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Definitions:
Industrial Revolution
“The term Industrial Revolution refers to the
vast economic and social changes initiated in Great Britain during
the last few decades of the eighteenth century and spreading to
the Continent and other parts of the world during the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. It involved a shift from production by
individuals alone or in small groups using hand tools powered by
muscles, wind, and water to production by organized groups of people
in factories using machinery powered by steam. These changes in
the methods of production resulted in sustained economic growth.
In the process of industrializing, nations experienced rapid population
growth and a general shift from a rural society based on agriculture
to an urban society based on manufacturing.”
Sullivan, E. Richard. “Chapter 40: The Industrial Revolution.”
(1994) A Short History of Western Civilization. New York,
NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., pg. 516
Capitalism
“An economic system
in which the means of production and distribution are privately
or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation
and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.”
The American Heritage Dictionary, Third
Edition Version 3.6p (1994) SoftKey International Inc.
Sir Thomas More
“SIR THOMAS MORE also SAINT THOMAS MORE, was born in London in
1478. He was a page in the household of Archbishop Morton, who sent
him to Oxford, and was called to the bar, whre he was eminently
successful. He became an MP and Undersheriff of London, and while
envoy to Flanders began writing Utopia in Latin. Finishing it in
1516. He was appointed privy councilor of Henry VIII in 1518 and,
recommended by Wolsey, was elected Speaker of the House of Commons
in 1525. On the Fall of Wolsey he succeeded against his will as
Lord Chancellor of England, the first layman to hold the office.
He came into conflict with the king by refusing to acknowledge the
sovereign as sole head of the church, and in 1532 he resigned. Charged
with high treason, he steadfastly refused to take an oath impugning
the pope’s authority or upholding Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine
of Aragon. During his imprisonment he prepared a Dialogue of Comfort
Against Tribulation. He was beheaded in 1535; his canonization occurred
four hundred years later”
Radice, Betty., ed. (1965) Utopia New York, New York: Penguin
Classics.
Charles Dickens
“Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, at Landport, near
Portsmouth, England. He died at Gads Hill, his home in Kent, on
June 9, 1870. The second of eight children in a family often plagued
by debt, Dickens at ten saw his father arrested and confined in
the Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison in London, and although a small
boy he was placed in a blacking factory where he worked at labeling
bottles, visiting John Dickens on Sundays. Charles returned to school
on his father’s release, taught himself shorthand, and at sixteen
became a parliamentary reporter. At twenty-four his career took
off with the publication of Sketches by Boz (1836), which
was followed by Pickwick Papers the next year.”
Dickens, Charles. (1997) Charles Dickens: Hard Times. New
York, NY: Signet Classic.
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