1400 - 1800 Timeline

This was a time of castles and peasants, guilds and monasteries, cathedrals and crusades. Great leaders such as Joan of Arc and Charlemagne were part of the Middle Ages as well as major events such as the Black Plague and the rise of Islam.

A big part of the Renaissance was a cultural movement called humanism. Humanism was a philosophy that all people should strive to be educated and learned in the classical arts, literature, and science. It looked for realism and human emotion in art. It also said that it was okay for people to pursue comfort, riches, and beauty.

A monk named Martin Luther began to question the practices of the Catholic Church as he studied the Bible. He found many areas where he felt the Bible and the Catholic Church disagreed. On October 31, 1517 Luther took a list of 95 points where he thought the Church had gone wrong and nailed it to the door of a Catholic Church

The 18th century was a period of remarkable scientific breakthroughs. This began with the scientific advances of the 16th and 17th centuries, when people began to reject unproven theories and superstition in favor of careful observation, and carried out experiments to test ideas

he believed that the Sun was located near the center of the universe. It was this center of the universe which influenced those bodies and caused them to revolve. This theory is called the heliocentric or sun-center theory of the universe.

The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in 18th-century Europe

In 1610 he made observations of 4 objects surrounding Jupiter that behaved unlike stars,

Anton van Leeuwenhoek (October 24, 1632 - August 26, 1723) was a tradesman and scientist from Delft, in the Netherlands. He is best known for his contribution to improvement of the microscope and his contributions towards the establishment of cell biology. Using his handcrafted microscope he was the first to observe and describe muscle fibers, bacteria, spermatozoa and blood flow in capillaries (small blood vessels).

In 1837, Britain was still a rural nation with 80% of the population living in the countryside. Most people were farmers or spun wool and cotton to weave into cloth. Soon new machines were invented that could do these jobs in a fraction of the time. This left many people out of work, so they flocked to the towns in search of jobs in new industries. By the middle of the nineteenth century over 50% of the population lived in towns and cities.