Deck 23: The Age of Optimism, 1850-1880

Question 1

Present Darwin's theory of evolution, and discuss its impact on nineteenth-century society.

Answer 1

Objectivity, accuracy, and thoroughness are the keys to a good essay on this topic.Social Darwinism should be included.

Question 2

During the second half of the nineteenth century

A)the social and cultural influence of the middle class increased significantly.
B)a general sense of optimism prevailed and standards of living tended to improve.
C)the modern banking system was established and scientific discoveries fueled industrial innovation.
D)the successful application to social problems gave a sense of security and confidence.
E)All of these

Answer 2

All of these

Question 3

Which of the following is associated with the expanded exchange of ideas?

A)Better printing presses
B)Carrier pigeons
C)Transoceanic telegraphs
D)Pony Express
E)Elementary computers

Answer 3

Transoceanic telegraphs

Question 4

Cheaper and better steel production led to all of the following except

A)the characterization of the second half of the nineteenth century as the "age of steel."
B)the expansion of rail systems.
C)overproduction of steel and a severe depression.
D)strong growth of the building industry.
E)the evolution of shopping emporiums.

Question 5

Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days is emblematic of

A)the triumph of modern technologies.
B)the solid realism of nineteenth century culture.
C)romantic revivalism.
D)Christian pessimism.
E)the dangers of modern society.

Question 6

The Suez Canal

A)opened by trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
B)cut travel time from India to Europe in half.
C)caused the destruction of the Ottoman empire.
D)was opposed by merchants.
E)led to the decline of British power in Asia.

Question 7

Consider the disadvantages suffered by urban workers and the measures taken by governments to alleviate them.Discuss urban living conditions, problems of the work environment, and educational and cultural issues.

Question 8

What did the aristocracy do to remain relevant in the nineteenth century?

A)Married into prosperous middle-class families.
B)Engage in banking and industry.
C)Occasionally adopt the habits of normal business people.
D)Continued to serve in the military and government.
E)All of these.

Question 9

As the "bourgeois century" progressed

A)a lower middle class of clerks, salespeople, lower civil servants, and similar groups rapidly increased.
B)professionalization accelerated.
C)the middle class increasingly became the trend setters in society.
D)requirements for certain offices or professions became more stringent.
E)All of these

Question 10

The Second Industrial Revolution was characterized by all of the following except

A)increased speed of production.
B)the use of mass-produced steel.
C)replacement of petroleum-powered machines with the steam engine.
D)the introduction of synthetic dyes and aluminum.
E)electricity coming into wider use.

Question 11

The accumulation of wealth from industrial activity rather than from land meant that

A)class distinctions became blurred.
B)most people looked down on businessmen.
C)the countryside became increasingly impoverished.
D)the landed aristocracy was less wealthy but gained in social status and political control.
E)noble families shunned industry and business as being beneath their station.

Question 12

What did it mean to be "middle class" in the 19^th century?

Question 13

Which was not characteristic of the middle class lifestyle?

A)Running water
B)Furniture and separate living quarters
C)Employment of servants
D)Hard, manual labor
E)A culture of literacy with books and newspapers

Question 14

Improvements in transportation included

A)a significant decline in the expense of rail transportation.
B)faster and more efficient ocean transportation.
C)advancements in refrigeration.
D)the building of the Suez Canal.
E)All of these

Question 15

Analyze some of the changes within the aristocracy and the middle classes during the second half of the nineteenth century, considering changed sources of wealth and professional and social fluctuations within each class.

Question 16

All of the following are features of the middle-class lifestyle except

A)the work ethic.
B)Victorian morality.
C)respect for diversity.
D)consumerism.
E)opposition to women working outside the home.

Question 17

What was the situation of Christianity in the nineteenth century? Be sure to discuss Catholicism, Protestantism, and the rapid growth of secular/atheist ideologies.

Question 18

Discuss the position of middle-class women.Survey their lifestyles, values, and the new professional opportunities that began to open for them.

Question 19

Discuss the main trends in Western culture in the age of optimism.

Question 20

Had you lived in the late nineteenth century, would you have favored an optimistic or a pessimistic view of society? Give reasons for your position and mention some people of the time with whom you would have agreed.

Question 21

Effects of industrialization on rural life included all of the following except

A)farm girls who went to the cities to work came back with urban and middle-class ideas.
B)destruction of markets for local goods.
C)expansion of the putting-out system.
D)emigration of millions of farm workers.
E)cheaper agricultural imports.

Question 22

Public educational and cultural benefits provided by governments in the late nineteenth century included all of the following except

A)mandatory primary public education.
B)traveling libraries to reach rural areas.
C)free college education.
D)making museums open to the general public.
E)contributing to a dramatic rise in literacy.

Question 23

The first state to offer a comprehensive welfare program including health insurance and old-age pensions was

A)Bismarck's Germany.
B)the French Third Republic.
C)Disraeli's Britain.
D)the United States.
E)Australia.

Question 24

What were the purposes of public education in the nineteenth century?

A)Discipline
B)Patriotism
C)Basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic
D)The basic principles of civil society, such as punctuality
E)All of these

Question 25

Which of the following worked actively to improve conditions for the working class?

A)Socialist parties
B)The Catholic Church
C)Some national governments
D)Charles Bradlaugh
E)All of these

Question 26

The introduction of governmental public services in Europe did not involve

A)the installation of sewers.
B)urban transportation.
C)running water in homes.
D)street lights.
E)public bathing houses.

Question 27

Amusement and the need to escape crowded cities created all of the following for the middle class except

A)problems in traveling from country to country as visas and passports were hard to come by.
B)water cure spas that gave special health benefits.
C)tours organized by Thomas Cook.
D)gambling casinos.
E)resort towns.

Question 28

What advances were to be found in cities by the turn of the twentieth century?

A)Public water and sewer systems
B)External electric lighting
C)Trams and underground railways
D)Large police forces
E)All of these

Question 29

Bourgeois conventions toward women included all of the following except that

A)women should neither receive a formal education nor work as teachers.
B)women's fashions should reinforce distinct gender roles and emphasize male material success.
C)domesticity was a woman's true calling.
D)women should be subordinate to men.
E)professional careers were nearly closed to women.

Question 30

Which was not a principle of nineteenth-century rational city planning?

A)Wide, straight avenues
B)Elegant buildings
C)Public monuments
D)Integration of various social classes
E)Provision for public services

Question 31

To cope with the many serious problems of urban growth, governments

A)took few and ineffective measures.
B)improved sanitation and transportation and pursued ambitious urban renewal programs.
C)forcibly moved many urban residents to the suburbs.
D)prohibited people from moving to the cities.
E)were unsure in how to deal with the aged and orphans.

Question 32

What was one possibility for working class women?

A)Service as domestics
B)Political activity
C)Military service
D)University education
E)Entrepreneurship

Question 33

How did the increased prosperity and greater productivity affect the workers and the poor?

A)Even though prices for staple goods fell, so did wages.
B)Life expectancies differed by income with lower classes dying much younger.
C)Without extra money, workers did not have income for entertainment.
D)Industries were able to stop regulations regarding child and female labor.
E)Workers across Europe remained unprotected by labor laws.

Question 34

What things characterized middle class men's clothing?

A)Sobriety
B)Dark colors
C)Fitted and lacking decoration
D)Designed to emphasize achievement-oriented attitudes
E)All of these

Question 35

The Factory Acts in Great Britain

A)Imposed a minimum wage
B)Allowed the exploitation of workers by industrialists
C)Forbade the introduction of Labor Unions
D)Regulated child and female labor
E)None of these

Question 36

In Great Britain, government attempts to regulate public health was opposed by

A)Queen Victoria.
B)Annie Wood Besant.
C)Thomas Cook.
D)the Socialist Party.
E)Pope Leo XIII.

Question 37

All of the following increased agricultural productivity except

A)the replacement of the sickle with the scythe.
B)specialization and regular schedules.
C)a significant improvement in the climate.
D)increased use of chemical fertilizer.
E)the steam driven threshing machine.

Question 38

Nineteenth-century culture was characterized by

A)pessimism about the intelligibility and perfectibility of the world.
B)materialism, secularism, and optimism.
C)lack of faith in progress and technology.
D)a revival of Christian spirituality.
E)a downturn in the interest in science.

Question 39

Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum novarum

A)called for the founding of the Salvation Army.
B)condemned all forms of modernism.
C)condemned Christian neglect of the poor.
D)defined the doctrine of papal infallibility.
E)attacked those who worked for birth control.

Question 40

"Social Catholics" were inspired by

A)Karl Marx.
B)The German government's social welfare legislation.
C)The Factory Acts.
D)Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum".
E)William Gladstone.

Question 41

The approach of Leopold von Ranke to the study of history involved

A)the positing of a world soul operating through events.
B)looking for evidence of class struggle in every historical period.
C)trying to present objectively how things really were in the past.
D)placing human history into the broad history of the universe.
E)the application of intelligent design that combined science and religion.

Question 42

In the age of optimism, materialism and selfishness were strongly criticized by

A)Comte and Durkheim.
B)Dostoyevsky and Carlyle.
C)Queen Victoria.
D)Darwin.
E)the Catholic Church.

Question 43

Anthropology, developed in the 1840s and 1850s, was

A)the comparative study of people in different societies.
B)the search for archaeological artifacts.
C)the search for human biological origins.
D)the study of primary texts.
E)None of these.

Question 44

Professionalization and specialization of the sciences and social sciences led to all of the following except

A)the fragmentation and compartmentalization of knowledge.
B)significant advances in several disciplines.
C)greater interaction and cooperation across disciplines.
D)a decline in the role of the amateur.
E)the inclusion of religious studies in the sciences.

Question 45

All of the following are true statements about photography in the nineteenth century except

A)it became a big business.
B)unlike painting and sculpture, photography was affordable to the public.
C)photography quickly eliminated realism from art.
D)it made its breakthrough with the inventions of the Frenchman Louis Daquerre.
E)it was enlarged by the development of celluloid film and the Kodak camera.

Question 46

As science advanced and living standards improved, the West

A)embraced positivism.
B)remained strongly influenced by religion.
C)increasingly turned to religion and rejected modernism.
D)resolved most of the contradictions between modern science and traditional religion.
E)eliminated church power over education.

Question 47

The discoveries of Louis Pasteur included

A)the use of ether in surgery.
B)identification of microbes as the cause of various diseases.
C)adding vitamins to milk.
D)developing carbolic acid.
E)the use of blood transfusions.

Question 48

Impressionism refers to

A)a new sensitivity resulting from the rise in literacy.
B)the powerful impact of traditional realism.
C)a new style of painting that tried to capture how objects looked before they were "distorted" by the brain.
D)yellow journalism.
E)a style of painting that returned to traditional myths and symbols.

Question 49

The author who described his own work as similar to "the analysis that surgeons make on cadavers" was

A)Emile Zola.
B)Charles Dickens.
C)Feodor Dostoyevsky.
D)Victor Hugo.
E)Ku Hung-Ming.

Question 50

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church

A)condemned "progress, " "liberalism, " and "modern civilization."
B)allied itself politically with reactionary forces.
C)officially adopted the doctrine of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals.
D)attempted to regain power it had lost as a result of the unrest of 1848.
E)All of these.

Question 51

John Stuart Mill stated, "Human development brings...an ever growing amelioration."

Question 52

In the realm of religion, in the late nineteenth century, which of the following is not true?

A)Greater tolerance, or perhaps indifference to religion, led to more acceptance of religious diversity.
B)Reconciliation between the Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations
C)Persistent anti-Semitism continued in Eastern Europe.
D)Germany and Austria-Hungary granted citizenship to Jews.
E)Most European society refused to accept Jews as social equals.

Question 53

The great medical breakthrough of disinfectant was made by

A)Louis Pasteur
B)Auguste Comte
C)Dmitri Mendeleev
D)Joseph Lister
E)Charles Darwin

Question 54

Social Darwinists, but not Darwin himself, believed that

A)social classes, nations, and races engaged in a struggle for survival equivalent to that of all living beings in nature.
B)poverty was a sign of biological inferiority.
C)imperialism, racism, and colonization were natural processes and hence were quite moral.
D)inferior races, classes, and nations were to become extinct.
E)All of these.

Question 55

Darwin's theories included all of the following except

A)a struggle for existence with only the fittest surviving.
B)the theories referred to as "natural selection."
C)the idea that humans are essentially different from other animals because of their immortal souls.
D)the inevitability of evolution.
E)a systematic explanation of human development.

Question 56

Auguste Comte's philosophy held that

A)true human development means progress in virtue and love of God.
B)human progress is an illusion.
C)since humans have already reached the ultimate level of social development, further progress is impossible.
D)human progress results from studying the material world with scientific methods.
E)science demeans and lowers the humanity of mankind.

Question 57

One of the advancements of the Second Industrial Revolution was faster and more efficient ocean transportation.

Question 58

Nineteenth-century anthropologists, when comparing different human societies,

A)were mostly racists.
B)were all evolutionists.
C)denied that important anthropological differences existed.
D)agreed on the superiority of Europeans.
E)used the Bible as a reference for many of their theories.

Question 59

Characteristics of experimental science in the nineteenth century included

A)prolific breakthroughs in many fields.
B)a working out of the great discoveries of the Scientific Revolution but few new breakthroughs.
C)a lowering of the prestige of the scientist as science became increasingly identified with business.
D)generalization rather than specialization.
E)research that was limited only to scientists with sufficient personal wealth.

Question 60

The most flourishing area of nineteenth-century social science was

A)psychology.
B)ethnology.
C)history.
D)sociology.
E)geography.

Question 61

The Bourgeois conventions concerning appropriate dress differed between the sexes, thus reinforcing gender distinctions.

Question 62

During the First Vatican Council in 1870 the doctrine of Papal Infallibility was defined, cementing the Pope's authority when speaking officially on matters of faith and morals.

Question 63

Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoyevsky are considered the greatest and most influential members of the realist school of painting.

Question 64

The most extensive program of urban rebuilding took place in midcentury Spain.

Question 65

In the nineteenth century it became common to classify people by their economic functions, rather than by their social origins.

Question 66

With the development of photography, realism in painting thrived in attempts to imitate the new art form.

Question 67

The study of history flourished in the nineteenth century.

Question 68

Critics of the optimistic age claimed that under the outer trappings of material comfort lay a frightening ignorance of aesthetic, moral, and spiritual values.