Primary Sources from the Age of Anxiety, 1900-1940

Chapter 27 studies the intellectual and cultural history of modern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. This assignment enables students to evaluate the upheaval in ideas and science, the religious revival, and the artistic and architectural innovations that signaled a marked departure from the assumptions that many Europeans had inherited from the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

The objective is to research one individual’s ideas in a selection from their own writing or intellectual production. The excerpt from the primary source should be approximately one page in length. These can be found quite easily via the Internet. Then, students should introduce the text with a paragraph that identifies the individual’s main idea and how it challenged pre-existing notions. Third, the primary source should be followed by two or three comprehension questions for blog readers to consider. Finally, the whole exercise should be posted to our class blog below and appropriately cited using EasyBib to format references according to MLA style.

Primary Sources from the Age of Anxiety, 1900-1940

Chapter 27 studies the intellectual and cultural history of modern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. This assignment enables students to evaluate the upheaval in ideas and science, the religious revival, and the artistic and architectural innovations that signaled a marked departure from the assumptions that many Europeans had inherited from the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

The objective is to research one individual’s ideas in a selection from their own writing or intellectual production. The excerpt from the primary source should be approximately one page in length. These can be found quite easily via the Internet. Then, students should introduce the text with a paragraph that identifies the individual’s main idea and how it challenged pre-existing notions. Third, the primary source should be followed by two or three comprehension questions for blog readers to consider. Finally, the whole exercise should be posted to our class blog below and appropriately cited using EasyBib to format references according to MLA style.

Historiography of the French Revolution

What is your interpretation/ thesis of the origins of the French Revolution?


You may endorse one of the views you have read for class or may wish to compose an original thesis. In either case, it should be concise. 


A. de Tocqueville: The administrative centralization of the Old Regime failed to grant greater political participation to the middle classes and writers, who created alternative centers of authority which detested inequality and envisioned alternative political organizations. 


D. Mornet: The ideas of the Enlightenment spread to literate elites in the city and across the countryside who fought for greater liberty and equality since the Old Regime did not provide them with opportunities for finding employment and social mobility. 


A. Soboul: The rising middle class (bourgeoisie) revolted against the Old Regime because it desired greater economic liberty and legal equality to replace feudalism with capitalism by winning the sans-culottes to its side, since both social classes lacked legal privileges. 


R. Chartier: The desacralization of the monarchy constituted a cultural origin to the French Revolution since French subjects no longer treated the king with the respect due to a monarch possessing the divine right to rule, which made it possible to oppose the absolute monarchy culminating in Louis XVI's execution.