5: Culture, Science, and Pseudo-Science
- Page ID
- 20783
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- 5.2: Scientific and Pseudo-Scientific Discoveries and Theories
- Science made incredible advances in the the Victorian era. Some of the most important breakthroughs had to do with medicine and biology. Those genuine advances, however, were accompanied by the growth of scholarship that claimed to be truly scientific, but that violated the tenets of the scientific method, employed sloppy methods, were based on false premises, or were otherwise simply factually inaccurate. Those fields constitute branches of “pseudo-”, meaning “false,” science.
- 5.3: Mass Culture
- The Victorian era saw the emergence of the first modern, industrialized, "mass" societies. One of the characteristics of industrial societies, above and beyond industrial technology and the use of fossil fuels themselves, is the fact that culture itself becomes mass produced. Written material went from the form of books, which had been expensive and treated with great care in the early centuries of printing, to mass-market periodicals, newspapers, and cheap print.
- 5.6: Modern Anti-Semitism
- European Jews were a minority everywhere they lived. Furthermore, because of their long, difficult, and often violent history facing persecution from the Christian majority, Jews faced a particularly virulent and deep-seated form of hatred from their non-Jewish neighbors. That hatred, referred to as anti-Semitism, took on new characteristics in the modern era that, if anything, made it even more dangerous.
Thumbnail: Queen Victoria, the symbolic matriarch of Western culture in the nineteenth century.