The Reign of Terror

    The Reign of Terror was a tragic period of time during the French Revolution. The exact start date is a bit of a debate. Some historians say that the September Massacres, when a series of prisoners were murdered in 1792, marks the beginning while others argue it back in 1789. Either way, everyone knows that Maximilien Robespierre had a large amount of influence over the events during the Revolution. Robespierre was known as the Incorruptible because he was too moral. People of the time had mixed opinions about him. Some saw him as a great leader while others swore he was the devil. He ordered executions, mass incarcerations, and just fear in general. There are 16,594 total recorded death sentences during this time. There were even more people given jail sentences. The 22^nd Law Prairial gave him the unnecessary ability to convict anyone of a crime against the Revolution. This power only led to an increase in deaths. In addition to the executions, news outlets were not even able to show how much damage he was doing because they were heavily censored to protect Robespierre. Despite all of the fear caused by this one man, a group of rebels formed to take him out of power. This plan is better known as the Thermidorian Reaction. The group overcame the Committee of Public Safety, made to prevent internal rebellion, and arrested Robespierre. With the fall of Robespierre in 1794 the Terror also officially ended, but the effects were felt for generations.

Youtube video with more information: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOuA-u6Me7o

Censer, Jack R., “Historians Revisit the Terror-Again.” Journal of Social History, vol. 48 no. 2, Oxford University Press, 2014. doi:10.1093/jsh/shu077.

Fairfax-Cholmeley, Alex. “Reliving the Terror: Victims and Print Culture during the Thermidorian Reaction in France, 1794–1795.” Wiley-Blackwell, 2019, file:///Users/katiehudnell/Downloads/Lit%20in%20Eng%202/Timeline%20source.pdf.

Hitchcock, James. “Saved Through Fire: France’s Reign of Terror & the Witness of the Church Militant.” Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, vol. 31, no. 6, Nov. 2018, pp. 26-33. EBSCOhost, http://web.b.ebscohost.com.proxy.library.kent.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=c077dfe4-79b5-40b3-af35-640a3f7fa738%40pdc-v-sessmgr05.

McLetchie, Scott. “Maximilien Robespierre, Master of the Terror.” Brace & Co., 1947, http://people.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1983-4/mcletchie.htm#22. 

The Penny Post

A notice describing the prices of various postage due to the introduction of the Penny Post in the UK nationwide.

Before the Penny Post, letter writing and postage was vastly more of an expensive and strenuous ordeal. According to Nestor in “New Opportunities for Self-Reflection . . .”, the cost of postage from London to Edinbburgh could total “the better part of a day’s wages for some” (5). Therefore, communication through letters was a luxury only the more privileged could afford to do on a consistent basis. To add to this, the cost of postage pre-reform was to be paid by the recipient rather than the sender. For those less privileged, especially women, they had to rely on their wealthy relatives and friends to deliver their correspondences to them, creating a barrier of sorts of communication between those of higher and lower socio-economic privileges. These high prices and the subsequent inaccessibility of communication through letters for the lower classes resulted in public outcry for postal reform, for which Queen Victoria was a proponent of (Golden). By 1840, the Penny Post was introduced nationwide in England, through Queen Victoria’s Postal Reform Act of 1839. The induction of the national Penny Post allowed for vast change in communication; first, the sender would pay the cost of the postage. This way, those without direct access to finances could still easily receive correspondence. Second, the cost that was paid could be as low as one pence (thus the name of the Penny Post). For the first time, the price of postage was so low that those previously without the resources to send and receive letters pre-reform finally had a new, more simple avenue for communication. Similar to how the advent of the internet, social media, and cell phones revolutionized communication in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Penny Post allowed for broad communication throughout Victorian England.

Nestor, Pauline. “New Opportunities for Self-Reflection and Self-Fashioning: Women,  Letters and the Novel in Mid-Victorian England.”
         Literature & History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2010, pp. 18–35.

Golden, Catherine J. Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing. University Press of Florida, 2009.

Images from: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Penny_Post

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black

1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws

COVE Timeline Assignment: 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws  

The British Corn Laws, or laws that regulated imported grains and food, were influenced by both economic and political conditions in Britain. The purpose of the tariffs were to keep people from buying forgien corn products and, in turn, force people to buy domestic corn products. This was meant to stimulate Britain's economy by enforcing domestic industry practices; it was also enacted to heavily favor the rich landholders who were invested in farmland production. The Corn Laws would not allow foreign corn into Britain unless domestic corn reached a price of 80 shillings per quarter (Vamplew 3). These laws offered a “significant degree of protection to British cereal producers” (Vamplew 11) who made huge profits from grain production. Landowners, seizing the majority of monetary profit, also retained much of the political power at the time; the act of voting was reserved for those who owned land. Thus, the beneficiaries of the Corn Laws were not the common people who were forced to buy grain at an absurdly high price, but the few lucky enough reap the benefits. 

While Britain's common people suffered from poverty, starvation and unsanitary living conditions, they were upset by the increasing price of grain products. Many had to quit their jobs because they were ill or they needed to take care of family members; those who did earn a wage used most of it to buy grain products to survive. The middle class was desperate for reform-- not wanting to suffer like those impacted by Irish in the Irish Potato Famine-- and wanted representation in their government. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, author of From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective, writes “In sum, repeal was an attempt to moderate the mounting pressures for parliamentary reform: by satisfying the middle class industrialist with repeal, the drive to gain control of parliamentary seats would cease, and, moreover, the working class Chartist movement (seeking more radical reform of Parliament) would lose momentum” (16). The repeal of the Corn Laws was a motion intended to “settle down” the middle class by lowering the cost of grain products and thus progressing to a free market economy.

In addition to political reform, the repeal of the Corn Laws may have been the aftermath of a growing population; Betty Kemp, author of “Reflections on the Repeal of the Corn Laws” writes, “The simplest argument for the repeal of the Corn Laws is that the rapid growth of population' in the nineteenth century, which made it necessary to import increasing quantities of wheat, also made it un- justifiable to tax those imports” (3). Thus, a booming need for more materials lead to the repeal of the Corn Laws. This repeal, led by Sir Robert Peel, was a victory for the middle class (Kemp 2) and “the final triumph of the Free Trade move- ment” (Thomas 2) which sought to lower prices on grain and provided the economy with various trade options.

 Supplemental Material

1. Listen to this great song for a brief history on the repealing of the Corn Laws: Repeal of the Corn Laws Song 
2. Look at this political cartoon from UKParliment.org that illustrates the divided social classes: 

 Petitions and the Corn Laws

Works Cited 

Kemp, Betty. "Reflections on the Repeal of the Corn Laws." Victorian Studies 5.3 (1962):

189-204.

Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl. From the corn laws to free trade: interests, ideas, and institutions in 

historical perspective. Mit Press, 2006.

Thomas, J. A. "The Repeal of the Corn Laws, 1846." Economica 25 (1929): 53-60.

Vamplew, Wray. "The protection of English cereal producers: the Corn Laws reassessed." The 

Economic History Review 33.3 (1980): 382-395.

The Great Exhibition

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, or the Great Exhibition for short, was an event that opened its doors on May 1, 1851. The Great Exhibition was brought about to showcase the “industry and ingeniousness of various world cultures” and to also educate the general public about the technologies that were on display (Audrey, para. 1). The majority of the exhibits that were shown had to deal with the British, about half or so, and the rest of the exhibits were set on display by other cultures.

            The Great Exhibition was accessible from May to October of 1851. Queen Victoria opened this exhibition and held it in a structure that was built for this event – the Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace was located in Hyde Park, London. The palace covered 26 acres and had over 4,000 tons of iron, over 200 miles of gutters and sash bars, and thousands and thousands of feet in wooden flooring as well as glass. The Crystal Palace resembled the “shopping arcades of Paris and London” (Audrey, para. 3). The entirety of the space was used to educate and entertain the public that wanted, and could afford, this exhibition experience.

            The first day the Great Exhibition was opened, over 25,000 people attended. Overall, over six million came to the exhibition from May to October of 1851 and many of these guests attended the exhibition more than once (Queen Victoria included). When the doors first opened, the entrance fee was about five shillings or above. But as it became clear that the exhibition was vastly popular, the price was lowered to one shilling so that the entirety of the general population could attend. After this change was made, many feared that the general population would scare away the wealthier class, but the Great Exhibition was so popular that the numbers never even dropped!

            Although this was a popular event and aimed to showcase the goods and technology of the time, no items were actually for sale in The Crystal Palace itself.  The items were just there to showcase the new and upcoming things regarding goods and technology. The Great Exhibition steered the population towards window shopping and pushed the consumers towards consumption even though nothing was immediately for sale. The space that surrounded the population had them looking from object to object with nothing but admiration. The consumers were too dazzled by their environment to pay much attention to the idea that they wouldn’t immediately be able to leave with one of the lavishing items.

Jaffe, Audrey. “On the Great Exhibition.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. 25 October 2020.

The Crimean War

Charge of the Light Brigade

The Crimean War was a battle that lasted from 1853-1856. It started when Russia threatened many European countries, such as Great Britain and France due to their desire to annex Turkey, which by then was known as the Ottoman Empire. This was especially troublesome for Britain, as Russia wanted to take over a country that was vital to their trading practices in eastern countries. This started an alliance between the Ottomans, British, French, and eventually Sardinia. This war helped the countries demonstrate the changes they put their militaries through: “developments in technology had the potential to alter radically the way in which war is fought; other changes, such as. . . the telegraph, would transform. . . how rapidly events in the East were viewed from the home front” (Markovits 1). The changes in military had helped gain wins for both sides, with Britain’s alliance ultimately winning the war. In addition to that, this was the first war to ever use such modern technology at the time, ranging from telegraphs to naval shells.

Unfortunately, there were other problems in the war aside from casualties. There was much criticism regarding mismanagement during certain battles. These criticisms were made apparent during one such battle, known as the Charge of the Light Brigade. During the battle, there was a severe miscommunication error that sent the British “headlong into retreating Russian hussars, who were fleeing from their. . . encounter with the Heavy Brigade” (Danahay 3). This mistaken order had led to extreme casualties for British troops and with no real gains for both sides. As such, the Crimean War ended up being significant due to the technological military advances at the time and the mismanagement during certain battles.

Bibliography

Danahey, Martin. “‘Valiant Lunatics’: Heroism and Insanity in British and Russian Reactions to the Charge of the Light Brigade.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [2 November 2020].

Markovits, Stefanie. “On the Crimean War and the Charge of the Light Brigade.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Timeline-Crimean-...

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Charge-Of-The-Lig...

1857 Financial Crisis

Run on the Seamen's Savings' Bank during the Panic of 1857. (Library of Congress via Wikimedia)

In 1857, Britain and the United States shared a financial crisis that began in the US and spread overseas, and which is “generally regarded as the first world-wide Financial Crisis” (Shakinovsky).

During the first 7 years of the 1850s, Britain was experiencing a period of extreme profitability and affluence. Their export market had expanded by 66% as innovations in the form of trains, steamships, and telegraphs alongside colonial expansion drove the economy to new heights.

In the United States, the crisis began on 24 August, 1857, with the fall of the Ohio State Life and Trust Company, and at its peak the panic resulted in the failure of 1,415 banks in the United States. England’s economy was heavily intermixed with the United States’, and while the spread of the panic was delayed, it did eventually prove contagious. Glasgow and Liverpool, the two cities most involved in American trade, were the first to feel the effects, with the first domino being the fall of the Liverpool Borough Bank on 27 October.

Basically, the banks had more loans, debts, and deposits than they had currency and bullion reserves, so when people lost trust in the banks and withdrew their money, the banks found their currency reserves depleting and had to close their doors.

To combat this panic, the British government suspended the Bank Charter Act of 1844, which had required banks to have bullion (gold and silver reserves) to back up all the currency in circulation. The idea of the act was that it would prevent risky speculation on the part of the banks and investors, but the booming markets and economy of the 1850s had encouraged risky ventures, which proved vulnerable as soon as the market contracted due to the panic. Suspending the act allowed for more paper currency to be issued, allowing the banks to have sufficient currency on hand. This suspension took some time to be effective, but it did eventually succeed in calming the panic and the crisis was declared officially over on December 24, 1857.

The crisis threw into stark relief the perils of the capitalist system and the growing pains of currency systems, and the issues with tying currency to physical bullion reserves amidst the growing British and world economies.

Source:

Shakinovsy, Lynn. “The 1857 Financial Crisis and the Suspension of the 1844 Bank Act.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=lynn-shakinovsky-the-1857-financial-crisis-and-the-suspension-of-the-1844-bank-act. Accessed 2 November 2020.

The Married Women's Property Act of 1870

Summary of the Act:

The Married Women’s Property Act was put forth in 1870 and later repealed in 1882 by a different property act. This act gave women married after 1870 the right to own and control various forms of property. While the act seemed to be about protecting the rights of women in a male governed society, recent historians have come to the conclusion that this act more so protected newly married couples from fraud. The act protected young women’s assets before entering into a marriage.

The women who most benefited from this act were single and widowed women. Despite this not creating equal rights for women, it did make a step in the right direction for women. Before this, once women were married all their property and any sort of wealth belonged to their husband. In addition to becoming the husband’s property, that property isn’t returned to the wife upon her husband’s death but can be instead willed away to someone else. Another part of before the act, stated that a husband could sell or give away the wife’s property at any point in their marriage. Then, however, it couldn’t be willed away.

Moral of it, married women had no control over their property once they were married. This act was important in protecting women from losing their livelihood and personal goods. A married woman could keep her earnings separate from her husband’s affairs. She could also have control over her own personal property like bank accounts, public stock and funds, and shares. Finally, this also meant she could have a more active role in society and her own life.

Sources for summary:

Combs, Mary Beth. “‘A Measure of Legal Independence’: The 1870 Married Women's Property Act and the Portfolio Allocations of British Wives.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 65, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1028–1057. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3874913. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

Griffin, Ben. “Class, Gender, and Liberalism in Parliament, 1868-1882: The Case of the Married Women's Property Acts.” The Historical Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, 2003, pp. 59–87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3133595. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020.

Supplemental Material:

This is a clip from the newest Little Women that features Amy talking to Laurie about how marriage restricts her ability to own property. She states that her money would become his and if they had children, the children would also be his. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D8nRpJsQlk

The Great Famine in India

In southern and western India, there was a large-scale crisis in which there was a scarcity of food and around six to eleven million people died. The cause of this, besides starvation, is due to increased population, increased grain prices, lack of railroads, and unfair distribution of wealth and power. In 1876, a monsoon occurred in the Deccan plateau where there was a persistent struggle for food; this did not help the peasant cultivators who were already in debt. Additionally, these cultivators dug themselves a deeper hole by selling cattle, farm tools, and land. Then, a significant drought occurred in 1877 in which cultivators lost all of their resources and eventually lost their incomes. Only the wealthy were able to purchase the increased grain prices and continue bringing in capitol. Since crops became cash crops, farmers lost additional money due to the decline in demand for cotton in India and increase in demand for cotton in America. That being said, India was losing a lot of business while the Americans were progressively gaining it. Furthermore, the government was not allowed to intervene and lower the prices of food because it would create more debt for them. However, the government was not the only group that had no empathy for the lower and middle class, “grain merchants, in fact, preferred to export a record 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Europe in 1877-78 rather than relieve starvation in India” (Davis, pg. 32). Lord Robert Bulwer-Lytton, a former Viceroy of India and diplomat, supported the Indian government’s refusal to intervene in the grain markets. This is because he believed that “he was in any case balancing budgets against lives that were already doomed or devalued of any civilized human quality” and stated that the Indian population ‘“has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil”’ (Davis, 32). He believes that engaging in a famine relief program would increase the poorer population and would bankrupt India. Moreover, he supported a laissez-faire approach and believed that free and abundant private trade provided by the government was not obtainable (Frederickson). Another reason for increased deaths in India was due to malaria and cholera. According to Lord George Hamilton, Under-Secretary of State for India, stated “‘the population of the district now affected by famine was probably the densest in the world… nearly double the density of the population of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”’ (Fredrickson). Lastly, India’s inability to assist the famished added to the millions of deaths within the country, and in turn created a global problem. Millions of more people were dying because the drought extended to different countries, but India was hit the hardest. 

Works Cited

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. United Kingdom, Verso, 2001.

EDGERTON-TARPLEY, KATHRYN. “Tough Choices: Grappling with Famine in Qing China, the British Empire, and Beyond.” Journal of World History, vol. 24, no. 1, 2013, pp. 135–176. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43286248. Accessed 2 Nov. 2020. 

Frederickson, Kathleen. “British Writers on Population, Infrastructure, and the Great Indian Famine of 1876-8.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].

April 3, 1895- May 25, 1895: Trials of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

One of Literature's best authors Oscar Wilde went on trial for having an affair with a man and in this time being gay was a crime punishable by death. Before this trial Oscar Wilde was gaining popularity due to his playwrights, novels, and poems. Oscar Wilde was known for his amazing work and his flamboyant dress along with his cutting wit and eccentric lifestyle often put him at odds with the social norms of Victorian England. 

Oscar Wilde did, however,  marry a woman named Constance Llyod and together had two sons named Cyril and Vyvyan. Oscar Wilde was hiding his sexualitty from the world and his family until he met a man named Lord Alfred Douglas who was a young (sixteen years younger) poet and aristocrat from Britian. The news about their relationship spread all over Britian like wild fire.  Soon The British Government wanted to arrest Wilde right away for his homosexual acts however instead of running away he decided to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for defamation. 

This is when our trials offically begin! Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, commonly known as Old Bailey was the location of the trials. During this trial Oscar Wilde got destroyed The trial went poorly for Oscar Wilde. His main problem was that the allegations about his homosexuality were true, and therefore he couldn't win the trial. However there were some things that they accussed Wilde of that didn't make sense such as: seducing 12 other young men to commit sodomy and the idea of homoerotic themes within his works. 

After three days of the court proceedings, Wilde’s lawyer withdrew the lawsuit. The British authorities saw this withdrawal as a  sign of implied guilt and issued a warrant for Wilde’s arrest on indecency charges. The Britain’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 had criminalized all sex acts between men as “gross indecency.” (Sex acts between women were never made illegal in England.) His friends begged Oscar to flee Britian and head to France so he wouldnt face the trial for a second time. However, Oscar stayed and decided to attend the trial with no attempts of escape or denial. 

Oscar Wilde was tried for homosexuality on April 26, 1895. He pleaded not guilty on 25 counts of gross indecency. The trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. Three weeks later, Wilde was retried. This time, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and received two years of hard labor, the maximum sentence allowed for the crime. On May 25, 1895, Oscar Wilde was taken to prison. He spent the first several months at London’s Pentonville Prison, where he was put to work picking oakum. Oakum was a substance used to seal gaps in shipbuilding. Prisoners spent hours untwisting and teasing apart recycled ropes to obtain the fibers used in making oakum. 

1901 - First wireless communication across Atlantic ocean

It was once believed to be impossible to send a transmission about as far as 200 miles due to the curvature of the Earth. This assumption didn’t stop Guglielmo Marconi from trying, though. Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor and engineer, born in Bologna, Italy. Growing up, Guglielmo had a very good education due to his family’s wealth. He had multiple tutors growing up and then went on to further his education at the Livorno Technical Institute and the University of Bologna.

Guglielmo had a strong interest in electromagnetic waves. He began to build his own wave generating equipment, but no one of importance was interested in what he had to offer, so Guglielmo moved to London. At first, he was only able to send transmission up to one mile away, but after a year's worth of work after moving to London, he had built it up to 12 miles away. There were many people in London who were interested in supporting Guglielmo’s work, including the British Post Office and eventually, Queen Victoria. A year later, Guglielmo had been able to send transmissions across the English Channel. After this, he had quickly begun to gain popularity around the globe. 

Guglielmo wanted to continue improving his work. At the time, “many physicists argued that radio waves traveled in straight lines, making it impossible for signals to be broadcast beyond the horizon, but Marconi believed they would follow the planet’s curvature” (History.com, Editors). After failing to go at too far of a distance right off the bat, Guglielmo tried a shorter distance, from Cornwall to Marconi. Just barely, they were able to successfully send the transmission; they received the message a faint three-dot message, the letter “s”. This transmission was approximately 2,100 miles away and sent sparks flying in the process. This moment was a monumental step in history, but there was still a long way to go to completely understand electromagnetic waves, so Guglielmo continued to improve his work for the next 30 years. In 1909, he was awarded a Nobel prize in physics for his work alongside Ferdinand Braun. Not only did his work help the evolution of the radio, but it save multiple lives. “His company’s Marconi radios ended the isolation of ocean travel and saved hundreds of lives, including all of the surviving passengers from the sinking Titanic” (History.com, Editors).

Works Cited

History.com Editors. (2009, December 02). Guglielmo Marconi. Retrieved December 08, 

2020, from https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/guglielmo-marconi

Editors. (2010, February 09). First radio transmission sent across the Atlantic Ocean. 

Retrieved December 08, 2020, from 

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marconi-sends-first-atlantic...

Treaty of Versailles 1919

The Treaty of Versailles was responsible for officiating the end of World War I which lasted from 1914 to 1918. The negotiations for this treaty started at the Peace Conference of Paris in January 1919. The end of the war saw the collapse of empires such as the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, Austrian Empire and German Empire. This called for a new international order that was unlike anything in modern history. The Treaty of Versailles was the first treaty to be certified at the Peace Conference as it “tried to regulate the new international order that had emerged in Europe as a result of the outcome of World War I” (Keleher et al.).

The four core delegates that put together this treaty were from France, Britain, United States and Italy. Their main and unanimous goal was figuring out the best way to stop Germany from causing any more harm. On June 28, 1919 the Treaty of Versailles was officially signed and the only great power not to sign it was the United States. What might be best known about this treaty is the harsh financial implications that it had for Germany. “The treaty’s provisions placed an extreme financial burden on Germany, thereby laying the foundation for another world conflict within a generation” (Keleher et al.). But there were also more implications for Germany such as a substantial loss of territory and disarmament.

Germans taking apart German war machines as part of the disarmament terms.  (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

President Woodrow Wilson was hoping that the inclusion of the League of Nations in the treaty would be enough to keep the peace. However, the Treaty of Versailles created a lot of bitterness and desire for something more in the German people. It left the door open for someone like Adolf Hitler to gain control. Almost inevitably, the next world war started in 1939 just twenty years after the signing. 

Video of the Peace Conference of Paris

Works Cited

Keleher, Edward P., and Lewis L. Gould. “Treaty of Versailles.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip&db=ers&AN=89316411&site=eds-live&scope=site.

1928 - Women Over the Age of 21 Gain Voting Rights

In 1928 women twenty-one or older finally received the right to vote in the UK. This did not come easy to women and took a lot to accomplish. The Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. “It was not until the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 that women over twenty-one were able to vote and women finally achieved the same voting rights as men. This act increased the number of women eligible to vote to fifteen million.” (Thevote). Some would later complain that the age should be lowered to eighteen, but this would not happen until 1967. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 helped pave the road to the Equal Franchise Act, it allowed women over the age of thirty who met a property qualifications to vote. Yet this left out a significant amount of women allowing only two-thirds of the total population of women in the UK to vote. It would unfortunately take another decade to reach the Equal Franchise Act allowing all women the right to vote with no restrictions except age. Many of the women who had fought for this right were now dead including Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, Elizabeth Wolstenholme-Elmy, Constance Lytton and Emmeline Pankhurst. However, the leader of the NUWSS during the campaign Millicent Fawcett, was still alive and attended Parliament to see the vote take place. Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was opposed to women’s right to vote and argued that the country should not be put into the hands of a female majority. He was just one struggle women faced along with other hardships like being imprisoned, hunger strikes, and assault. Overall women are lucky to have the rights they do today and must never stop fighting to be just as equal as men.

Video about 2 minutes: https://it-it.facebook.com/JeremyCorbynMP/videos/jeremy-corbyn-votes-for-women/10156562425118872/

Video about 3 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WxDvkO7Pw8

Citations:

(john@spartacus-educational.com), J. (n.d.). Retrieved December 08, 2020, from https://spartacus-educational.com/W1928.htm

Millicent Fawcett on the passing of the Equal Franchise Act - archive, 6 July 1928. (2018, July 06). Retrieved December 08, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jul/06/millicent-fawcett-equal-franchise-women-vote-1928

Thevote. (n.d.). Retrieved December 08, 2020, from https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/overview/thevote/

Women's suffrage timeline. (2017, August 16). Retrieved December 08, 2020, from https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/womens-suffrage-timeline

The Great Depression Begins - 1929

World’s Highest Standard of Living photo

The Great Depression is regarded as the most traumatic financial crisis the United States of America (USA) has ever faced. While it is commonly thought to have only affected the USA, it actually had drastic effects on European nations, too.

The Great Depression is formally regarded to have started in the fall of 1929, but the financial situations that caused the depression to occur started before that. The Great Depression was caused by “dislocated and dysfunctional financial markets, low interest rates, instability of the crisis epicenter, investors’ panic, and high bankruptcy rates,” which took years to develop (Nenovski and Pamukova 31).

The situation became particularly dire in August of 1929 when the USA entered a recession; however, the recession was seen as a typical, natural recession that properly reflected the ebb and flow of the economy. Ultimately, the cause of the recession—which was experienced globally and eventually developed into the Great Depression—was the manufacturing revolution; the Industrial Revolution prior to 1929 created what economists refer to as “a classic debt-deflation cycle” (Bruner and Miller 51).

Unfortunately, the federal government in the USA did not react to this recession correctly. Instead, they “increased the discount rate from 5% to 6%, a level not seen since the contraction in 1921,” to lessen the ongoing speculation about USA stock exchanges (Bruner and Miller 50). This was then mimicked by other countries striving to stabilize their economies, which caused the global Great Depression.

Arguably, however, what turned the recession into a full-blown depression was not even economics; fear may have been the underlying reason that the recession turned into a depression. More specifically, an unstable currency regime, poor federal response, banks panicking, and labor hoarding turned the recession into the Great Depression (Bruner and Miller 52). Citizens, the government, and banks were all terrified of the prospects and stopped trusting the stock market. This lack of trust caused the economy to crumble until it was stabilized in the spring of 1933.

 Works Cited

Bruner, Robert F., and Scott C. Miller. “The Great Crash of 1929: A Look Back After 90 Years.” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 2019, pp. 43–58. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1111/jacf.12374.

Nenovski, Tome, and Nela Pamukova. “Roots, Causes, Effects, and Lessons Learned from the Global Financial Crisis.” Journal of Sustainable Development, vol. 9, no. 22, June 2019, pp. 18–33. EBSCOhost  https://proxy.library.kent.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=tr ue&db=bth&AN=138553815&site=ehost-live

 Further Information: Photo to Capture the Time and Short Video to Explain Why It Started

Bourke-White, Margaret. “World’s Highest Standard of Living.” The Guardian, 18 Sep. 2019,                https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/18/great-depression-photography-     art-exhibition-chicago.

“The Great Depression Explained in One Minute.” YouTube, uploaded by One Minute Economics, 18 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv7IP2qL0gg.

World War II (1939-45)

During my research on World War 2 for this project, I learned many facts I didn’t know about the war and even furthered my knowledge on some subjects I already knew. World War 2 was mostly a result of unresolved conflicts from World War 1 or the Great War and took place from September 1, 1939, to September 2, 1945. In World War 2 “the principal belligerents were the Axis powers- Germany, Italy, and Japan- and the Allies- France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent China,” however, many other countries were involved including Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Guatemala (Royde-Smith 2020). Because of the many deaths said to have occurred during the war, many historians claim it is “the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history” (Royde-Smith 2020). The war started on September 1, 1939, when “Hitler invaded Poland from the west: two days later, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, beginning World War II” (History.com Editors 2020). The war of the Allied forces against Germany ended in February of 1945 with Germany’s surrender but the war would not fully end until September 1945. At the Potsdam Conference, which took place from July- August 1945, “U.S. president Harry S. Truman (who had taken office after Roosevelt’s death in April), Churchill and Stalin discussed the ongoing war with Japan as well as the peace settlement with Germany” (History.com Editors 2020). The war officially came to an end on “September 2, [when] U.S. General Douglas MacArthur accepted Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay (History.com Editors 2020).

Sources:

Britannica: World War 2: https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II

History.com – World War 2

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history

Here is a video I found to quickly summarize World War 2. World War II: Crash Course World History #38-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78COTwT7nE