passed in 1799 that outlawed unions and strikes, favoring capitalist business people over skilled artisans. Bitterly resented and widely disregarded by many craft guilds, the acts were repealed by Parliament in 1824.
Amalgamated Society of Engineers
This union, founded in 1851, introduced a new union model that was to abandon the work of the Chartists and Robert Owen, to take unions out of politics, and to concentrate on advancing the interests of individual trades. They did this by accumulating funds that could be used as insurance for their members or attracting new members while avoiding strikes. Such hospitable and reasonable actions by the working class inspired Disraeli to give them the right to vote in 1867.
Chartists
Reformers who wanted changes like universal male suffrage; the secret ballot; and payment for members of Parliament, so that even workingmen could afford to enter politics. This group supported a document called the People's Charter.
Second Industrial Revolution
Involved development of chemical, electrical, oil, and steel industries. Mass production of consumer goods also developed at this time through the mechanization of the manufacture of food and clothing. It saw the popularization of cinema and radio and provided widespread employment and increased production.
Capitalism, Free Market, Market Economy
An economic theory or policy of the absence of restrictions or tariffs on goods imported into a country. There is no "protection" in the form of tariffs against foreign competition. Prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear of monopolies. It was based on private ownership of capital.
Laissez-Faire
Policy that government should interfere as little as possible in the nation's economy.
Adam Smith / The Wealth of Nations (1776)
One of the best-known critics of government regulation of trade and industry and a leading figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. He developed the general idea of freedom of enterprise and established the basis for modern economics in his groundbreaking work Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He also criticized guilds for their stifling and outmoded restrictions, advocating a more highly developed "division of labor," which entailed separating craft production into individual tasks to increase workers' speed and efficiency. He argued that government should limit itself to "only three duties," and he believed that the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive market would be sufficient to improve the living conditions of citizens, a view that quickly emerged as the classic argument for economic liberalism.
Socialism, Mixed Economy
An economy in which private enterprise exists in combination with a considerable amount of government regulation and promotion; a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution,of capital, land, etc. in the community as a whole.
Utopian Socialists
Early nineteenth-century socialists who hoped to replace the overly competitive capitalist structure with planned communities guided by a spirit of cooperation. Leading French utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier and Louis Blanc believed that property should be communally owned.
Henri de Saint-Simon
This man was one of the early and influential socialist thinkers who proclaimed the tremendous possibilities of industrial development. He believed scientific thinking should be applied to society and society should be led by an intellectual class who can improve society.
Charles Fourier
French doctrinaire thinker who subjected all institutions to sweeping condemnation. He advocated "phalanstries" or small self-sufficient communes and a system of social and economic organization. None of those experiments that were tried in France succeeded. However, Brook Farms, on a similar principle, was run for about 5 years in America.
Louis Blanc
A Paris journalist, editor of Revue de Progres and author of Organization of Work. He proposed social workshops and that the state should support manufacturing centers as a way to deal with the problems of industrialization. He recognized the developing hostility toward the owning class/bourgeoisie.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
A self-educated printer who wrote a pamphlet in 1840 titled "What Is Property?" His answer was that it was nothing but theft. Property was a profit that was stolen from the worker, who was the source of all wealth. Unlike most socialists, Proudhon feared the power of the state and was often considered an anarchist.
Communism, Command Economy, Marxian Socialism
A theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state; An economic system controlled by strong, centralized government, which usually focuses on industrial goods with little attention paid to agriculture and consumer goods; Based on Marxist ideas and the Communist Manifesto, this was the idea that the lower classes needed to fight the upper classes and eventually create a system in which society was built on industry and there was no private property.
Friedrich Engels / The Condition of the Working Class in England
Another German communist who aided Marx in writing The Communist Manifesto. He was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of communist theory, alongside Karl Marx. He scorned the Utopian socialists and believed the social problems of the nineteenth century were inevitable results of a capitalist economy. He and Marx had a very cynical view of police, law, art, and religion, believing that they were all agents of capitalism that served the purposes of capitalists.
Karl Marx
A nineteenth century philosopher, political economist, sociologist, humanist, political theorist, and revolutionary. He is often recognized as the father of communism. His analysis of history led to his belief that communism would replace capitalism as it replaced feudalism. He also believed in a classless society.
Marx and Engels / The Communist Manifesto (1848)
A book written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that describes the new political system of scientific socialism, which becomes the basis for communism. The book states that all of human history is based on the conflict between the bourgeoisie (those who own the means of production) and the proletariat (working class), and predicted that the proletariat would rise up in a violent revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie and create a society with an equal distribution of goods and services.
Zollverein
A German customs union founded to increase trade and stimulate revenues of its members decades before unification. Austria was notoriously left out of the union causing tension between the two rivals.
William Wordsworth
An English poet who helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature. He is best known for his poems on nature and the human experience, particularly in his work "Lyrical Ballads" co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
