Humanities Test Questions – Flashcards
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How did Samuel Richardson tell the plot of his novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded?
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Series of letters
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As reported in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section, why did the British consider Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite?
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For condemning slavery yet owning slaves
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Why did the Hawaiians kill Captain Cook in 1779?
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For overreacting to a Hawaiian's theft of a small boat
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Why did Hobbes believe that most people willingly accepted a social contract?
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To control their instincts and to achieve peace
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Why did the Lunar Society meet monthly on the night of a full moon?
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So they would have light to travel home by
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Which Baroque artist greatly influenced Diego Velázquez's paintings?
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Caravaggio
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Why did the English Puritans invite Holland to invade Britain in 1688?
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James II appointed Catholics to high government positions
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Why does Louis XIV wear red high-heeled shoes in Hyacinthe Rigaud's portrait?
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To elevate his 5'4" height
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Why did Louis XIV urge his courtiers to live beyond their means?
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To make them financially dependent on him
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Why did the English people find Oliver Cromwell difficult to tolerate as their leader?
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For imposing too many restrictions on them
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On what values was liberalism based?
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Equality and freedom
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Why did both Britain and France side with the South prior to the Civil War?
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Their economies depended on Southern cotton
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In Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave, what does the distant Mount Fuji represent?
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The immortality of the natural world
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By how much did Haussmann's plan increase land dedicated to public parks in Paris?
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A hundred times
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What was one of the effects of Stephen Foster's plantation melodies?
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To humanize the blacks
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Why did Charles Baudelaire speak so disparagingly of George Sand?
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He considered her bourgeoisie
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According to Baudelaire, what was the greatest job of the flâneur (man-about-town) like himself and Édouard Manet?
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To shock the bourgeoisie
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According to Émile Zola, what two factors over which they have no control determine people's lives?
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Heredity and environment
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In the preface to his novel Thérèsa Raquin, how does Zola explain the immoral actions of the two main characters?
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They are human animals
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What earlier work does Manet's Olympia mirror?
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Titian's Reclining Nude
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For what did Joseph Paxton design London's Crystal Palace?
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The Exhibition of the Art and Industry of All Nations
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What human-rights issue lay beneath the surface of nineteenth-century Russian culture?
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Plight of the serf
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Why do most of Edgar Degas's paintings have work as their primary theme?
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Degas worked long and hard on his paintings
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Why did Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and other artists found a Société anonyme?
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To help rebuild French culture
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What two principles did William Morris emphasize in his designs?
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Simplicity and utility
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How many Native Americans died on the Trail of Tears?
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Over 4,000
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In The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, why did Albert Bierstadt paint a mountain from the Swiss Alps, not the actual Lander's Peak?
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His audience expected that familiar view
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What caused the "Panic of 1873" and subsequent four-year "Long Depression"?
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Failure of a Philadelphia banking firm
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By how much did Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase increase the United States' size?
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Doubled
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How were women almost always portrayed in late nineteenth-century American visual art?
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As passive
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In The Night Café, how does Vincent van Gogh express "the terrible passions of humanity"?
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Garishly contrasting reds and green
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Why did some French complain about the Eiffel Tower?
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Violation of Paris's beauty
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What anniversary did Paris's Exposition Universelle of 1889 mark?
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Beginning of the French Revolution
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Why did the Society of Men of Letters refuse to accept Rodin's Monument to Balzac, forcing him to return the advance payments?
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Not a realistic portrayal
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What did Joseph Conrad aim to show in Heart of Darkness?
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The dehumanizing effects of colonialism
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Which earlier artist inspired Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in their development of Cubism?
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Cézanne
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Why did Braque and Picasso begin pasting paper, fabric, rope, and other objects to their canvases?
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To challenge the space between life and art
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Which earlier artist's work may have inspired Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?
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Manet
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Why were Thomas Edison's early films for the Kinetoscope rather limited?
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Only one person at a time could view them
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Why did Picasso paint masks on two of the prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon?
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To make them look primitive
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What did one American critic call Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase?
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"An explosion in a shingle factory"
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In The Battleship Potemkin's Odessa Steps scene, how did Eisenstein heighten tension and emotional impact?
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Using different rhythms of music
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According to the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section, why did so many Southern African-Americans make the Great Migration to the north between 1915 and 1918?
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Plentiful jobs
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Why is the final episode in James Joyce's Ulysses considered revolutionary?
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Uncensored exploration of a woman's sexuality
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Why did the exhibition committee for a 1917 New York show hide Duchamp's "ready-made" entry, Fountain, behind a curtain?
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It was a urinal
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What do skyscrapers, a distinct American invention, predominantly symbolize?
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Corporate power and prestige
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What types of subjects did William Carlos Williams use for his poems?
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Commonplace, everyday
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According to the first-person narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, what is Jay Gatsby's great tragedy?
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Believing in the American Dream
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What typically are the subjects of blues songs?
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Loss and injustice
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Who coined the phrase "Jazz Age" to describe 1920s America?
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Why did Adolph Hitler claim Jews were to blame for what he perceived as Germany's post-World War I moral decline?
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Their association with communism
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What three major divisions of German society does Georg Grosz parody in his painting The Pillars of Society?
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Military, clergy, and middle class
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In his painting to what event does Picasso link the tragedy of Guernica?
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Ritualized Spanish bullfighting
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What "cosmic interaction" did Piet Mondrian believe the grid represented?
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Masculine and feminine
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On what condition would Picasso allow Guernica to be on permanent display in a museum in his native Spain?
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Spanish people regain civil liberties
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Why do the works by Jean Dubuffet, such as Corps de Dame, look do disordered?
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He aimed for "authentic" art, divorced from convention and tradition
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Why did the London-formed Independents call their creations "Pop Art"?
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They based it on American popular culture
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What question about art did the Minimalists seem to be asking with their works?
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What makes a work of art?
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Why was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore, charged with obscenity?
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For publishing Ginsberg's "Howl"
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What is Jean-Paul Sartre's first principle of his atheistic existentialism?
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"Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself"
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Why was Martin Luther King, Jr., arrested and jailed in Birmingham in 1963?
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Leading a protest march
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What did the college students involved in the 1960s antiwar movement want school administrations to do?
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Remove ROTC from their campuses
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Why did the government continue to fund building the F-111 fighter bomber even though it was declared obsolete?
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Keep people employed and the company afloat
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As recreated in Jeff Wall's photographic illustration for Invisible Man, why does Ellison's narrator need light?
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Confirm his reality
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In The Feminist Mystique, why does Betty Friedan reject Freud's idea that women envy men?
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Assumption that women are inferior to men
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What is Prague's Dancing House with its teetering sense of collapse designed to evoke?
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Post-World War II bombed building
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Why did African painter Chris Ofili support The Holy Virgin Mary on two balls of elephant dung?
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The Zimbabwe viewed elephant dung as a fertility symbol
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How does Renzo Piano's Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia qualify as "green architecture"?
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Ten pavilions function as wind scoops and cool the inside
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Why did the Chinese government demand Zhang Hongtu's painting Bird's Nest, in the Style of Cubism be removed from China?
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Inappropriate muted palette for celebration
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What has Santiago Calatrava designed the Port Authority Trans Hudson station at the World Trade Center site to resemble?
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Bird being released by a child's hands
