Gillette Ages of Isms – Ap Euro

19th c. Urban Society Creative Assignment

You finally get an opportunity to break out of analytical writing and exercise your creative juices!

Your inspiration will be one of the rooms in the drawing of a Parisian apartment building that appears on the next page. You may also want to incorporate other rooms/stairwells in your piece, but one room should be the starting point. Using the room as inspiration, you will write a creative piece that illustrates what life was like for one or more social classes in 19th century urban society. You have wide latitude in the type of writing that you would like to do. You can write a short story, a series of diary entries, a play, a newspaper article, or …? If you have another idea, just run it by me – I will likely approve it.

You get to choose to work solo or in a group of 2 or 3.

Requirements:➢ At the top of your paper: (1) identify the number of the room you selected, and

(2) indicate which social class(es) the people belong to. Be very specific, such as the upper middle class, the middle middle class, the labor aristocracy, etc.

➢ Provide a date for the piece between 1840 and 1914. It can be over a period of time. Then think carefully about the historical information you choose to include. For example, if you set your story in London in 1850, your characters should not be attending the Crystal Palace Exhibition, which didn’t occur until 1851.

➢ Incorporate historical facts – such as what the people do for a living, leisure activities, clothing, gender roles, attitudes towards religion, living conditions, hopes/aspirations, etc. You might consider, too, the prevailing ideologies of the time period (ex. liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, romanticism, feminism (ish)), features of the modern city, events specific to your country setting (ex. Revolutions of 1848 in Paris or Vienna), art, literature, and/or scientific developments. If you are eager for some visual inspiration from 19th c. cities, check out the documents and visuals on Paris and Vienna on my website: https://msgilletteblog.wordpress.com

➢ Highlight or underline the historical facts that appear in the piece.➢ Please do your best to adopt a believable voice for your characters. This class

has not immersed you in 19th c. literature or movies depicting the 19th c., so this may be a challenging proposition. At best please avoid making your characters sound like 21st c. Canadian teenagers.

➢ Length: I am largely indifferent … the range can vary wildly. You should probably be able to produce 3 pages at a minimum.

➢ Format: You may format this work like a standard paper, or you may be creative (though the most important part of this assignment is the writing … don’t dazzle me with fancy formatting at the expense of good writing). Do double-space, though, please.

➢ For very creative exemplars, please visit my website

Gillette Ages of Isms – Ap Euro

Gillette Ages of Isms – Ap Euro

Rubric

Fully Meeting Meeting Minimally Meeting Not Yet MeetingIdentifiers(room #, social class, date)Incorporation of historical details(i.e. isms, art, literature, science)X2Setting (historically accurate to the time)

Believable character voice

Fluency/Mechanics

Style

TOTAL: /28

Comments:

Gillette Ages of Isms – Ap Euro

Life in the Emerging Urban Society(1840-1914)

Objectives1. Describe life in 19th-century cities and explain how urban conditions changed

from the pre-industrial era to 1900 (consider city size, layout, transportation, health conditions, etc.).

2. Explain the factors that accounted for the unsanitary conditions of industrial cities.

3. Identify important individuals who participated in reform or scientific advancements in public health and explain their contributions.

4. Describe the social structure of urban society in Europe, ca. 1840-1914.  Identify the major social classes and subclasses, and describe their respective occupations, cultures, leisure activities, and values.

5. Discuss how urbanization affected family life and gender roles for both the middle and working classes.

6. Identify important developments in scientific thought in the 19th c. - ex. in biology/the medical sciences, physics, chemistry, electricity, and evolution. Provide examples of how scientific discoveries transformed into material improvements for the general population.  Describe the social and cultural consequences of developments in science.

7. Explain developments in late 19th-century universities, and how the new sociologists portrayed industrial society.

8. Identify the principles of realism and provide examples of how they were manifested in 19th-century literature.

Terms and PeopleEdwin ChadwickJeremy Bentham / utilitarianismmiasmatic theoryLouis Pasteur / germ theoryRobert KochJoseph Lister / antiseptic principle

Napoleon III (r. 1848-1870)Georges Haussmann

labor aristocracysweated industries

companionate marriageseparate spheressuffrage movement

thermodynamicsDmitri MendeleevSecond Industrial Revolution

evolutionCharles LyellJean Baptiste LamarckCharles Darwin / On the Origin of Species /   natural selectionHerbert Spencer / Social Darwinism

sociologyMax Weber

realism (1840s-1890s)