1.2 Anti-Semitism Anti-Semitism was not an invention of the twentieth century, nor was it simply a German phenomenon. In the years before 1914 violent pogroms were directed against Jews, who were made scapegoats for the problems of the Russian Empire. The flight of Jews from the east, first to escape the violent prejudices unleashed periodically in Tsarist Russia and then to escape the upheavals in the aftermath of World War I, sharpened the anti-Semitism which was already to be found in the west of Europe. Th
Introduction This unit explores the Holocaust, as the destruction of European Jewry is commonly known. The mass killing represented by the Holocaust raises many questions concerning the development of European civilisation during the twentieth century. This unit, therefore, covers essential ground if you wish to understand this development. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course
10 Comparing and contrasting Often you will find that an assignment asks you to ‘compare and contrast’ poems. There's a very good reason for this, for often it is only by considering different treatments of similar subjects that we become aware of a range of possibilities, and begin to understand why particular choices have been made. You will have realised that often in the previous discussions I've used a similar strategy, showing, for example, how we can describe the rhyme scheme of ‘Love From the North’ as si
3 Rhythm All speech has rhythm because we naturally stress some words or syllables more than others. The rhythm can sometimes be very regular and pronounced, as in a children's nursery rhyme – ‘JACK and JILL went UP the HILL’ – but even in the most ordinary sentence the important words are given more stress. In poetry, rhythm is extremely important: patterns are deliberately created and repeated for varying effects. The rhythmical pattern of a poem is called its metre, and we can analyse, or â
1 Approaching poetry What is the point of analysing poetry? One simple answer is that the more we know about anything the more interesting it becomes: listening to music or looking at paintings with someone who can tell us a little about what we hear or see – or what we‘re reading – is one way of increasing our understanding and pleasure. That may mean learning something about the people who produced the writing, music, painting that we are interested in, and why they produced it. But it may also mean under
1.1.2 Egyptian calculation The earliest Egyptian script was hieroglyphic, used from before 3000 BC until the early centuries AD. Initially an all-purpose script, it was eventually used only for monumental stone-carving and formal inscriptions. It had been superseded (by abou Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: know something about how hieroglyphs were used to represent numbers and the nature of the problems that have survived; understand that Egyptian calculation was fundamentally additive. Operations such as doubling and halving being used for multiplication and division; appreciate the advanced understanding of mathematics in Ancient Egypt in relation to the manipulation of fractions; consid Introduction For many centuries, ancient Egypt was seen as the source of wisdom and knowledge, about mathematics as well as other things. There was a long classical Greek tradition to this effect, and in later centuries the indecipherability of the hieroglyphs did nothing to dispel this belief. But since the early nineteenth century, when the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone by Young and Champollion enabled rapid progress to be made in translating extant Egyptian texts, the picture has changed to reveal a Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence. Courtesy of Lanterna at Flickr All other materials included in this unit are derived from conten 1.9 Further reading Doblhofer, Ernst, Voices in Stone (Paladin, 1973; orig. edn. 1957). Not especially mathematical, but a good account of the decipherment of hieroglyphs and cuneiform texts if you want to follow that up. Flegg, Graham, Numbers (Penguin, 1984; orig. edn. 1983). A book packed with much more information about numbers and their history than we have time for during the course. Friberg, Jöran, ‘Methods and Traditions of Babylonian Mathematics’, Historia Mathematics 1.7 Babylonian mathematical style Not only should you have learnt through this exercise more about the Babylonian mathematical style, but also, on another level, you should have gained more experience in the endeavour of trying to understand past mathematics. The model that we have been trying out can be characterised thus: use any means, any symbolism or notation that occurs to you, to find your way into the problem, then check rigorously to see how much of your new understanding is more a projection backwards from your own 1.5.1 Uncertain origins The tablet is called Plimpton 322, and is described by Neugebauer (The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Dover, 1969) p. 40) as ‘one of the most remarkable documents of Old-Babylonian mathematics’. The name arises simply from the fact that the tablet has catalogue number 322 in the George A. Plimpton collection at Columbia University, New York. Plimpton bought it in about 1923 from a Mr Banks who lived in Florida; it is not certain where he obtained it, but it may have been dug u 6 Conclusion William Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, two days after hearing that the legislation for the abolition of slavery in British dominions had successfully completed its passage through the House of Commons, a fitting conclusion to the work he had begun nearly half a century before. The Practical View both reflected and contributed to a major shift in religious consciousness of which the continuing growth of the Evangelical movement was the most striking manifestation. Methodist num 5.2 Wilberforce’s anti-slavery campaign in context Certainly the outcome was a positive one from Wilberforce’s point of view in that abolition of the slave trade in British ships and colonial possessions passed rapidly through both Houses of Parliament, and became law in March 1807. This result in part implied an increased receptivity to Wilberforce’s religious arguments against slavery, but there were also other factors at work. These included the advance of liberal ideas of justice and toleration, themselves reflecting the influence of 4.6 Contemporary reactions Wilberforce’s underlying conservative inclinations and his vested interest in the existing social order led him to emphasise those aspects of Christianity that are conducive to stability rather than the more radical strands of Jesus’ teaching. Nevertheless, there is no doubt of Wilberforce’s absolute conviction of the reality of an afterlife and, consequently, of the spiritual perspective in which life as we know it has to be viewed. Herein was an outlook fundamentally different from th 4.5 The interaction of religion and society Now read the previous extract again with the associated commentary which draws out the key points and their significance, particularly in helping to understand the interaction of religion and society at this time. Wilberfor 4.3 Religion and political stability Wilberforce’s whole approach is strong indirect testimony to the predominance among his contemporaries of the kinds of religious outlook he is criticising, although objective evaluation requires a detachment from his own Evangelical zeal. Certainly his portrayal of the dominant tone of late eighteenth-century Christianity as one of undemanding endorsement of social harmony, decency and good neighbourliness rings true. A leading theological influence was that of William Paley (1743–1805) w 4.1 The impact of A Practical View
A Practical View is significant both as a kind of ‘manifesto’ by a prominent figure in a religious movement of rapidly expanding influence, and as part of an ongoing process of reflection on the state of British politics and society in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Wilberforce had been working on it intermittently for four years before its eventual publication on 12 April 1797. As a busy politician he struggled to find the time for sustained writing. He had initially had 3 Britain in the 1790s A problem that has exercised historians for many years is, put in its most concise form: why was there no revolution in Britain in the 1790s? The question is a significant one here, because religious factors have formed an important strand in the answers that have been given. The intellectual trend was set by the publication in 1913 of England in 1815, in which the French historian Elie Halévy (1870–1937) argued that the growth of Methodism in this period was a key factor in the Bri 1.3 Wilberforce’s ‘Conversion’ to Evangelicalism Wilberforce’s religious ‘conversion’ in 1785 was profound but not instantaneous. Through the influence of Isaac Milner, an Evangelical clergyman who was his companion on extended journeys on the Continent, he first became intellectually convinced of the truth of Christian doctrines that he had doubted in the early 1780s. This process of rational argument, study and consideration was characteristic of an Enlightenment way of thinking, even if the conclusion was diametrically opposed to t
Box 1 A note on Egyptian scripts and numerals
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Exercise 4
