WW: Chapter 16 (pages 798-811)

     This part of the chapter explains how there were small revolutions occurring throughout Europe in the 1800's. As a result of these small revolutions, social equality was vastly improved and foreign rule seemed to be a thing of the past. I feel as if these revolutions unified people who shared the same beliefs. This is why equality had such a huge emphasis and took a big part of the reason as to why these revolutions occurred in the first place. 

     Something that ended around this time period was slavery. It was abolished between 1780 and 1890, for the most part. A reason why slavery was abolished was due to the fact that Enlightenment thinkers were pretty critical of it. They believed that it was immoral to have someone be someone else's property. Two very specific examples being the Americans and the French. They tried to address the fact that anyone who was identified with the term "slave" lacked the right to liberty, as well as the right to equality. It was not just the almighty and powerful who thought abolishing slavery was necessary, religious groups, such as Protestant evangelicals, also shared the same beliefs and became extremely vocal when it came to the issue of slavery. People also believed that slavery was out of date. However, in some cases very drastic measures were taken to abolish slavery. For example, in the United States it took the Civil War to settle the dispute between the Union and the Confederates and the whole situation revolving around slavery. However, just because the abolition of slavery took place doesn't necessarily mean that the living conditions for the people who used to live under slavery improved. 

     The chapter goes on to explain how people gained a sense of nationalism. People bought into the idea of belonging to one nation, hence the term nationalism. Before, people had thought that they only belonged to things such as clans, villages, or legions, as opposed to one entire nation. As people started to embrace nationalism and began to be enlightened by things such as science, religion soon started to lose its grip on the control it had held on people for so long. Nationalism was its own renaissance for the cultural identity of people across the world. By the time that the nineteenth century came around, nationalism was a force to be reckoned with. This fueled the tensions between European nations. They ended up fighting over things such as colonies across the world. Another example would be World War I.  

     The chapter also went on to talk about Feminist movements. European Enlightenment thinkers were often questioning the belief that women were somehow inferior to men. The first organized feminist meeting was a conference that was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.