Intellectual History Commons^™

The Intellectual Fallout From World War I, William Dean

Faculty Scholarship – History

Many books link World War II to postmodernism, but few link World War I in the same way. The author here explores the intellectual fallout from World War I as the context of the roots of post-modernism. His limited purpose in this paper is to explore one of many possible links between the unanticipated carnage of World War I, through existentialism, to the attack on meaning in history posed by postmodernism. The postmodern drive towards individual isolation and autonomy has a corrosive political impact on our world, as it does on individual well being.

One of the internal inconsistencies that …

Printing And Protestants: An Empirical Test Of The Role Of Printing In The Reformation, Jared Rubin

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper seeks to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis that instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600.