Historical events and people: a discussion of key influences

¶ … History of Modern Medicine

Taj Mahal

The Taj Mahal is India's most famous architectural structure. It is actually a beautifully preserved tomb whose name is translated as "Crown Palace." It dates back to the Seventeenth Century and the reign of the Fifth Mughal Emperor as a tribute to his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal who died as the result of public rebellion against the regime after bearing her husband's fourteenth child. The original construction of the TAJ was inspired by the Persian Princess' request of her husband before her death.

The Life and Work of Galileo

Galileo Galilee was a Sixteenth Century inventor and astronomer who revolutionized man's understanding of the universe and the Earth's relationship to the Solar System, in particular. Among Galileo's most important contributions where the demonstration that objects of different mass all fall at the same rate and the confirmation of Copernican's view that the Solar System was heliocentric and not geocentric. Galileo was eventually confined by the Pope to house arrest for publishing his heretical astronomical observations.

3. Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau was a Seventeenth Century (1712-1778) political philosopher originally from Geneva, Switzerland. He contributed important writings in the area of human morality and its connection to government and society.

4. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a Nineteenth Century British intellectual whose father held a seat in the British Parliament. Instead of flowing in his father's footsteps, Shelley became a radical writer who vehemently opposed oppressive government and advocated political reform and atheism. As a result, he was expelled from Oxford University and all but disowned by his father.

5. The History of the American Abolitionist Movement

The official establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society was in 1833, but the abolitionist movement against slavery in the United States actually predated that by decades. In fact, abolitionist literature had been published and circulated and conventions held in opposition to slavery as early as the late Eighteenth Century.

6. Verdi

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian composer who lived from 1813 to 1901. Among his most well-known operas that are still widely performed today are La Rigoletto (1851), La Traviata (1853), and Otello (1887).

7. The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower is one of the world's most historic landmarks. It is located in Paris, France and was built in two years by Gustave Eiffel and completed in 1889. The structure is made entirely from iron and its shape is the product of a mathematical equation that guarantees its structural stability in the wind.

8. Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was a psychologically troubled post-impressionist Nineteenth Century artist and painter from Holland in the Netherlands who only sold one painting during his lifetime. He committed suicide at the age of 37 but produced many works of art during a three-year period that are some of the world's best known paintings today.

9. Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a prolific early Twentieth Century writer. An Austrian Jew, Kafka was intellectually gifted but weakened by disease and emotionally dependent on his parents all his life. His works were never published during his life time and were only published by a friend posthumously and in spite of his instructions that his writings be destroyed after his death.

10. Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian who fought for Germany during the First World War. Afterwards, he led an unsuccessful coupe attempt against the German government for which he was briefly imprisoned. During his sentence he authored Mein Kampf ("My struggle") in which he introduced his anti-Semitic theories. In the next two decades he managed to rise to power and establish the Nazi regime that triggered World War II, resulted in more than 50 million deaths worldwide, and left the infamous history of the brutal Jewish Holocaust throughout Europe.

11. Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical perspective that emphasizes the larger reality of the external world beyond the specific human needs or goals of the individual. Its two most influential contributors are Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.

12. Information on the origins of Jazz

Generally, Jazz is believed to have originated in New Orleans, Louisiana after the Creoles who were originally from the West Indies and lived under Spanish and then French rule became American through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France. A series of racial segregation measures forced the well educated and classically trained black Creoles to live with uneducated, newly freed American slaves. Jazz evolved from the combination of the musical influences of the two different cultures.

13. Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz was a Twentieth Century Mexican writer and poet and was also a publisher and a diplomat. His writings were heavily influenced by his political beliefs and his intense criticisms of specific political philosophies like Marxism and Stalinism.

14. How does the theater of the absurd reflect the quest for meaning at mid-century? How about the poetry of Eliot and other poets at mid-century?

The so-called "theater of the absurd" can be thought of as the expression of intellectual freedom of the early Twentieth Century. It explored themes and plots that were unconventional and that tested the audience's imagination. Likewise, the poetry of T.S. Eliot and others of the time introduced a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness and light-hearted prose that was also radical in relation to classical poetry and art in general. 15. How is ethnicity and ethnic identity shown in the arts?

Generally, all cultures represent aspects of self-image as well as the manner in which they regard others in their artistic expressions. Cultures typically emphasize culturally important and recognizable images and themes from their societies and they depict other cultures in accordance with the way they regard them.

16. How has high technology and the information explosion influenced late twentieth and early twenty-first-century culture, arts, and literature?

High technology has revolutionized contemporary culture, art, and literature as radically as the printing press and freedom of artistic expression did centuries earlier. Today, social culture is much more dynamic than ever before, largely because of the speed and range of communications media. The same is true about art and literature in addition to the fact that the individual artist and writer no longer have to rely on third-party publishers and their opinions or decisions about the worth of their work in order to publish and distribute it very widely.