FIRST TEST (Sept) :    Thoughts from chapters 1 and 2 of Carr to consider more deeply:

• We can achieve our understanding of the past only through the eyes of the present.
• The reconstitution of the past in the historian’s mind is dependent on empirical evidence. But it is not in itself an empirical process.
• All history is contemporary history.
• Do not make a fetish of facts and documents; they do not by themselves constitute history.
• History as a “moving procession”.
• The historian is an individual human being; he is also a social phenomenon.

THIRTY YEARS WAR TEST:

So for Friday, here’s the skinny: you will be writing Free Responses to a few questions. You can expect to see something like the questions below. You may wish to check out this guide to writing the FRQ.

Some big issues, culled from Gay&Webb, to consider:

• Few of the provisions of the peace [of Westphalia] were new; they were important more for what they confirmed than for what they created.
• What had been true for Spain in the 16th century was true in the 1640s: the show of strength abroad revealed, and produced, the reality of weakness at home

AND some of my own:

• Why isn’t Philip II, arguably the most powerful man of the second half of the 16th century, remembered as a hero of Spain?
• Assess the following statement by Johna Huizinga: “The rebellion against Spanish authorities was a conservative revolution and could not have been otherwise — in those days, it was not the rebels but the lawful governments who were the reformers and innovators.”
• Provide 3 specific grievances against Philip II, as stated in the Dutch Act of Abjuration (Dec of Independence), which led to the separation of the United Provinces from Spain.
• Compare and contrast the political abilities of Elizabeth Tudor and Marie Stuart.
• What importance to European development were the siege of Malta (1565) and the battle of Lepanto (1571)? [You may wish to listen to this BBC program.]