1. B While medieval scholars read secondhand commentaries on ancient works, the humanists, inspired by the example of Petrarch, sought out the manuscripts in their original form. The other choices are closely associated with the humanists, so they cannot be correct.
2. D Renaissance artists rejected the practice of hierarchical scaling, in which the size of figures in a composition is proportionate to their spiritual significance, in favor of a greater emphasis on realism. For example, Leonardo, in his Last Supper, emphasized Christ’s significance not by rendering him as larger than his disciples, but by placing him at the center of the painting.
3. D Pope Leo X made the assumption that since Luther was an Augustinian monk and Tetzel, the main seller of indulgences, was a Dominican, the 95 Theses were simply a typical squabble between religious orders. Leo had not counted on the fact that the printing press would enable Luther to reach an audience far beyond his native city of Wittenberg. The lack of a more determined response by the Catholic Church in the early stages of the Reformation played a major role in the successful spread of Luther’s ideas.
4. C Luther had very little interest in social issues and was furious when German peasants tied some of his theological ideas to certain social goals such as the elimination of serfdom. His lack of interest in challenging the existing social order encouraged some German rulers to support his religious ideas because they didn’t pose a challenge to their primacy in the social hierarchy.
5. D In 1559, one year after coming to the throne, Elizabeth worked out a religious settlement that led to a formal break with Rome and the creation of a Church of England that emphasized middle-of-the-road Protestant beliefs.
6. D While many were surprised by his decision, the 42-year-old Luther’s marriage to Katharina von Bora emphasized his refusal to accept the need for clerical celibacy. By marrying the 26-year-old former nun and having six children, Luther placed the family, rather than the institutional Church, at the center of religious faith.
7. B The majority of Florence’s population of 60,000 in the fifteenth century was involved in the most important commodity produced in Florence, wool cloth, which it exported to the rest of Europe.
8. C In 1498, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese captain, reached the coast of India.
9. B The year 1492 marked the final stage of the Reconquista, the long struggle by the Christian states in the north of the Spanish peninsula against the Muslims. In that year, Grenada, the last Islamic outpost in Spain, fell to the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella.
10. D Bankrolled by a French monarchy that wished to see its rivals the Habsburgs weakened, Gustavus Adolphus entered the conflict in part to seek territorial gains for Sweden along the Baltic coast, but also to defend Protestant interests in the Empire that had recently come under attack following the issuing of the Edict of Restitution.
1. B After becoming King of France in 1589, Henry IV, a Calvinist, found that he was unable to gain control over Paris due to the strong Catholic sentiments of the inhabitants of the city. Never one to take his religious beliefs all too seriously, Henry decided it would be expeditious to convert to Catholicism in order to control the French capital.
2. A King Charles was able to rule without calling a Parliament so long as he kept his expenditures to a minimum. This proved to be impossible in 1640, when a rebellion broke out in Scotland following Charles’s insistence on placing the Book of Common Prayer in Scottish churches. In order to raise an army to put down the rebellious Scots, Charles was forced to call his first Parliament in eleven years.
3. D While urban riots stemmed from a variety of causes, those disturbances that saw the extensive participation of journeymen and apprentices were often tied to their growing frustration over a glass ceiling that now limited their opportunities. With the guild method of production being replaced by large-scale production featuring capitalist entrepreneurs, the economically hard-pressed guilds were increasingly reluctant to see further competition and therefore limited the number of entrants into the ranks of guild master.
4. A While both rich and poor families in the early modern period can be viewed as an economic unit, there were significant gender differences within this unit. While men served in the “public” sphere, such as working the family’s plot of land or handling commercial transactions, women were expected to remain exclusively tied to the “domestic” sphere by either doing the housework themselves or, if wealthier, supervising such activities.
5. D Medieval science consisted of a synthesis of Christian theology and classical authors. The Scientific Revolution would bring about a rejection of this synthesis in favor of a new brand of science in which the experimental method would predominate.
6. D In his Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, Copernicus hypothesized that the planets moved around the sun in perfect circles. It was Johannes Kepler, however, who was the first to explain that the planets moved in an elliptical orbit around the sun.
7. A After viewing the horrors of the English Revolution, Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan to show that men were naturally depraved and therefore required an absolutist state in order to rein in their evil passions.
8. D Women played an important role in the Enlightenment by sponsoring salons, where philosophes could speak on an informal basis with the elite of society.
9. C Deists such as Voltaire believe that God created the world but plays no additional role in overseeing his creation. Science must therefore be used to explain the workings of the universe.
10. C As surprising as it may seem, prior to the eighteenth century, children were viewed simply as smaller versions of adults (something that is quite apparent when looking at medieval images of Mary holding an infant Christ looking like an adult in miniature). The change in this perception owes a great deal to Rousseau’s Émile and his description of three distinct stages on the road to adulthood: infancy, childhood, and adolescence.
11. C Angered by a 1791 report to the French Revolutionary government that stated women should receive an education geared only toward their domestic duties, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her Vindication of the Rights of Women to support the French thinker Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Women, a document which the French Republican government had rejected.
12. A The members of the Third Estate realized that if voting was done by estate they would consistently be outvoted by the clergy and aristocracy. Therefore, they refused to show their credentials unless the King met all attendees of the Estates-General in a National Assembly, a new legislative body where there would be no further distinctions based on social class.
13. B The Bastille was traditionally the place where prisoners of conscience were kept for opposing the Bourbon monarchy. By 1789, the year the prison was stormed, it no longer housed political prisoners. Nevertheless, it still stood as a symbol of royal repression.
14. B The march of the women of Paris on Versailles was one of the turning points of the French Revolution since the march ended with Louis XVI and his family returning to Paris with the women. Paris was far more radical than any other locality in France, and with the King now within the confines of the city, the revolution would advance much further than if the King had remained at Versailles.
15. B After realizing that he could not defeat the British navy, Napoleon decided to wage economic war on Britain through his Continental System, which closed the European continent to British imports and exports.
16. D The Napoleonic Code enshrined one of the fundamental ideas of the French Revolution: There were no special rights based on social class and therefore everyone was responsible for the payment of taxes.
17. D The sans-culottes, who proudly wore pants rather than the silk breeches of wealthier Parisians, were members of the working class and played a vital role in the growing radicalization of the French Revolution. It was support from the sans-culottes that allowed the Jacobins to push the Girondins out of the National Assembly and assume control over the Revolutionary government.
18. A While abhorring what he felt was the anarchism of the French Revolution, Baron von Stein recognized that there were new forces being introduced into Europe by the power of nationalism. To that end, von Stein directly challenged one of the key rights of the Prussian Junkers—their exclusive hold over the officer corps—by placing members of the bourgeoisie within their ranks.
1. D The Corn Laws introduced high tariffs for wheat imported into Great Britain. While the law was hailed by the landed classes, who wanted to keep foreign grain out of the country so they could have exclusive rights to the British market, it was hated by the middle-class manufacturers, who believed that expensive bread forced them to pay higher wages. Getting rid of the Corn Laws was a sign that the middle class, which had entered Parliament as a result of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, was now a force to be reckoned with in British politics.
2. C While the middle-class liberals viewed the revolution as a means to securing political rights, the more radical workers hoped that the revolution would provide increased economic opportunities. Their demands led to the creation of national workshops that provided jobs for unemployed workers, this over the objections of the liberals, who viewed the workshops as a costly and unnecessary intrusion by the government into the economy.
3. B The Chartists believed that annual parliamentary elections were necessary in order to create a government more responsive to the needs of the people. This was the one point within the Six Acts of the People’s Charter that was never implemented. Today, the life of a British parliament is five years, thanks to a law enacted in 2011. Before then, it was the prime minister who in effect called for elections.
4. C Belgium, like Great Britain, was blessed with a ready supply of coal and iron, as well as a stable government and a ready supply of merchant capital. With these advantages, it was able to become the first industrialized nation on the continent.
5. B With the advent of the Franco–Prussian War in 1870, Napoleon III was forced to remove from Rome the French troops who were protecting the city on behalf of the papacy. Following this withdrawal, Italian troops entered the city, which became the new capital of the Italian state.
6. D Collecting firsthand testimony from adults who began their working lives as child laborers in factories and mines, the Sadler Committee brought child labor to the attention of the British public. The investigations of the committee would eventually lead to the passage of the Factory Act in 1833.
7. B The emancipation decree signed by Tsar Alexander II in 1861 required the newly emancipated serfs to pay for their freedom in annual payments extending over fifty years. This practice was brought to an end as part of a series of concessions by the monarchy in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905.
8. C In the second half of the nineteenth century, governments throughout Europe began to develop postal systems, reflecting such factors as increased literacy through the expansion of public schools and the ability to move large quantities of letters through an ever-increasing rail network. This clear-cut expansion of the role of government is the direct opposite of (C), which posits that European governments were stepping away from providing such services and expected private concerns to pick up the task.
9. B The middle class was important in the second half of the nineteenth century not because it was new, but because it was newly powerful, replacing traditional aristocracy as the group that shaped public opinion, set the historical record, and guided society’s values.
10. D “Informal empire” refers to when a nation controls the economy and politics of another nation or territory. Prior to the expansion of direct colonial control in the period after 1870, nations such as Britain sought to secure their trading privileges without feeling the need to step in directly and rule. The situation in China serves as the best description of informal empire, since Britain, France, Germany, and other nations insisted on certain economic rights without directly controlling the vast Chinese state.
11. C While the other items on the list were all invented in the second half of the nineteenth century, the power loom was invented in 1785 by Edmund Cartwright and was one of the most important inventions of the Early Industrial Revolution, not the Second Industrial Revolution.
12. A All of these writers are considered to be part of the realist tradition in literature. Realism was a movement in the nineteenth century that focused on depicting the relatively ordinary lives of the middle and working classes without relying on traditional embellishments such as the romanticization of their subject.
13. B While establishing the rules that European states needed to follow to show their control over the various parts of Africa, the Conference was initially called to deal with the status of the Congo, a territory that King Leopold II of Belgium was seeking to control for economic exploitation through the formation of what would eventually be known as the Congo Free State.
14. D Thomas Cook’s career as a travel agent began when he came up with the idea of providing travel arrangements for a group of fellow temperance advocates who were in need of transportation to a rally. By the 1860s, Cook was selling group tours to destinations such as Egypt, Italy, France, and Switzerland and introduced packaged foreign travel to the British middle class.
1. D When the economic slowdown began, governments responded by following the standard economic theory of the day and reducing their expenditures in order to balance their budgets. Unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of making the depression far worse, as declines in both governmental and individual consumption dramatically shrunk the global economy.
2. D In 1929, Mussolini, an agnostic, decided to heal the long-term rift between the papacy and the Italian state. With the Lateran Treaty, Mussolini allowed the pope to become the ruler of Vatican City, a district in the heart of Rome, in exchange for the Church’s recognition of Mussolini’s Fascist government.
3. C In the early stages of the war, German atrocities in neutral Belgium provided the British with a powerful propaganda tool both for domestic consumption as well as for the important task of swaying American public opinion.
4. A Popular front governments were created in France and Spain as a reaction to the triumph of Fascism in Germany. Politicians of the left in both nations viewed the conflict between Communists and Social Democrats in Germany as having provided an opportunity for the ascendency of Hitler.
5. C The term “crimes against humanity” was originally found in the preamble to the 1907 Hague Convention on War. At the conclusion of the Second World War, the Allied states formed an International Military Tribunal charged with prosecuting Nazi war criminals. One of the charges against the accused, “crimes against humanity,” was the category used to cover the murder of millions of civilians by the Nazis.
6. B The Matignon Agreements, named after the hotel where the French government, employers, and the trade unions met and signed the accord, took place in the aftermath of a damaging general strike. The Agreements, the crowning achievement of Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, for the first time provided a guarantee for French unions to organize and to strike.
7. D The First World War was not fought on British territory; the fighting took place entirely on continental Europe. Soldiers at home were housed in bases for training, and the British government had no way to require foreign citizens to house its soldiers.
8. D Meeting in July 1941 for the first time on a ship off the coast of Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill issued a joint proclamation in which they declared that the struggle against the Axis powers was to “ensure life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom and to preserve the rights of man and justice.” The Atlantic Charter served as the foundation for the later establishment of the United Nations, a central postwar goal for Roosevelt.
9. C On his own initiative, Churchill traveled to Moscow in October 1944 in an attempt to get Stalin to accept some sort of role for the Western Allies in Eastern Europe. The name of the agreement comes from the numbers that Churchill had scribbled on the piece of paper that he gave to Stalin, listing the various percentages of control that each of the Allies might expect to have in the postwar period.
10. D When the Second World War ended, Britain had 40,000 troops in Greece and was providing the military and financial support that allowed for the survival of the Greek government in its struggle with a Communist insurgency. Due to its own dire financial situation, Great Britain informed the United States that it would withdraw from Greece at the end of March 1947. To fill the void left by the British, Truman went before Congress and requested money for the Greeks, using the justification that the United States needed to support any nation that was trying to avoid subjugation by Communists. This later became known as the Truman Doctrine.
11. D In 1968, the “Prague Spring,” a movement in Czechoslovakia that sought not to overturn the Socialist system, but simply to allow greater personal liberties such as freedom of the press, was brutally put down when the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, decided that the reform movement was a threat to Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.
12. B Millions of Germans expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia were joined by millions of other Germans fleeing from the approaching Red Army in a mass migration into what later became established as West Germany. These individuals were to provide the low wage (but relatively skilled) workforce, which later proved essential for the expansion of the German economy in the 1950s.
13. D While the mass protests that hit France in the wake of the student revolt of May 1968 shook the government of Charles de Gaulle to its core, the parliamentary elections that took place the following month, in which the Gaullists won 358 of 487 seats, showed that de Gaulle still maintained the support of the majority of Frenchmen.
14. B Perestroika was an attempt to redirect the Soviet economy toward meeting consumer demand, but it was to do so within the continuing structure of central planning. This inability to break away from the limits of central planning led to the clear-cut failure of perestroika and a general decline in living standards.