Unit 7 · 19th-Century Perspectives and Political Developments

Dual Monarchy (Austria-Hungary) ● (core concept) — The 1867 creation recognizing the political power of the largest ethnic minority, an attempt to stabilize the state by reconfiguring national unity.

Nationalism ● (core concept) — The belief that people sharing language, culture, or history should form their own sovereign state.

Zionism ● (core concept) — A form of Jewish nationalism that developed late in the 19th century as a response to growing anti-Semitism throughout Europe.

Nation-state ○ — A sovereign state whose citizens share a common national identity.

Alliance system ● (core concept) — The rival networks of alliances dividing Europe into armed camps before World War I.

Camillo di Cavour ● (core concept) — Piedmontese statesman who engineered northern Italian unification; an illustrative example.

Crimean War ● (core concept) — The war that demonstrated Ottoman weakness and contributed to the breakdown of the Concert of Europe, creating conditions for Italian and German unification.

German unification ● (core concept) — The Bismarck-led unification of German states into the German Empire.

Giuseppe Garibaldi ● (core concept) — Military leader whose campaigns helped unify southern Italy; an illustrative example.

Italian unification (Risorgimento) ● (core concept) — The mid-19th-century movement uniting Italy's states into a single kingdom.

Otto von Bismarck ● (core concept) — Prussian statesman who unified Germany through diplomacy and war.

Realpolitik ● (core concept) — Bismarck's pragmatic politics of power over principle.

"Blood and iron" ○ — Bismarck's phrase for unifying Germany through military force; an illustrative example.

Franco-Prussian War ○ — The war between France and Prussia that completed German unification; an illustrative example.

Triple Alliance and Triple Entente ○ — The rival pre-WWI alliance blocs; illustrative examples of the alliance system.

Charles Darwin ● (core concept) — Naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection challenged traditional views of human origins.

Social Darwinism ● (core concept) — The misapplication of evolutionary ideas to justify inequality, imperialism, and racism.

Theory of evolution (natural selection) ● (core concept) — Darwin's theory that species change over time through the survival of best-adapted individuals.

Freudian psychology ● (core concept) — Freud's new account of human nature emphasizing the irrational and the struggle between the conscious and subconscious.

Positivism ● (core concept) — The philosophy that science alone provides knowledge, emphasizing the rational and scientific analysis of nature and human affairs.

Quantum mechanics ● (core concept) — Developments in the natural sciences that challenged Newtonian certainty and the faith in objective knowledge.

Theory of relativity ● (core concept) — Einstein's theory that, with quantum mechanics, undermined the primacy of Newtonian physics as an objective description of nature.

New Imperialism ● (core concept) — The late-19th-century scramble by European powers to seize colonies in Africa and Asia.

Civilizing mission ○ — The racist ideology justifying imperialism as uplifting colonized peoples; an illustrative example.

Congo Free State ○ — Leopold II's brutal personal colony in Africa; an illustrative example of New Imperialism's abuses.

Germ theory ○ — The discovery that microorganisms cause disease, revolutionizing medicine; an illustrative example of the Age of Progress.

Louis Pasteur ○ — Scientist whose germ theory and vaccines illustrate the Age of Progress.

Colonial resistance movements ● (core concept) — Uprisings and movements opposing European imperial rule; illustrative examples of imperialism's global effects.

Berlin Conference ○ — The meeting regulating European claims in Africa; an illustrative example of New Imperialism's methods.

Impressionism ● (core concept) — The painting movement capturing light and fleeting moments, breaking from academic tradition.

Realism ● (core concept) — The artistic and literary movement depicting everyday life and social problems without idealization.

Claude Monet ○ — An illustrative example of Impressionist painting.