Western Civilization II
Final Exam Questions
Course Introduction
Western Civilization II traces the development of European society from the late Renaissance through the modern era, examining significant political, cultural, intellectual, and economic transformations. The course explores key events such as the Enlightenment, the French and Industrial Revolutions, the rise of nationalism, colonialism, world wars, and postwar reconstruction. Emphasis is placed on the interplay between ideas and institutions, the evolution of democratic and authoritarian systems, and the impact of Western expansion on global history. Students gain an understanding of how historical forces shaped the modern world and the enduring legacy of Western civilization in contemporary society.
Recommended Textbook
Humanities The Culture Continuity and Change Volume II 1600 to the Present 2nd Edition by Henry
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Chapter 20: The Baroque in Italy: The Church and Its Appeal
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Q1) List and analyze at least two reasons for Artemesia Gentileschi's use of her self-portrait for Judith in her five paintings of the Jewish heroine's story.
Q2) Why was the division between the Council of Trent-rejected secular music and religious compositions less pronounced in Venice?
A)It traditionally had ignored papal authority
B)It had a large Protestant population
C)It was too far from Rome for any to notice
D)It was not a part of the Holy Roman Empire
Q3) What did Bernini aim to symbolize with his oval colonnade that encloses Vatican Square?
A)The world converging at the church
B)The classical tradition of the church
C)The motherly arms of the church
D)The expansive reach of the church
Q4) What is a defining characteristic of Baroque art?
A)Attention to viewers' emotional experience of a work
B)Return to the forms and proportions of classical art
C)Focus on the symbolic meaning of a work
D)Absence of excessive decoration and sensuousness
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Chapter 21: The Secular Baroque in the North: The Art of Observation
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Q1) Describe the developments in Dutch music during the seventeenth century,highlighting especially the innovations and contributions of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Q2) Why was Rembrandt so interested in self-portraiture?
A)He wished to emulate Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait
B)He suffered from an excess of vanity
C)He aimed to document the changes age brought
D)His own face provided the ideal practice subject
Q3) Why can Rembrandt's late work Slaughtered Ox be viewed as optimistic?
A)Soft light falls on the animal's carcass
B)The carcass suggests a feast to come
C)The crucifixion pose implies redemption
D)The maid in the doorway represents the Virgin
Q4) What do most of Jan Vermeer's 34 painting depict?
A)The symmetry of Dutch domestic architecture
B)A moment in the domestic world of women
C)National pride in Dutch land reclamation
D)A civic institution's membership at a particular time
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Q5) Summarize Descartes' use of deductive reasoning to prove to his satisfaction the existence of God.
Chapter 22: The Baroque Court: Absolute Power and Royal Patronage
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Q1) Why is Velázquez's Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)considered such a complex painting?
A)The number of figures in it
B)Its focus on individual actions
C)The obscurity of its symbolism
D)Its competing focal points
Q2) Explain how and why Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's San Pedro Nolasco dramatizes the diversity of language and culture in New Spain.
Q3) As discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,in Henri Testelin's Jean-Baptiste Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Science to Louis XIV,why does Louis look out of place amid the scientific dignitaries and instruments?
A)He looks bewildered by the instruments
B)He is the image of ostentatious excess
C)He is much shorter than the scientists
D)He is rendered obsolete by the scientists
Q4) Describe three of the subjects and their actions in Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas.
Q5) Define absolutism,and show how Louis XIV's rule exemplifies it.
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Q6) Identify and describe three of the six dances that can make up a suite.
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Chapter 23: The Rise of the Enlightenment in England: The
Claims of Reason
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Q1) Why did the Maori tattoo their heads?
A)To identify their clan
B)To increase their mana
C)To attract a mate
D)To display their wealth
Q2) How did Charles II thank John Dryden for his poem "Annus Mirabilis"?
A)Appointing him England's poet laureate
B)Naming one of the city's new squares after him
C)Awarding him a pension for life
D)Declaring it England's national poem
Q3) Why did Samuel Johnson undertake his monumental Dictionary of the English Language?
A)To stop the English language from changing
B)To help people pronounce words properly
C)To help readers understand his newspaper
D)To standardize the English language
Q4) List,define,and provide examples of two types of novels that developed in eighteenth-century England.
Q6) Compare Hobbes' and Locke's ideas about the role of government. Page 6
Q5) Explain how Milton's God and Satan reflect the ideas of Locke and Hobbes.
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Chapter 24: The Rococo and the Enlightenment on the
Continent: Privilege and Reason
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Q1) Why is the music that arose in reaction to the Rococo called "classical"?
A)Its symmetry,proportion,unity,and clarity
B)Its reliance upon a small number of instruments
C)Its predictability of form and movements
D)Its use of Greek and Roman mythological themes
Q2) Show how François Boucher's paintings of Madame de Pompadour-Madame de Pompadour and The Toilet of Venus-were propagandistic in terms of her roles with Louis XV.
Q3) How did Voltaire make himself so unpopular with both the French and Prussian courts that he had to retire to the country to avoid imprisonment?
A)Writing plays that involved questionable morals
B)Openly living with the marquise du Châtelet,a married woman
C)Stating that the Prussian monarchy was better than the French
D)Criticizing the government and satirizing the rulers
Q4) From what sources did the English draw inspiration for the English garden?
A)Virgil,Horace,and Pliny
B)Leonardo,Raphael,and Michelangelo
C)Homer,Herodotus,and Thucydides
D)Bruegel,Vermeer,and Rembrandt
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Q5) Cite and explain two examples of Europe and China influencing one another.
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Chapter 25: The Rights of Man: Revolution and the
Neoclassical Style
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Q1) Why did Napoleon reject Canova's statue of him as Mars?
A)He needed to remove himself from a military image
B)He had ordered himself portrayed as Augustus,not Mars
C)He desired to be portrayed as taller,not his actual height
D)He thought displaying himself as a nude was inappropriate
Q2) Why did Napoleon launch a massive rebuilding program in Paris?
A)To restore Paris to its Baroque grandeur
B)To impress his empire with his new palace
C)To make Paris the new Rome
D)To expand the churches to glorify God
Q3) Why in The Wealth of Nations did Adam Smith take a laissez-faire position on slavery?
A)He owned several slaves
B)Slaves could supply goods cheaper
C)Slavery was just another commodity
D)He believed blacks were inferior to the British
Q4) Identify,describe,and cite specific examples of two ways Jean Louis-David's paintings define French Neoclassicism.
Q6) List and explain specific two ways Napoleon used art as propaganda. Page 9
Q5) Describe the conditions Africans endured during the African diaspora.
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Chapter 26: The Romantic World View: the Self in Nature and
the Nature of Self
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Q1) List three characteristics of the Romantic hero,showing how Napoleon fit this character type.
Q2) Why in Lyrical Ballads did Wordsworth chose to focus on people from "humble and rustic life"?
A)They were more honest
B)They were less educated
C)They were closer to nature
D)They were more like him
Q3) In Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," what does the Mariner's killing of the albatross represent?
A)Coleridge overcoming opium addiction
B)An attack on nature
C)Salvation for his shipmates
D)Christ's crucifixion
Q4) Explain the sublime's appeal to the Romantics,exemplifying your response with at least two works of visual art or literature.
Q5) Identify and explain the main theme of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
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Q6) Define Emerson's Transcendentalist beliefs,and show how his friend Thoreau lived what Emerson preached.
Chapter
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Q1) Compare the subjects and themes of Gustave Courbet's The Stonebreakers and A Burial at Ornans,both of which drew criticism from French viewers.
Q2) As reported in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,why possibly did Roger Fenton not include the dead or wounded in his Crimean War photographs?
A)British government forbade it
B)He wasn't allowed on the battlefield
C)The families requested him not to do so
D)Newspapers would not print them
Q3) Why did Charles Darwin sail on the H.M.S.Beagle in 1831?
A)To serve as the ship's physician
B)To find evidence for human evolution
C)To photograph South America
D)To serve as the ship's naturalist
Q4) Why did the factories tend to employ unskilled single young women and widows?
A)They worked for lower wages than men
B)In London women outnumbered men
C)They were more dependable than men
D)Their children would work as assistants
Q5) Explain Charles Darwin's argument of natural selection.
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Chapter 28: Global Confrontation and Civil War: Challenges to Cultural Identity
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Q1) Why in 1877 did Southern African Americans lose many of the freedoms they had gained from the Civil War?
A)Jim Crow organized the Ku Klux Klan
B)Newly-elected President Hayes was a Southerner
C)The Supreme Court struck down the Emancipation Act
D)Union troops withdrew from the South
Q2) How did the American Civil War change the nature of warfare?
A)It allowed the different races to fight together
B)It was American fighting against American
C)Its battlefields were on civilians' properties
D)It was mechanized and impersonal,with no pageantry
Q3) Why did Haussmann's redesign cause the working class to move outside the city?
A)Their neighborhoods were destroyed
B)Schools were located outside the city
C)Factories replaced their tenement housing
D)The government built them new houses there
Q4) Compare the compositional elements of Suzuki Harunobu's Two Courtesans,Inside and Outside the Display Window and Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave,showing how each artist uses the Taoist principle of unity within diversity.
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Chapter 29: In Pursuit of Modernity: Paris in the 1850s and 1860s
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Q1) Why did Charles Garnier design the façade of the Paris Opera House to be a merger of Neoclassical and Baroque?
A)To satisfy liberals and nationalists
B)To highlight the best of both styles
C)To reflect a new imperial style
D)To cut expenses by using existing parts
Q2) Identify and explain two ways Giuseppe Verdi achieved dramatic realism in his operas.
Q3) Why did French audiences react so negatively to Wagner's Tannhäuser?
A)Its plot was hopelessly Romantic
B)It was performed in the German language
C)Its second-act dance was not a ballet
D)Its German plot inflamed French hostility
Q4) Why were Jacques Offenbach's operettas so popular with the French?
A)They included the second-act ballet
B)They satirized the Germans
C)They were light and entertaining
D)They glorified Louis-Napoleon's reign
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Q5) Compare Manet's Olympia to Titian's Reclining Nude,focusing on the differences in symbolic elements in the two works.
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Chapter 30: The Promise of Renewal: Hope and Possibility in
Late Nineteenth-Century Europe
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Q1) Why did the 13 Russian artists known as the Travelers show their paintings across the country instead of in an urban gallery?
A)The aristocracy disliked their paintings' realism
B)They desired to spread their message of social reform
C)No urban gallery would display their work
D)The tsar feared they would stir up a rebellion
Q2) List and discuss three events that contributed to 1870's France's less-than-optimistic mood.
Q3) What theory did John Stuart Mill advocate in The Subjection of Women?
A)Libertarian
B)Economic
C)Socialist
D)Utilitarian
Q4) Why did Zola call Gustave Caillebotte's The Floor-Scrapers "crude" and "violent"?
A)Its loose,sketchy brushwork
B)Its working-class subject
C)Its reliance on parallel lines
D)Its downplay of natural light
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Chapter 31: The Course of Empire: Expansion and Conflict in America
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Q1) How does Emily Dickinson's poetry resemble Walt Whitman's?
A)Focus on life in the city
B)Unconventional verse
C)Celebration of individual
D)Unorthodox themes
Q2) Identify and describe Frederick Law Olmsted's contributions to the American landscape.Considering your hometown,can you see any of Olmsted's influences?
Q3) What was the title of the preparatory sketch for George Bellows' Cliff Dwellers?
A)"Your Tired,Your Poor,Your Huddled Masses"
B)"Why Don't They All Go to the Country for a Vacation?"
C)"I Sing the Body Electric,the Armies of Those I Love"
D)"The Wretched Refuse of Your Teeming Shores"
Q4) How is Mary Cassatt's Gathering Fruit mural a positive reinterpretation of the Eve theme?
A)The women share the fruit among generations
B)The women avoid temptation to eat the fruit
C)The women warn children to avoid the fruit
D)The women cut down the Tree of Knowledge
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Chapter 32: The Fin De Siècle: Toward the Modern
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Q1) In Still Life with Plaster Cast,what does Paul Cézanne seem to be suggesting by the two viewpoints?
A)One's point of view determines perception of an object's size
B)Like color,perspective can be symbolic,charged with feelings
C)People do not view the world from a single point of view
D)The human eye can be tricked into focusing on certain details
Q2) Why did Georges Seurat prefer to paint using tiny dots of color called pontilles?
A)To add movement and depth to his figures
B)To convey emotions through color combinations
C)To compensate for the subtractive process of mixing
D)To exaggerate the rigidity of the figures he portrayed
Q3) Why did some French complain about the Eiffel Tower?
A)Feared collapse
B)Too tall
C)Annoying beacon light
D)Violation of Paris's beauty
Q4) Citing at least two artists as examples,explain the effect on their art of the Symbolists' need to retire from society in order to create works.
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Chapter 33: The Era of Invention: Paris and the Modern World
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Q1) Who developed Imagist poetry?
A)Guillaume Apollinaire
B)Gertrude Stein
C)Alice B.Toklas
D)Ezra Pound
Q2) Why did Arnold Schoenberg create his 12-tone system?
A)To abandon the home-key idea of tonality
B)To show that every tone was equal to every other
C)To give his Sprechstimme(speech-song)a wider range
D)To reflect song with more explosive force
Q3) What is the chief theme of Kandinsky's Composition VII?
A)The Great Deluge
B)The biblical Apocalypse
C)The Russian Revolution
D)The passion of Christ
Q4) Why did viewers find Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon disturbing?
A)The subjects are prostitutes
B)The shapes are unnatural
C)The women look androgynous
D)The blue and orange colors clash
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Chapter 34: The Great War and Its Impact: a Lost
Generation and a New Imagination
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Q1) List and define Freud's three competing drives of human personality.
Q2) How does The Battleship Potemkin's Odessa Steps scene qualify as Eisenstein's invention?
A)No civilians were killed in the massacre
B)No such steps exist in the city of Odessa
C)No massacre occurred on the steps
D)No baby carriage rolled down the steps
Q3) According to Freud,which of the following is not one of the competing drives of human personality?
A)Ego
B)Superego
C)Id
D)Superid
Q4) As discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,why did Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes dislike Paris?
A)Too racist
B)Too money-oriented
C)Too avant-garde
D)Too elegant
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Making It New
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Q1) Why is William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury considered one of the most daring uses of stream of consciousness in modern fiction?
A)It's told from the viewpoints of 15 different characters
B)One of its narrators is intellectually disabled
C)Its interior monologues span multiple generations
D)One of its narrators is a victim of rape
Q2) As discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,why did Adolph Hitler ban abstract art?
A)For including works done by Jewish artists
B)For representing dissolution of the established
C)For not representing subjects realistically
D)For rejecting propagandistic symbolism
Q3) What do skyscrapers,a distinct American invention,predominantly symbolize?
A)American manufacturing skill
B)Corporate power and prestige
C)American male dominance
D)Ostentatious wealth
Q4) Identify and explain two reasons for America's infatuation with its distinct invention,the skyscraper.
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Chapter 36: The Age of Anxiety: Fascism and Depression
holocaust and Bomb
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Q1) Why did the bourgeois German youth flock to the Wandervogel movement?
A)To defy their conservative parents
B)To discuss plans for a revolt
C)To recapture a premodern past
D)To train in secret for military duty
Q2) Why in part did Elie Wiesel win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986?
A)For Night,his memoir about the Holocaust
B)For Night and Fog,his Holocaust documentary
C)For Maus,his graphic novel about the Holocaust
D)For If This Is a Man,his novel about an Auschwitz guard
Q3) Why did Hitler begin the tradition of carrying the Olympic torch from Athens to the Olympic venue in 1936?
A)Show off the Germans' athletic abilities
B)Advertise Germany's openness to other cultures
C)Suggest that Germany was the new classical Greece
D)Imply Germany's position as civilization's center
Q4) Focusing on one work of literature and one film discussed in the chapter,analyze the artistic response to the horrors of World War II.
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Chapter 37: After the War: Existential Doubt, artistic
Triumph, and the Culture of Consumption
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Q1) Identify and explain two ways the art of the Abstract Expressionists introduced a new aspect-the creation of meaning shifting from artist to audience.
Q2) Why did the London-formed Independents call their creations "Pop Art"?
A)They based it on American popular culture
B)The vivid colors they used pop from the canvas
C)It celebrated the popular films of the 1950s
D)It became very popular with war-ravaged Londoners
Q3) From the London Independents to Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein,artists of the 1950s and early 1960s were fascinated by American popular culture.Identify and explain two reasons for this fascination.
Q4) In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot,why does Godot never arrive?
A)He is dead
B)Audience never knows
C)He does not exist
D)He goes to the wrong place
Q5) Identify and define two of existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir's reasons for a woman not being able to realize her own existence.Do these reasons have relevance in our post-women's liberation society? Defend your response.
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Chapter 38: Multiplicity and Diversity: Cultures of Liberation and
Identity in the 1960s and 1970s
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Q1) In The Feminist Mystique,why does Betty Friedan reject Freud's idea that women envy men?
A)Assumption that women are inferior to men
B)Too much emphasis to female sexuality
C)Denial of the chance for inequality to be eliminated
D)Acceptance that culture determines gender roles
Q2) An overarching theme of the 1960s and the 1970s is the exploration and redefining of roles in American society.From African Americans to the youth culture to women to men,identify and discuss three traditional roles that were challenged and perhaps changed.
Q3) According to Marshall McLuhan,what created the "global village"?
A)World War II
B)Electronic mass media
C)The Vietnam War
D)Affordable transportation
Q4) Identify and describe two ways African Americans used passive resistance in their quest for civil rights during the 1960s.Then detail the immediate results of this protest technique.
Q5) Summarize the role popular music played in the youth rebellion of the 1960s.
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Chapter 39: Without Boundaries: Multiple Meanings in a
Postmodern World
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Q1) Define "green architecture," and explain how it fits with the concept of postmodern architecture.Then describe two examples-one from the book and one from your community.
Q2) What primarily defines Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao,Spain,as postmodern?
A)Outer elements covered in metal
B)Enormous and expansive size
C)Discontinuity with the town and countryside
D)Playful resemblance to a ship in full sail
Q3) In literature,how does the postmodern hero differ from his or her predecessors?
A)Has been rejected by society for not conforming
B)Embraces his or her ordinariness and lack of purpose
C)Has no definable goal and merely wanders through life
D)Accepts that the search for meaning is never-ending
Q4) Identify and describe three ways Yasumasa Morimura's Portrait (Twins)is designed to disturb the viewer.
Q5) Identify and explain how works by two painters discussed in the chapter exemplify cultural misunderstandings.
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