AP European History Lecture Notes Review

Flashcards covering key vocabulary from the Renaissance and Exploration through Globalization.

Italian Renaissance

Rebirth of interest in classical antiquity (Greco-Roman) that impacted education, culture, and art.

Francesco Petrarch

Father of humanism, the main intellectual component of the Renaissance.

Humanism

Belief that human nature and achievements, evident in the classics, were worthy of admiration and contemplation.

Civic Humanism

Encouraged scholars to read ancient Greco-Roman documents that educated them on how to become a better citizen.

Individualism

Optimism and self-confidence in one’s own achievements and pursuit of knowledge.

Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Asserted that humans were at the center of divine creation because of their unique gift of free will.

Patronage

Wealthy and influential Italians, such as the Medici family, used their wealth to support the art. Commissioned art was used to glorify these families and their cities.

Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince

Encouraged leaders to learn from the shrewd and ruthless tactics of Roman emperors. He believed that leaders should neither be loved, nor hated, but feared.

Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier

Became a manual of proper behavior for upper-class men and women. It also influenced the separate spheres model of gender inequality.

Northern Renaissance

Retained a more religious focus, which resulted in more human-centered naturalism that considered individuals and everyday life appropriate objects of artistic representation.

Christian Humanism

Employed Renaissance learning in the service of religious reform.

Spanish Inquisition

Ordered Spain’s Jewish population to either convert to Catholicism (and become “conversos”) or leave the country.

1492 Treaty of Tordesillas

Spain and Portugal made an agreement through the Catholic Church over who can claim which areas in the New World.

Smallpox

deadly European disease that decimated hundreds of thousands of indigenous Americans and greatly contributed to the success of Spanish colonization.

Criticisms of the Catholic Church

Corruption within the Church, including simony, nepotism, pluralism/absenteeism, and the selling of indulgences.

Martin Luther

Believed that salvation is initiated by God (not the Church), authority is rested in the Bible alone, and that the Church should not be a hierarchical clerical institution.

Predestination

The concept that men cannot actively work to achieve salvation; God already decided who would be saved and who would be damned.

Peace of Augsburg

Each territory in the Holy Roman Empire would be able to decide whether it was Catholic or Protestant.

Catholic Reformation (Counter-Reformation)

Launched by the Catholic Church in an attempt to purify its image and take back supporters.

Pope Paul III’s mid-16th century Council of Trent

Addressed what reforms had to be made in the Church. The Council laid a solid basis for the spiritual renewal of the Catholic Church and its faith, organization, and practice.

Politique

Sacrificed religious principles for political necessity. He sacrificed his Protestantism in order to lead effectively.

Bohemian Phase (1618-1625) of the Thirty Years’ War

Started with the defenestration of Prague in 1618, when Calvinist rebels threw Bohemian royal council members out of a window.

Edict of Restitution

Gave the Holy Roman Empire back all of the German states that were secularized with the Peace of Augsburg.

Peace of Westphalia (1648)

Concluded the Thirty Years’ War.

Austria, Prussia, and Russia

Strengthened their national unities and state authorities most notably by establishing a permanent government system and military roster.

Henry IV (past Henry of Navarre; r. 1589-1610)

Defused religious tensions and rebuilt France’s economy after inheriting a France wrecked from religious wars. He founded the Bourbon dynasty.

Edict of Nantes (1589)

Allowed Huguenots (French Protestants) the right to worship in 150 traditionally Protestant towns throughout France.

Fronde

Occurred in 1648-1653 as a result of the failure of Cardinal Jules Mazarin to meet the costs of the Thirty Years’ War.

Louis XIV, the “Sun King,”

Based his authority on the concept that kings were God’s rulers on Earth.

Louis XIV's court of Versailles

Location of government where he made France’s noble families stay at all times to jockey for power and favors from the King.

Edict of Fountainbleu

Revoked king Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes with his own Edict of Fountainbleu in 1685, causing 200,000 Protestants to flee from France.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Applied mercantilist policies to France.

Mercantilism

A system of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power of the state based on the belief that a nation’s international power was based on its wealth, specifically its supply of gold and silver.

English Civil War

Stuart Absolutism leads to this (1642-1651). English citizens were debating taxing authority, state religion, and sovereignty.

James I

Believed in the divine right of kings and attempted to rule as an absolutist monarch.

Charles I

Attempted to make England even more absolutist; he tried to implement ship money, a tax without parliamentary approval.

Charles II

Issued the Declaration of Indulgence, the non-enforcement of laws against Catholics in England.

James II

Was an open Papist (Catholic). He dismissed his Lord of the Treasury after he refused to convert to Catholicism.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Developed the idea of heliocentrism: the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the universe, and the stars and planets revolved around it.

Johannes Kepler

Developed the 3 laws of planetary motion.

Galileo Galilei

Developed the law of inertia: motion, not rest, is the natural state of an object, and that an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by some external force.

Isaac Newton

Developed the law of universal gravitation: all objects are attracted to one another and the force of attraction is proportional to the object’s quantity of matter and is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Industrious Revolution

Families in northwestern Europe focused on earning wages rather than producing goods for household consumption.

Enlightenment

Thinkers of this believed in progress, freedom of thought and expression, education of the masses (including women), liberty to all men (battle against absolutism), and individualism.

Philosophes

French philosophers who applied scientific reasoning to human nature.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Argued for equal rights (excluding women and nonwhite races) and that government policy should reflect the general will of the people. He believed that man needs a strong absolutist centralized power and he attacked private property.

Montesquieu

Believed in separation of political powers in government. He believed there were only 3 types of government (monarchy, republicanism, and despotism).

Rationalism

A secular, critical way of thinking in which nothing was to be accepted on faith and everything was to be submitted to reason.

Utilitarianism

Social policies should promote the “greatest good for the greatest number.”

Deism

belief in a distant God but denial of organized religion, basing one’s belief on the light of reason.

Enlightened Despots

Authoritarian leaders who used their political power according to the principles of the Enlightenment.

Seven Years’ War

Non religious colonial/global balance of power conflict (1756-1763).

Liberal Phase (1789-1792) of the French Revolution

Established a constitutional monarchy, increased popular participation, nationalized the Catholic Church, and abolished hereditary privileges.

Financial Crisis

France’s loss in the Seven Years’ War and investment in the American Revolution caused this for the Ancien Regime.

Marquis de Lafayette

Championed equality and other natural rights seen in the American Declaration of Independence.

First French Constitution (1791)

Giving all lawmaking power to the National Assembly.

National Convention and Committee of Public Safety

The radical of the revolution influenced by rousseau (general will).

Reign of Terror

period from 1793 to 1794 during which Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety tried and executed thousands suspected of treason and a new revolutionary culture was imposed.

Thermidorian Reaction

Occurred after the violence of the Reign of Terror in 1794, resulting in the execution of Robespierre and the loosening of economic controls.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Overthrew the Directory in 1799 in a coup d’état.

Napoleon’s Concordat of 1801

Restored Catholic worship in France.

Continental System

Attempted to halt all trade between Britain and continental Europe.

Quadruple Alliance (Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria)

Defeated Napoleon and led the “Concert of Europe,” which sought to uphold peace through conservative policies.

enclosure movement

Marked the beginning of the end for the long-used open-farming system, and the rise of capitalist market-oriented estate agriculture and the emergence of a landless rural proletariat.

Cottage industry

rural workers used hand tools in their homes to manufacture goods on a large scale for sale in a market.

1815 Corn Laws

Placed high tariffs on imported grain, benefitting the aristocracy but making food prices high for ordinary workers.

Combination Acts (1799)

Outlawed unions and strikes, favoring capitalist business people over skilled artisans.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution

Chance differences among the individual members of a given species that prove useful in the struggle for survival are selected naturally, and they gradually spread to the entire species through reproduction.

Herbert Spencer

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.”

Social Darwinism

Applying Charles Darwin’s concept of survival of the fittest to race.

Louis Pasteur

The father of vaccination. His germ theory and pasteurization significantly advanced medicine in Europe.

Karl Marx

Criticized his socialist predecessors for their fantastical utopian ideals, claiming that his version of “scientific” socialism was realistic.

Second Industrial Revolution (1815-1914)

Introduced an increase in automated factory work.

Constitutional Charter

A limited liberal constitution.

Charles X

Wanted to establish the old order in France.

Louis Napoleon

Was elected president in 1852 after the French Revolution of 1848 and went on to establish a semi-authoritarian regime.

Crimean War (1853-1856)

Fought between over Russian desires to expand into Ottoman territory and concluded in Russian defeat by France, Britain, and the Ottomans.

Austro-Hungarian Compromise

After being defeated by Prussia in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War and losing northern Italy, Austria agreed to this and established the dual-monarchy in 1867, which divided the Austrian Empire into two.

Italian Unification

Established in the 1850s under Victor Emmanuel II, the autocratic king of Sardinia-Piedmont.

Realpolitik

politics based on Machiavellian power rather than ideals.

nationalistic conservative constitution

To prepare to consolidate power, Bismarck reorganized the Prussian army and created this for the North German Confederation.

Austro-Prussian War (Seven Weeks’ War)

Established Prussia as the dominant German state.

Kellogg-Briand Pact

Was meant to eliminate the use of war to resolve conflicts.

Great Depression

Began in 1929, a massive economic downturn caused by the United States’s stock market crash struck the entire world.

Rapid industrialization of soviet russia

State-supported industrialization of Russia through the implementation of five-year plans (Gosplan) of centrally-planned production.

collectivization of agriculture

Stalin forced peasants onto this farm (socialist communal farming collectives).

Political Repression in Soviet Russia

Great Purge” in the late 1930s when Stalin purged his political opponents in the military, bureaucracy, and landowning peasants, resulting in around 1 million deaths

Germany

Had been building up its military; the H.M.S. Dreadnought battleship outperformed every other ship in history.

Schlieffen Plan

Failed when Belgium fought against the invading German forces, resulting in trench warfare and massive casualties.

Treaty of Versailles

After the armistice came to be in the allies favor and after the negotiations made at this came, the allies planned to disarm the german nations.

Appeasement

Policy of appeasement, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the French agreed that Germany should take over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, as it contained many ethnic Germans.

Adolf Hitler

Absorbed Austria into Greater Germany in 1938.

Blitzkrieg

Used by the Germans for quick conquest strategy with tanks and planes.

The European economy after the war

Had been completely eradicated from any European union and had been at constant battle with neighboring countries.

The Marshall Plan

Massive funding of the european countries post WW2 as a way to ensure economical and political stability and growth.

NATO

NATO was an anti-Soviet military alliance of Western governments meant to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Warsaw Pact

a military alliance among the U.S.S.R. and its Communist satellites (including Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.), was created in 1955.