3 Principal artists and works Michelangelo, Slave, known as Rebel, sculpture, c.1513, acquired 1794 Michelangelo, Slave, known as Dying or Asleep, sculpture, c.1513, acquired 1794 Venus de Milo, sculpture, late Hellenistic, acquired 1827 Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, painting, 1501–6, acquired 1519 Cimabue, Maestà , painting, c.1270, acquired 1814 Diana of the Louvre (also known as Diana of Versailles), sculpture, Roman copy of Greek o
2.1 Introduction The original TV programme was divided into an introduction and seven sections, each preceded by a simple question that appears on screen. To help you to explore this material, we have split the programme into eight clips, each associated with an activity. Once you have completed all the activities, you will have viewed the TV programme in its entirety and considered some of the questions explored in the original OU course.
5.2 The aftermath of the Holocaust In interwar Europe ethnic Germans had been in an overwhelming majority in the populations of both Germany and Austria. In addition, the two largest minorities spread across the states of interwar Europe, and particularly the states of the centre and east, had been Germans and Jews. The war and the Holocaust produced ‘solutions’ to the questions of both minorities. The Jews of central and eastern Europe who survived were often unwilling to return to their former homes; indeed, many of thos
4.2 Who to blame Browning developed his work on Police Battalion 101 into a book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992b). The same material was subsequently used, and reinterpreted, by Daniel J. Goldhagen for Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996). Goldhagen points the finger of blame for the Holocaust precisely at Germany. The Holocaust was, he stresses, a German phenomenon, and he argues that it built on what he det
1.3 Eugenics Just as anti-Semitism was not unique to Nazi Germany, neither were ideas of racial superiority or attempts to create a society peopled by ‘better’ human beings. Politicians, scientists and social commentators in many European countries expressed concern about the ‘degeneracy’ of their respective ‘national stock’ in the years before World War I. Sir Francis Galton – scientist, anthropologist, cousin of Charles Darwin and inspired by his work – had coined the word ‘eugenics’
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
Box 1 A note on Egyptian scripts and numerals
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