Lesson Plans

The Western Heritage ©2000

by Kagan, Ozment, and Turner

Focus Lesson 2

Chapter 10: "Renaissance and Discovery"

AP* Course Description

1. Intellectual and Cultural History
   • Changes in religious thought and institutions
   • Secularization of learning and culture
   • Scientific and technological developments and their consequences
   • Major trends in literature and the arts
   • Intellectual and cultural developments and their relationship to social values and political events
   • Developments in social, economic, and political thought
   • Developments in literacy, education, and communication
   • The diffusion of new intellectual concepts among different social groups
   • Changes in elite and popular culture, such as the development of new attitudes toward religion, the family, work, and ritual
   • Impact of global expansion on European culture
2. Political and Diplomatic History
   • The rise and functioning of the modern state in its various forms
   • Relations between Europe and other parts of the world: colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, and global interdependence
   • The evolution of political elites and the development of political parties and ideologies
   • The extension and limitation of rights and liberties (personal,civic, economic, and political); majority and minority; political persecutions
   • The growth and changing forms of nationalism
   • Relationship between domestic and foreign policies
   • Efforts to restrain conflict: treaties, balance of power, diplomacy, and international organizations
   • War and civil conflict: origins, developments, technology, and their consequences
3. Social and Economic History
   • The role of urbanization in transforming cultural values and social relationships
   • The shift in social structures from hierarchical orders to modern social classes: the changing distribution of wealth and poverty
   • The development of commercial practices and their economic and social impact
   • Changes in the demographic structure of Europe, their causes and consequences
   • Gender roles and their influence on work, social structure, family structure, and interest group formation
   • The growth of competition and interdependence in national and world markets
   • Private and state roles in economic activity
   • Development of racial and ethnic group identities

Key Components

• Instructor's Manual: pp. 22–24
• Study Guide and Workbook, Vol. I: pp. 97–107
• Test Item File: pp. 50–55

Key Web Sites

• Web Museum: The Italian Renaissance 1420–1600
• Web Museum: The Northern Renaissance 1500–1615
• Annenberg/CPB: Exhibits Collection –– Renaissance
• The Florence Art Guide
• Sistine Chapel Ceiling
• Lecture 39: The Italian Renaissance: Humanism
• Institute for Learning Technologies: The Prince

Key Words and Terms

Suggested Pacing

Test Strategy

Key Concepts

• Revival of classicism
  A major influence on the Renaissance was Greco-Roman culture. This glorification of the classical world was also reinvented at the end of the eighteenth century during the time of revolutions. This Neo-Classical period will not only look back to ancient Greece and Rome but to the Renaissance as well.
  
  
• Humanism
  The growth of humanism during this period influenced many philosophical movements of the future. Although linked to the Roman Catholic Church in many ways, humanism was different from previous Western European Christian thought in that it encouraged individuality as God's gift, rather than the community as God's will.
  
  
• Impact of the printing press
  As the twentieth century ended, there was much talk about the most important invention, the most influential person of the last thousand years. More than once, Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, was named. The impact of the printing press not only involved making books available in the vernacular for "ordinary"—the well-to-do and educated—people to read, but in computer terms, it also meant data storage and retrieval and dissemination.
  
  
• "Old Imperialism"
  This period of imperialism involved factors different from what came to be known as "New Imperialism" in the late nineteenth century. It is important that students begin to track information about exploration and colonization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including goals, nations, and levels of control, so that they will have information for later comparison—and possible examples for their essays.

Summing Up Student Understanding

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Aspects of Western Civilization, Vol. I, edited by Rogers—Chapter 8, All Sections
• Sources of the West, Vol. I, edited by Kishlausky—Part III, "The Renaissance"