| Glossary Term |
Definition |
| Empress Eugenie | Empress Consort of France (1853-1871), the wife of Napoleon III, emperor of the French. |
| Florence Nightingale | A Nurse most famous for her contributions during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. |
| Nihilists | Those who do not believe in any values whatsoever. |
| Red Shirts | The volunteers who followed Giuseppe Garibaldi in southern Italy during his Mille expedition to southern Italy, but sometimes extended to other campaigns of him. The name derived by the colour of their shirts. |
| Realpolitik | Policies associated initially with nation building that are said to be based on hard-headed realities rather that the romantic notions of earlier nationalists. The term has come to mean any policy based on considerations of power alone. |
| Bismarck’s Four Rules of War | 1) Avoid war at all costs 2) Once you’re in a war, you should win as quickly as possible 3) Never fight more than one major power at a time 4) Once you win a war, make a favorable peace |
| Ems telegraph | The document that instigated the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. It refers to a report about an incident in the town of Bad Ems which is a resort spa east of Koblenz on the Lahn river, at the time part of Prussia. |
| Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 | Declared in1857, it facilitated divorce in Great Britain. |
| Haussmann | A French civic planner whose name is associated with the rebuilding of Paris in the late 19th century. |
| Gymnasia | The classical higher or secondary schools of Germany from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century. Students were admitted at 9 or 10 years of age and were required to have a knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic. |
| Realschulen | Appeared in the eighteenth century as a six-year course. It was simply a higher elementary or intermediate school. |
| Meiji restoration | A chain of events that led to enormous changes in Japan's political and social structure. It occurred from 1866 to 1869, a period of three years that traverses both the late Edo period and the beginning of the Meiji Era. |
| Gustave Flaubert | A French novelist who is counted amoung the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first publised novel Madame Bovary and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style, best exemplified by his endless search for “the precise word”. |
| Ivan Turgenev | A major Russian novelist and playwright. His novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as a major work of 19th century fiction. |
| Rationalism | The philosophic idea that people must justify their claims by logic and reason. |
| Auguste Comte | A French thinker who coined the term "sociology." He is remembered for being the first to apply the scientific method to the social world. |
| Positivism | A theory developed in the mid-nineteenth century, at the foundation of the social sciences that the study of facts would generate accurate, or “positive”, laws of society: these laws could in turn, help in the formulation of policy and legislation. |
| Social Darwinism | Thoery which grew out of Darwinist thought. It used a distorted version of evolutionary theory to lobby for racist, sexist, and nationalist policies. |
| Marxism | A body of thought about organization of production, social inequity and the processes of revolutionary change as devised by the philosopher and economist Karl Marx. |
| Realism | A style in the arts that arose in the mid-nineteenth century and was dedicated to depicting society realistically without romantic or idealistic overtones. |
| Anarchism | The belief that people should not have government; it was popular among peasants and workers in the last half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. |
| Haussmannization | The process of urban renewal followed by many governments after the middle of the nineteenth century and named after its prime practitioner, Georges-Eugene Haussmann |
| Kulturkampf | Literally, a “culture war,” but in the 1870s the word indicated German chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s attempt to fight the cultural power of the church through a series of injurious policies. |
| Nation-state | A sovereign political entity of modern times based on representing a united people. |
| Proletariat | The working class or, in Marxist terms, those who do not control the means of production such as factories, tools, workshops, and machines. |
| Russification | A program for the integration of Russia’s many nationality groups involving the forced acquisition of Russian language and the practice of Russian orthodoxy as well as the settlement of the ethnic Russians among other nationality groups. |
| Zemstvos | Regional councils of the Russian nobility established after the emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 to deal with education and local welfare issues. |
| Risorgimento | The political and social process that unified disparate states of the Italian peninsula into the single nation of Italy between the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. |
| Pétroleuses | According to popular rumours at the time, they were female supporters of the Paris Commune, accused of burning down much of Paris during the last days of the Commune in May 1871. |
| “On the Origin of Species” | Written by Charles Darwin, it was a challenge to the Judeo-Christian worldview that humanity was a unique creation of God. It held that life developed through a primal battle for survival and through the sexual selection of mates(natural selection). |
| Edouard Manet | A French painter who was one of the first 19th century artists to approach modern-life subjects, his art bridged the divide between Realism and Impressionism. Early masterpieces The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy. |
| George Eliot | The pen name of Mary Anne Evans, an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity. |
| Charles Dickens | An English novelist who paid close attention to the distressing effects of industrialization and urbanization. In addition to publishing such favorites as Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, he ran charitable organizations and pressed for social reforms. |
| Joseph Lister | An English surgeon who promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He successfully introduced carbolic acid (phenol) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds. |
