HIS 146B University of California Good & Bad Violence in A Princess of Mars Essay

1. Define the relationship between class and gender as influences shaping the lives of the women whose autobiographies we sampled in Week 1. 

2. Identify four major trends in the social development of Limoges in the late nineteenth century, as described John Merriman’s Red City, and explain how they were related to each other. 

3. In our readings for week 3, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Herbert Spencer, and Pope Leo XIII each take a position with regard to the poor, and poverty. Explain the differences between them, and the implications of those differences for their understanding of the relationship between the state and society. 

4. Consider our readings from the debate on women’s suffrage in week 4 of the class. Which argument would have seemed more modern, at that time, that is, to a person living in Europe at that time (not to you today)—the argument for, or the argument against votes for women? In what sense was it more modern? 

5. There is a lot of violence in Edgar Rice Burrough’s novel A Princess of Mars. Some of that violence appears to be portrayed in a positive light, and some in a negative light. What do you think was the difference for Burroughs between “good” violence and “bad” violence? 

6. Consider the views on “shopping” presented by Thorstein Veblen and Erika Rappoport in our readings for week 5. Did they see that new social activity as liberating or oppressive for women? 

7. Was cycling, as described in Ritchie and Rabenstein’s article (Week 5), one of the forms of the “new kinaesthetic of the twentieth century” described by Hillel Schwartz (in our reading for Week 2)? 

8. Violence plays a role in the political ideas of Heinrich Treitschke (week 3), Almroth Wright (week 4), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Week 4). Do all three men think of it in the same way? 

9. In consultation with Dr. Dickinson, develop your own question based on our readings.