Western Civ Final Exam

Spend 80 minutes.

Open book; open note.

Use specifics illustrating your answers; discuss the significance of these specifics.

Here's a link to a printable WORD file with the exam.

Or, it's printed below....

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WESTERN CIVILIZATION – Final Exam

Allot one hour and twenty minutes (80 minutes) to complete this exam. Open book, open note examination.

Remember, as you write your essays, use specifics. History writing is big ideas and interconnected stories illustrated by specific people, events and dates. An excellent essay puts these many specific historical details into an understandable and interesting contect.

1. Choose one of the following two questions and write an essay discussion. (40 points – 30 minutes)
A. Why did the industrial revolution happen in England? Discuss the factors -- social, demographic, geographic, political, religious, technological and perspectives/outlooks of the English -- that made 18th and 19th century England the first to industrialize. In your discussion, theorize specifically why any of the great Pre-Renaissance civilizations/peoples (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Medieval Christian) did not have a similar “industrial revolution.”

B. Discuss the decline of medieval feudalism and development of nations, national governments, and national political identities after the Renaissance. In your discussion include most (if not all of the following people/events): Magna Carta, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, absolutism, Louis XIV, Oliver Cromwell, Maximelien Robespierre, American Revolution, democracy.

2. (20 points – 15 minutes)

In the 500 years after the Renaissance, Western Civilization is increasingly the study of the emergence if the individual and the story of how an individual’s revolutionary ideas, courage, or actions can change the history of the world. Pick three to five individuals from the last 500 years who you feel had the greatest impact on the last 500 years of Western Civilization .

3. (20 Points – 10 minutes) Short Answer – Two sentences (choose 10 of 16: one to identity this person, thing, or event (with a rough date) and one to identify the significance of this person/thing to an understanding of Western Civilization.
a. Henry VIII
b. Ignatius Loyola
c. Crystal Palace
d. Bernini
e. Francis Bacon
f. Fall of Constantinople
g. Rousseau
h. Spinning Jenny
i. Charles I of England
j. Spanish Armada
k. Versailles
l. The Welsh Longbow
m. Vasco da Gama
n. John Calvin
o. Pizarro
p. Baroque Art

4. (20 Points – 15 minutes) We live today in an extremely faced paced world of mass communication, 24 hour news, cultural fads, and world travel; we are surrounded by an ever-changing variety of material things different from a generation ago and unknown a century ago. We live in a world that is easy to remove from its roots in the Western Civilization we have studied this semester. In this essay, examine traces of the “Four Pillars” – the Greco-Roman; the Medieval Christian; the Renaissance Individual; and the Modern Revolutionary – that you see in specific examples your American world, beliefs, perspectives. (Look to politics, economics, religions, art and architecture, high and low culture to find these traces – yet do not be confined to this areas....)

5. Extra Credit (5 points) List at least 6 examples of oppression (with at least one specific date and person or event) from Anna’s “Oppression Lecture” .