Questions for the Second Essay -- Fall 2003 Your essays should be left in my box in the History Office (742 Ballantine) before 3:00 Monday, December 15. Note: The History Department Closes at 4:30. Below you will find the questions for the second essay. Write a 5-page response to one of these questions. The format of the essay is the same as the previous one and may be accessed here. 1) Most early secular visions of Progress, such as those of Condorcet, envisioned a united humanity working together in the future to conquer nature and create a better world for all. But in the late 19th and in the 20th centuries new issues have arisen that have explicitly or implicitly thrown into question the assumptions and values upon which classical notions of progress were constructed. Discuss the way in which the increasing role of three or four of the issues below in discussions of the future have weakened the values and assumptions underpinning progress.
2)
You have finished the course, and over Christmas break your friends and/or family
ask you about this course because they really want to know how people have thought
about the future in the years since 1870. What are the four most important themes
you would want to explain to them? What themes are so important that to leave
them out would fail to do justice to their understanding of visions of the future?
(You may choose your themes from the titles of the sections of the course in the
syllabus.) Explain
and defend the importance you ascribe to each theme by using specific examples
from the works below. For each theme use one of more of the sources to give your
audience a sense of how this vision of the future was expressed and what assumptions
and values underlay it. (Note you may use a single work as an example of more
than one issue. In general papers that use more than one work to support a particular
theme will be considered stronger.)
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