Chapter 16 Part 1 blog post

An interesting point about chapter 16 was the enlightenment inspired ideas that sparked the Atlantic revolutions of the United States, France and Haiti. The Enlightenment spoke against a monarch way of thinking and towards equality. The Enlightenment brought about thoughts of democracy and liberty. This inspired those of the three mentioned countries to break away from the previous way of life and toward their idea of democracy. However, what is most interesting is what that new idea of liberty was. Equality was reserved for Caucasian males with money. The rest were treated as lesser than, but this still seemed a reasonable definition of democracy. This new way of living was regarded as freedon, but today, it would not seem so. It is interesting to see how far we have come.

While the Revolutionary War was, in fact, revolurionary, it was not as much of a quest for independence as I had been taught. They did become independent in many ways. They governed themselves. They developed a Declaration of Independence and Constitution which outlined their rights. However, not everything changed. They maintained the idea that white men in power receive the majority of rights even in their independence. The colonists for a long time had not even thought of rebelling for a long time due to advantages of living under British rule. Therefore, the American Revolution is less revolutionary than originally taught.

The French Revolution in itself was highly interesting. The United States' dictator lived far away, but France was dealing with issues in their own immediate country. The nobility and clergy lived lavish lives while "the rest" was treated far less fairly. The issue with this was that the nobility created one per cent of the nation, while the clergy made up another one per cent. This means that ninety eight per cent of the nation included the poorly treated rest. This effected the rest directly, daily.

A question posed in class asked what the ninety eight percent rest of the United States today would he. Likely, this would include anyone who is not an upperclass citizen. Washington and members of corporate businesses such as Google would make up the first two per cent. They make the most money and it is very difficult to get through to any of them in asking for equality. Middle class and below are obviously not cared about and as of now, this remains unchanging. Our situation is not entirely far off that that the French experienced.