Final Examination

About this exam
The purpose of the final examination is to encourage you to go back through your notes from the semester and to organize them such that the course resides in a coherent place in your long-term memory. Your goal in writing the exam is to demonstrate your engagement with the material from the course.  This is not a research paper.  Your database of information is the set of notes that you took in class. 

• Stylistically these essays should be like all other writing you have done for this course: concise, full of specific evidence, and organized in support of a coherent thesis or argument.
• Make your argument dense, with lots of specific evidence.
• Stick to the page limit.
• Marshal your evidence into a coherent argument that you state as a thesis in the first sentence.
• All lecture terms, images, reading guides, and texts from the course are still on the website as they have been all semester.  Recorded lectures / transcripts are still on Blackboard.  Use these resources.
• Surfing, googling, or other research from outside the course is strongly discouraged: We know what content has been delivered in class, and we are looking for that content and your mastery of it.
• Historical identifications: Use the skills you have been developing this semester when introducing historical or technical terminology:
• the definition (who, what, where, when)
• and then a brief statement about the term’s significance for your argument.

The Problem
Armies are typically understood in terms of international conflict, either fighting a war beyond one’s borders or defending the state’s borders from an external aggressor.  But in the modern era, most of the conflicts we have seen in this course have been internal to the state:

• the political-theological division within the Holy Roman Empire represented by Martin Luther’s reformation and the “protestants”;
• the French Wars of Religion, which were as much political/legal as they were about theology and liturgical practice;
• the assimilation campaigns of newly sovereign territorial states after the Peace of Westphalia;
• the rise of political “absolutism”; with
• the example of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

We have seen human reason applied to the science of state, with transformative results in economics, agricultural and industrial production, public health, and the advancement of society.
But we have also seen a great deal of criticism and dissent:

• aesthetic education that taught people to perceive fine distinctions in the arts but also to critique political and religious authority;
• Immanual Kant’s Enlightenment motto of “Dare to know,” dare to think for yourself, to question authority, and to cultivate your own power of reason;
• and in the nineteenth century at the height of European progress, the critiques of reason itself:
• in Marx, who pointed out that people are subject to economic forces beyond their control;
• in Darwin, who showed that we are the product of long-term biological processes;
• and in Nietzsche and Freud, who said that even reason itself is subject to deeply seated forces of the will and the unconscious.

The Question
Consider the course of European history since the Reformation (or maybe the Renaissance).
Do dissenters threaten the survival of the state such that they should be purged (like Louis XIV expelling the Huguenots),
or is non-conformism vital to the life of the nation?

Specifications (just like your other essays)

• Two pages
• Typed in a font not smaller than 10 point
• Double spaced
• One-inch margins all around

Exam submission:

• Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format.
• Please name your file thus: “[LastName]Final.[doc]” 
• Mine for example would be CarhartFinal.doc
• Victoria’s would look like McFarlaneFinal.pdf

Due: Tuesday, May 5 @ 5:00pm
            via Blackboard (link to “Final Exam Submission”)