The concept of race as a categorization of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) has an extensive history in Europe and the Americas. The contemporary word race itself is modern; historically it was used in the sense of " nation , ethnic group " during the 16th to 19th centuries. Race acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology through scientific racism starting in the 19th century. With the rise of modern genetics , the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
186-516: The Aryan race is a pseudoscientific historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people who descend from the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a racial grouping . The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan , used by modern Indo-Iranians as an epithet of "noble". Anthropological , historical , and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of this concept. The concept derives from
372-534: A Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language family by this time. The inequality of races and the notion of a "superior race" was universally accepted by the scholars of this era, therefore race was referred to "national character and national culture" beyond biological confinement. In 1853, Arthur de Gobineau published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races , in which he originally identified
558-468: A "group of people belonging to the same family and descended from a common ancestor". It also introduces the first use of the word "race" as a term referring to an "ethnic group" in 1572. An earlier but etymologically distinct word for a similar concept was the Latin word genus meaning a group sharing qualities related to birth, descent, origin, race, stock, or family; this Latin word is cognate with
744-616: A "physical-genetic species" rather than an ethnolinguistic category. Encyclopedias and textbooks of historiography, ethnography, and anthropology from this era, such as Meyers Konversations-Lexikon , Brockhaus Enzyklopädie , Nordisk familjebok , H. G. Wells 's A Short History of the World , John Clark Ridpath 's Great Races of Mankind , and other works reinforced European racial constructions developed on now-pseudoscientific concepts such as racial taxonomy , Social Darwinism , and scientific racism to classify human races. The term Aryan
930-577: A "return to the origins". Various writers in the newspaper Zhar-Ptitsa showed interest in a purported manuscript—the Book of Veles —which supposedly dated to the first century BCE. F. A. Izenbek, a White Army officer, alleged the discovery of this manuscript during the Russian Civil War . However one of Izenbek's friends, Iurii Miroliubov, had forged the manuscript, and used the term " Vedism " to describe Russian neo-paganism; he later appropriated
1116-660: A centre of German Romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano , Achim von Arnim , and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff ( Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ) met regularly in literary circles. Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, for example the German Forest , and Germanic myths . The later German Romanticism of, for example E. T. A. Hoffmann 's Der Sandmann ( The Sandman ), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff 's Das Marmorbild ( The Marble Statue ), 1819,
1302-629: A collection of versified folk tales, in 1806–1808. The first collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm was published in 1812. Unlike the much later work of Hans Christian Andersen , who was publishing his invented tales in Danish from 1835, these German works were at least mainly based on collected folk tales , and the Grimms remained true to the style of the telling in their early editions, though later rewriting some parts. One of
1488-684: A complicated history. By the 18th century, European languages—notably German, French and Slavic languages—were using the term "Roman" in the sense of the English word " novel ", i.e. a work of popular narrative fiction. This usage derived from the term "Romance languages" , which referred to vernacular (or popular) language in contrast to formal Latin . Most such novels took the form of " chivalric romance ", tales of adventure, devotion and honour. The founders of Romanticism, critics (and brothers) August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel , began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in
1674-428: A considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views, and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below. In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading "to something like
1860-612: A defence of religion and the medieval spirit ( Génie du christianisme , 1802), and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his enormous autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe ("Memoirs from beyond the grave"). After the Bourbon Restoration , French Romanticism developed in the lively world of Parisian theatre , with productions of Shakespeare , Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and adaptations of Scott and Byron alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in
2046-574: A different orthography, and write this name Kághó. The last-named nation was followed by a people called Tekrúr. The people of Ghánah declined in course of time, being overwhelmed or absorbed by the Molaththemún (or muffled people; that is, the Morabites), who, adjoining them on the north towards the Berber country, attacked them, and, taking possession of their territory, compelled them to embrace
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#17327983607432232-482: A distinct national identity and began to enjoy an international reputation. Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, helping to develop the Habbie stanza as a poetic form . James Macpherson (1736–1796) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by
2418-529: A dramatist, with his play on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best work. George Sand was a central figure of the Parisian literary scene, famous both for her novels and criticism and her affairs with Chopin and several others; she too was inspired by the theatre, and wrote works to be staged at her private estate . French Romantic poets of the 1830s to 1850s include Alfred de Musset , Gérard de Nerval , Alphonse de Lamartine and
2604-435: A high elevation in central Asia, speaking a proto-language ancestral to later Indo-European languages, which later branched off in two directions: one moved towards Europe and the other migrated to Iran, eventually splitting again with one group invading north-western India and conquering the dark-skinned dasas of Scythian origin who lived there. The northern Aryans of Europe became energetic and combative, and they invented
2790-612: A historian of the 3rd century Han dynasty in the territory of present-day China describes barbarians of blond hair and green eyes as resembling "the monkeys from which they are descended". (Gossett, pp. 4) Dominant in ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of human diversity was the thesis that physical differences between different populations could be attributed to environmental factors. Though ancient peoples likely had no knowledge of evolutionary theory or genetic variability, their concepts of race could be described as malleable. Chief among environmental causes for physical difference in
2976-433: A logically and comprehensive fashion were known as classifiers and systematists. This process was a new trend in science that served to help answer fundamental questions by collecting and organizing materials for systematic study, also known as taxonomy . As the study of natural history grew, so did scientists' effort to classify human groups. Some zoologists and scientists wondered what made humans different from animals in
3162-612: A longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals". Romantic artists also shared a strong belief in the importance and inspirational qualities of Nature. Romantics were distrustful of cities and social conventions. They deplored Restoration and Enlightenment Era artists who were largely concerned with depicting and critiquing social relations, thereby neglecting
3348-541: A medieval idea that there was a hierarchical structure of life from the most fundamental elements to the most perfect, began to encroach upon the idea of race. As taxonomy grew, scientists began to assume that the human species could be divided into distinct subgroups. One's "race" necessarily implied that one group had certain character qualities and physical dispositions that differentiated it from other human populations. Society assigned different values to those differentiations, as well as other, more trivial traits (a man with
3534-850: A misreading of the Sanskrit text, and indicate that the Rig Vedic opposition between ārya and dasyu is distinction between "disorder, chaos and dark side of human nature" contrasted with the concepts of "order, purity, goodness and light", and " dark and light worlds ". In other contexts of the Vedic passages the dinstiction between ārya and dasyu refers to those who had adopted the Vedic religion , speaking Vedic Sanskrit, and those who opposed it. However, increasing number of Western writers of this era, especially among anthropologists and non-specialists influenced by Darwinist theories, contrasted Aryans as
3720-494: A moral outlook known as individualism . They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form , but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response. With this philosophical foundation, the Romanticists elevated several key themes to which they were deeply committed: a reverence for nature and the supernatural , an idealization of
3906-459: A myth. He wrote that black skin was due to the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa and not due to the descendants of Ham being cursed. Independently of Ibn Khaldun's work, the question of whether skin colour is heritable or a product of the environment is raised in 17th to 18th century European anthropology. Georgius Hornius (1666) inherits the rabbinical view of heritability, while François Bernier (1684) argues for at least partial influence of
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#17327983607434092-458: A new, imagined biological category: "a tall, light-complexioned, blonde, blue-eyed race" - supposed phenotypic traits of Nordic race . The anglicized term "Aryan" then developed into a purely racialist meaning implicating Nordic racial type. However, modern scholarship of Indo-European studies use "Aryan" and "Indo-Aryan" in their original senses referring to Indo-Iranian and Indic branch of Indo-Europeans. Classification of human races based on
4278-408: A novel by Laurence Sterne (1759–1767), introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the English literary public. An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany
4464-545: A particular people or even a particular 'racial' group but all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms (such as ritual, poetry, etc.)". Scholars state that the historical Aryans, the Vedic period Bronze Age tribes who lived in Iran , Afghanistan , and the northern Indian subcontinent —composers of the Rig Veda and Avesta—were unlikely to be blond or blue-eyed, contrary to
4650-483: A shift in public consciousness to the immediate impact of technology and urbanization on the working class . By World War I , Romanticism was overshadowed by new cultural, social, and political movements, many of them hostile to the perceived illusions and preoccupations of the Romantics. However, Romanticism has had a lasting impact on Western civilization, and many works of art, music, and literature that embody
4836-775: A significant role in the physical appearance of different peoples. He writes, "the forms and dispositions of mankind correspond with the nature of the country". He attributed physical and temperamental differences among different peoples to environmental factors such as climate, water sources, elevation and terrain. He noted that temperate climates created peoples who were "sluggish" and "not apt for labor", while extreme climates led to peoples who were "sharp", "industrious" and "vigilant". He also noted that peoples of "mountainous, rugged, elevated, and well-watered" countries displayed "enterprising" and "warlike" characteristics, while peoples of "level, windy, and well-watered" countries were "unmanly" and "gentle". The Roman emperor Julian factored in
5022-416: A significant role in various neo-pagan movements. The Russian Slavophile movements borrowed various discrete ideas of a presumed "prestigious Aryan origin" of Europeans from Nazi Germany. Although Russian Orthodoxy was the primary religious influence on Russian nationalists, the primacy of Christianity was treated skeptically by these groups, who later began searching for an ancient text to rationalize
5208-473: A single couple (Adam and Eve), and in his defense Agassiz often used what now sounds like a very "modern" argument about the need for independence between science and religion; though Agassiz, unlike many polygeneticists, maintained his religious beliefs and was not anti-Biblical in general. In the context of ethnology and anthropology of the mid-19th century, Agassiz's polygenetic views became explicitly seen as opposing Darwin's views on race, which sought to show
5394-654: A state—who are descendants of a Volk domiciled in Europe in a closed tribal settlement and are closely related to German racial community. The Nazi concept of " Volksgemeinschaft " racially unified ethnic Germans, including those living outside the German Reich, propounding only the members of the racial community be considered Aryan. Members of the SS deemed Aryans could be selected from populations of Volksdeutsche across Europe to create "master race". Nazi Party established
5580-477: A strong chin was assumed to possess a stronger character than men with weaker chins). This essentially created a gap between races by deeming one race superior or inferior to another race, thus creating a hierarchy of races. In this way, science was used as justification for unfair treatment of different human populations. The systematization of race concepts during the Enlightenment period brought with it
5766-482: A theory rejected by modern scholarships. "Aryan" then came to be used by scholars of the 19th century to refer to Indo-Europeans. The now-discredited and chronologically reconstructed North European hypothesis was endorsed by such scholars who situated the PIE homeland in northern Europe, which led to the association of " Proto-Indo-Europeans ", originally a hypothesized linguistic population of Eurasian PIE speakers, with
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5952-583: A very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. Others have proposed 1780–1830. In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism , for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–1948. However, in most fields
6138-769: A yellow race. Thomas Huxley (1825–1895) wrote one paper, "On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind" (1870), in which he proposed a distinction within the human species ('races'), and their distribution across the earth. He also acknowledged that certain geographical areas with more complex ethnic compositions, including much of the Horn of Africa and the India subcontinent, did not fit into his racial paradigm. As such, he noted that: "I have purposely omitted such people as
6324-548: Is anyone who does not discern a reason for these differences among the nations, but rather declaims that all this so befell spontaneously, how, I ask, can he still believe that the universe is administered by a providence?" European medieval models of race generally mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem , Ham and Japheth , the three sons of Noah , producing distinct Semitic ( Asiatic ), Hamitic ( African ), and Japhetic ( Indo-European ) peoples. Some critics have alleged that
6510-540: Is controversial within white nationalist circles. Many white supremacist neo-Nazi groups and prison gangs , notably in the United States, view themselves as part of an Aryan race, including the Aryan Brotherhood , Aryan Nations , Aryan Guard , Aryan Republican Army , White Aryan Resistance , Aryan Circle , Aryan Brotherhood of Texas , and others . Indo-European history, real and feigned, plays
6696-696: Is described as "one of the most important proto-Nazi texts", The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , in which he theorized an existential struggle to the death between a superior German-Aryan race and a destructive Jewish-Semitic race. In 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race , a polemic against interbreeding between "Aryan" Americans, the original Thirteen Colonies settlers of British-Scots-Irish-German origin, with immigrant "inferior races", which according to him were, Poles , Czechs , Jews, and Italians . The book
6882-446: Is his law". The Romantic poet William Wordsworth , thinking along similar lines, wrote that poetry should begin with "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility", enabling the poet to find a suitably unique form for representing such feelings. The Romantics never doubted that emotionally motivated art would find suitable, harmonious modes for expressing its vital content—if, that is,
7068-445: Is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but create not merely
7254-651: Is now most highly regarded for his short lyrics and his generally unromantic prose writings, especially his letters, and his unfinished satire Don Juan . Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely publicised personal life appeared to match his work, and his death at 36 in 1824 from disease when helping the Greek War of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably Romantic end, entrenching his legend. Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost 70) in 1827, and Coleridge largely ceased to write in
7440-469: Is often called "romantic originality". The translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most valuable quality of human nature is its tendency to diverge and diversify. According to Isaiah Berlin , Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness,
7626-853: The Ancien Régime , and the French Revolution had been more of an inspiration to foreign writers than those experiencing it at first-hand. The first major figure was François-René de Chateaubriand , an aristocrat who had remained a royalist throughout the Revolution, and returned to France from exile in England and America under Napoleon, with whose regime he had an uneasy relationship. His writings, all in prose, included some fiction, such as his influential novella of exile René (1802), which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly contemporary history and politics, his travels,
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7812-460: The 1935 Nuremberg Laws , and the racist doctrines of Adolf Hitler considered Jews , Roma and Slavs , including Poles , Czechs , Russians and Serbs , "racially inferior sub-humans" ( German : Untermensch , lit. 'sub-human'); the term was also applied to " Mischling " (persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry) and black people . A definition of Aryan that included all non-Jewish Europeans
7998-610: The Australoid race and the Capoid race in some cases the Mongolian (East Asian) and American collapsed into a single group. Among the 19th century naturalists who defined the field were Georges Cuvier , James Cowles Pritchard , Louis Agassiz , Charles Pickering ( Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution , 1848). Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz twelve, and Pickering eleven. The 19th century saw
8184-528: The Crusades that he had researched to a degree that was new in literature. In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had little connection with nationalism, and the Romantics were often regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of the French Revolution , whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as elsewhere in Europe, a shock to
8370-545: The Lake Poets were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were supported by the critic and writer William Hazlitt and others. In contrast, Lord Byron and Walter Scott achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings; Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem The Lay of
8556-876: The Mohammedan religion. The people of Ghánah, being invaded at a later period by the Súsú, a nation of Blacks in their neighbourhood, were exterminated, or mixed with other Black nations." Ibn Khaldun suggests a link between the rise of the Almoravids and the decline of Ghana. However, historians have found virtually no evidence for an Almoravid conquest of Ghana. Scientists who were interested in natural history, including biological and geological scientists, were known as " naturalists ". They would collect, examine, describe, and arrange data from their explorations into categories according to certain criteria. People who were particularly skilled at organizing specific sets of data in
8742-540: The Northern Europeans " in self-congratulatory studies. Subsequently, the German Romantics' quest for a "pure" national heritage led to the interpretation of the ancient speakers of PIE language as the distinct progenitors of a "racial-linguistic-national stereotype". The term " Aryan " was originally used as an ethnocultural self-designative identity and epithet of "noble" by Indo-Iranians and
8928-559: The SS and worked for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology publishing theories of Nazi eugenics and racial evolution, claimed the Nordic race as a highly evolved race, and Aboriginal Australians as being the lowest rank in the racial hierarchy . Hans F. K. Günther was considered to be the most influential Nazi anthropologist, although he was not professionally trained. Günther's racist writings on Nordicism
9114-464: The SS organization Ahnenerbe ( German : Deutsches Ahnenerbe ) for conducting archaeological investigations of a presumed "Germanic expansion in pre-history". Nazi scholars endorsed the now-discredited North European hypothesis in an effort to prove PIE was originally spoken by an "Aryan master race", and associated the Semitic languages with "inferior races". Historical revisionism around race
9300-431: The close genetic similarity and complex interrelationships between these groups . The term was adopted by various racist and antisemitic writers during the 19th century, including Arthur de Gobineau , Richard Wagner , and Houston Stewart Chamberlain , whose scientific racism influenced later Nazi racial ideology . By the 1930s, the concept had been associated with both Nazism and Nordicism , and used to support
9486-473: The deconstruction of traditional tonal harmony in music. They continued the Romantic ideal, stressing depth of emotion in art and music while showcasing technical mastery in a mature Romantic style. By the time of World War I , though, the cultural and artistic climate had changed to such a degree that Romanticism essentially dispersed into subsequent movements. The final Late Romanticist figures to maintain
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#17327983607439672-520: The disabled . Nazi Germany introduced the Anti-Jewish legislation that systemically discriminated against Jews by requiring Aryan certification for a German Reich citizen. After Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany , the public policies of Nazi Germany became increasingly hostile towards supposed "inferior types", particularly Jews, who were considered to be the highest manifestation of
9858-532: The founding Nazi ideologues of Slavic Neopaganism . With the rise of first-wave feminism , various authors of the Goddess movement cast the ancient Indo-Europeans as a "patriachal, warlike invaders who destroyed a utopian prehistoric world of feminine peace and beauty" in various archaeological dramas and books such as Riane Eisler 's The Chalice and the Blade (1987) and Marija Gimbutas 's Civilization of
10044-458: The lexical similarities between Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages such as Persian , Gothic , Greek , and Latin , and concluded that Sanskrit—as a descendant language —belonged to the same proto- or parent-language in the language family —that is PIE, as the other Indo-European languages, in his Third Anniversary Discourse on the Hindus (1786). However, the linguistic homeland of
10230-404: The national poet of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem (and song) " Auld Lang Syne " is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and " Scots Wha Hae " served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Scott began as a poet and also collected and published Scottish ballads. His first prose work, Waverley in 1814, is often called
10416-524: The original speakers of Proto-Indo-European was a politicized debate among the archaeologists and comparative historical linguists since the start, entangling in chauvinistic causes. Some European nationalists and dictators , most notably the Nazis, later attempted to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland in their country or region as racially superior. According to Leon Poliakov ,
10602-625: The rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment , Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more "authentic" European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization , brought about by the Industrial Revolution . Romanticism lionized the achievements of "heroic" individuals—especially artists, who began to be represented as cultural leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley , described poets as
10788-597: The scientific theory of natural selection for the rationalization of the supposed fitness of some races over others, although Darwin himself never applied his theory of fitness to vague entities such as races or languages. The "unfit" races were suggested as a source of genetic weakness, and a threat that might contaminate the superior qualities of the "fit" races. The misleading mixture of pseudoscience and Romanticism produced new racial ideologies which used distorted Social Darwinist interpretations of race to explain "the superior biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of
10974-572: The supernatural / occult and human psychology . Romanticism tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a view still influential today. The Romantic movement in literature was preceded by the Enlightenment and succeeded by Realism . The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the middle of the 18th century, including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College ) and his brother Thomas Warton , Professor of Poetry at Oxford University . Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were
11160-527: The white supremacist ideology of Aryanism that portrayed the Aryan race as a " master race ", with non-Aryans regarded as racially inferior ( Untermensch , lit. ' subhuman ' ) and an existential threat that was to be exterminated . In Nazi Germany , these ideas formed an essential part of the state ideology that led to the Holocaust . In the late 18th century, Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
11346-657: The "four quarters" of the globe as the basis for providing labels for human differences. The four subgroups that Bernier used were Europeans, Far Easterners, Negroes (blacks), and Lapps. As noted earlier, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations. Some based their hypothetical divisions of race on the most obvious physical differences, like skin color, while others used geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics to delineate between races. However, cultural notions of racial and gender superiority tainted early scientific discovery. In
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#173279836074311532-456: The "master race" ( German : Herrenrasse ). Recent archaeogenetic studies contradict these ideas, and instead suggest that Proto-Indo-European speaking peoples probably had brown eyes and hair, and intermediate skin complexion. After the death of Kossinna, Heinrich Himmler , and other Nazi figures such as Alfred Rosenberg , adopted his nationalistic theories of Germanic peoples and methodologies, including settlement archaeology, and founded
11718-730: The "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature. The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter
11904-452: The "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his " Defence of Poetry "). Romanticism placed the highest importance on the freedom of the artists to authentically express their sentiments and ideas. Romantics like the German painter Caspar David Friedrich believed that an artist's emotions should dictate their formal approach; Friedrich went as far as declaring that "the artist's feeling
12090-479: The 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his 1800 essay Gespräch über die Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"): The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Germaine de Staël in her De l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of
12276-406: The 1820s. Wordsworth was by 1820 respectable and highly regarded, holding a government sinecure , but wrote relatively little. In the discussion of English literature, the Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the 1820s, or sometimes even earlier, although many authors of the succeeding decades were no less committed to Romantic values. The most significant novelist in English during
12462-486: The 18th century, scientists began to include behavioral or psychological traits in their reported observations—which traits often had derogatory or demeaning implications—and researchers often assumed that those traits were related to their race, and therefore, innate and unchangeable. Other areas of interest were to determine the exact number of races, categorize and name them, and examine the primary and secondary causes of variation between groups. The great chain of being ,
12648-579: The 9th century, Al-Jahiz , an Afro-Arab Islamic philosopher , attempted to explain the origins of different human skin colors , particularly black skin , which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of black basalt in the northern Najd as evidence for his theory. In the 14th century, the Islamic sociologist Ibn Khaldun , dispelled the Babylonian Talmud' s account of peoples and their characteristics as
12834-714: The Abyssinians and the Hindoos, who there is every reason to believe result from the intermixture of distinct stocks." By the late nineteenth century, Huxley's Xanthochroi group had been redefined as the Nordic race , whereas his Melanochroi became the Mediterranean race . His Melanochroi thus eventually also comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the Hamites (e.g. Berbers, Somalis, northern Sudanese, ancient Egyptians) and Moors . Huxley's paper
13020-548: The Aryan identity as asserted in the Rig Veda was cultural , religious , and linguistic , not racial; nor do the Vedas contemplate racial purity . The Rig Veda affirms a ritualistic barrier : an individual is considered Aryan if they sacrifice to the right gods, which requires performing traditional prayer in the traditional language, and does not connote a racial barrier. Michael Witzel states that term Aryan "does not mean
13206-508: The Aryan race as the white race, and the only civilized one, and conceived cultural decline and miscegenation as intimately intertwined. He argued that the Aryans represented a superior branch of humanity, and attempted to identify the races of Europe as Aryan and associated them with the sons of Noah , emphasizing superiority, and categorized non-Aryan as an intrusion of the Semitic race . According to him, northern Europeans had migrated across
13392-565: The Aryans". Following Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II , various neo-Nazi and racial nationalist movements developed a more inclusive definition of Aryan claiming to Western European peoples, with Nordic and Germanic peoples being the most "racially pure". However, in the United States , most white nationalists define whiteness broadly as people of European ancestry , and some consider Jews to be white although this
13578-478: The Enlightenment's position that humans can fully comprehend the world through rationality alone, suggesting that intuition and emotion are key components of insight and understanding. Published in 1774, " The Sorrows of Young Werther " by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began to shape the Romanticist movement and its ideals. The events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences on
13764-601: The French retreat from Moscow in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had little appeal for him, and like Goya he is often seen as a forerunner of Realism. His most important works are Le Rouge et le Noir ( The Red and the Black , 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme ( The Charterhouse of Parma , 1839). Romanticism in Poland is often taken to begin with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz 's first poems in 1822, and end with
13950-615: The Goddess (1991). Notes Bibliography Historical race concepts The word "race", interpreted to mean an identifiable group of people who share a common descent , was introduced into English in the 16th century from the Old French rasse (1512), from Italian razza : the Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest example around the mid-16th century and defines its early meaning as
14136-488: The Greek words "genos", ( γένος ) meaning "race or kind", and "gonos", which has meanings related to "birth, offspring, stock ...". In many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances became full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting that society's cultural norms . (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990) Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest
14322-577: The Human Races . According to Kuhl, the eugenicists believed that nations were political and cultural constructs, not race constructs, because nations were the result of race mixtures. Georges Vacher de Lapouge 's "anthroposociology", asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by culture as well as by physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide were often motivated by supposed racial differences. During
14508-462: The Indian religious scripture, the Vedas , to aggrandize the manuscript. Nationalistic white Russian émigrés and neo-Pagans consider the manuscript to be an authentic historical source of Slavic antiquity, who claim a direct link between "ancient Aryans" and themselves as Slavs. However, the manuscript is declared literary forgery by scholars. Alexey Dobrovolsky , a Russian neo-Nazi , is considered
14694-616: The Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic poem Marmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past, already evoked in Ossian ; Romanticism and Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had equal success with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form of long poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand Tour , which had reached Ottoman Europe, and orientalizing
14880-510: The Middle Ages was a central theme in debates, with allegations that Romanticist portrayals often overlooked the downsides of medieval life. The consensus is that Romanticism peaked from 1800 until 1850. However, a "Late Romantic" period and " Neoromantic " revivals are also discussed. These extensions of the movement are characterized by a resistance to the increasingly experimental and abstract forms that culminated in modern art , and
15066-563: The Paris Academy; and on the other hand, there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro." These five groups saw some continuity in the various classification schemes of the 19th century, in some cases augmented, e.g. by
15252-713: The Rockies); Tropical Asiatic (south of the Himalayas); Temperate Asiatic (east of the Urals and north of the Himalayas); South American Temperate (South America); New Holland (Australia); Arctic (Alaska and Arctic Canada); Cape of Good Hope (South Africa); and American Tropical (Central America and the West Indies). Agassiz denied that species originated in single pairs, whether at a single location or at many. He argued instead multiple individuals in each species were created at
15438-511: The Romantic ideals died in the 1940s. Though they were still widely respected, they were seen as anachronisms at that point. Romanticism was a complex movement with a variety of viewpoints that permeated Western civilization across the globe. The movement and its opposing ideologies mutually shaped each other over time. After its end, Romantic thought and art exerted a sweeping influence on art and music , speculative fiction , philosophy , politics , and environmentalism that has endured to
15624-553: The Romantic ideals have been made after the end of the Romantic Era. The movement's advocacy for nature appreciation is cited as an influence for current nature conservation efforts. The majority of film scores from the Golden Age of Hollywood were written in the lush orchestral Romantic style, and this genre of orchestral cinematic music is still often seen in films of the 21st century. The philosophical underpinnings of
15810-436: The Romantic interest in folk literature, but neither had a fully Romantic approach to life or their work. Though they have modern critical champions such as György Lukács , Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced in the form of the many operas that composers continued to base on them over the following decades, such as Donizetti 's Lucia di Lammermoor and Vincenzo Bellini 's I puritani (both 1835). Byron
15996-472: The Romantic period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier. The early period of the Romantic era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795 and 1805 had, in
16182-609: The Semitic race, and segregation of Jews in ghettos culminated in the policy of extermination the Nazis called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question . The state-sponsored persecution systematically murdered over 6 million Jews, 5.7 million Slavs, 1.8–3 million Poles, 270,000 disabled people, among other victims , including children through mass shooting , gas chamber , gas van , and concentration camps , in
16368-440: The ancient Indo-European culture, also known as " Aryan ". Gobineau originally wrote that the white race's miscegenation was inevitable. He attributed much of the economic turmoils in France to the pollution of races. Later on in his life, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved. To Gobineau, the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to
16554-657: The ancient bard Ossian , he published translations that acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics . Fingal , written in 1762, was speedily translated into many European languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European, and especially in German literature, through its influence on Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . It
16740-519: The ancient period were climate and geography. Though thinkers in ancient civilizations recognized differences in physical characteristics between different populations, the general consensus was that all non-Greeks were barbarians. This barbarian status, however, was not thought to be fixed; rather, one could shed the 'barbarian' status simply by adopting Greek culture. (Graves 2001) Hippocrates of Kos believed, as many thinkers throughout early history did, that factors such as geography and climate played
16926-600: The artist steered clear of moribund conventions and distracting precedents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others thought there were natural laws the imagination of born artists followed instinctively when these individuals were, so to speak, "left alone" during the creative process. These "natural laws" could support a wide range of different formal approaches: as many, perhaps, as there were individuals making personally meaningful works of art. Many Romantics believed that works of artistic genius were created " ex nihilo ", "from nothing", without recourse to existing models. This idea
17112-542: The artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical form. The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy , awe , wonder , and terror , in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the "beautiful" and the "sublime". Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics , unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast to
17298-530: The association between the sons of Noah and skin color dates back at least to the Babylonian Talmud , which some have argued states that the descendants of Ham were cursed with black skin. In the seventh century, the idea that black Africans were cursed with both dark skin and slavery began to gain strength with some Islamic writers, as black Africans became a slave class in the Islamic world. In
17484-469: The author of the 'Book of Roads and Realms' (El Bekri), is divided into two parts, standing on both banks of the Nile, and ranks among the largest and most populous cities of the world. The people of Ghánah had for neighbours, on the east, a nation, which, according to historians, was called Súsú; after which came another named Máli; and after that another known by the name of Kaǘkaǘ; although some people prefer
17670-583: The authors of the oldest known religious texts of Rig Veda and Avesta within the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language family—Sanskrit and Iranian , who lived in ancient India and Iran . Although the Sanskrit ā́rya- and Iranian *arya- descended from a form *ā̆rya-, it was only attested to the Indo-Iranian tribes. Benjamin W. Fortson states that there may have been no term for self-designation of Proto-Indo-Europeans, and no such morphemes has survived. J. P. Mallory et al. states although
17856-448: The beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a "Counter-Enlightenment"— to be associated most closely with German Romanticism . Another early definition comes from Charles Baudelaire : "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling." The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of Realism , which affected literature, especially
18042-486: The best known works, which became a paradigm of the French Romantic movement. The preface to his unperformed play Cromwell gives an important manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that "there are no rules, or models". The career of Prosper Mérimée followed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the originator of the story of Carmen , with his novella published 1845. Alfred de Vigny remains best known as
18228-482: The biological similarities between the different races were "too great" for the polygenist thesis to be plausible. He also used the idea of races to argue for the continuity between humans and animals, noting that it would be highly implausible that man should, by mere accident acquire characteristics shared by many apes. Romanticism#Germany Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era )
18414-478: The brothers, Jacob , published in 1835 Deutsche Mythologie , a long academic work on Germanic mythology. Another strain is exemplified by Schiller's highly emotional language and the depiction of physical violence in his play The Robbers of 1781. In English literature , the key figures of the Romantic movement are considered to be the group of poets including William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , John Keats , Lord Byron , Percy Bysshe Shelley and
18600-418: The chief qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott . Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first Romantic poet in English. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed
18786-647: The common origin of all human races and the superficiality of racial differences. Darwin's second book on evolution, The Descent of Man , features extensive argumentation addressing the single origin of the races, at times explicitly opposing Agassiz's theories. Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was a successful diplomat for the Second French Empire . Initially he was posted to Persia , before working in Brazil and other countries. He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between
18972-410: The concept of the Aryan race was deeply rooted in philology, based on the work of Sir William Jones' claiming that Sanskrit was related to Greco-Roman (European) languages. Other thinkers invented secularized origins for European civilization that were not based on the biblical genealogies from which Europe's aristocracy had long claimed descent. The influence of Romanticism in Germany saw a revival of
19158-477: The conflict between monogenism (a single origin for all human races) and polygenism (the hypothesis that races had separate origins). This debate was originally cast in creationist terms as a question of one versus many creations of humanity, but continued after evolution was widely accepted, at which point the question was given in terms of whether humans had split from their ancestral species one or many times. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) divided
19344-742: The constitutions, laws, capacities, and character of peoples: "Come, tell me why it is that the Celts and the Germans are fierce, while the Hellenes and Romans are, generally speaking, inclined to political life and humane, though at the same time unyielding and warlike? Why the Egyptians are more intelligent and more given to crafts, and the Syrians unwarlike and effeminate, but at the same time intelligent, hot-tempered, vain and quick to learn? For if there
19530-707: The crushing of the January Uprising of 1863 against the Russians. It was strongly marked by interest in Polish history. Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism" traditions of the szlachta or Polish nobility. Old traditions and customs were revived and portrayed in a positive light in the Polish messianic movement and in works of great Polish poets such as Adam Mickiewicz ( Pan Tadeusz ), Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński . This close connection between Polish Romanticism and Polish history became one of
19716-437: The defining qualities of the literature of Polish Romanticism period, differentiating it from that of other countries. They had not suffered the loss of national statehood as was the case with Poland. Influenced by the general spirit and main ideas of European Romanticism, the literature of Polish Romanticism is unique, as many scholars have pointed out, in having developed largely outside of Poland and in its emphatic focus upon
19902-524: The difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal article "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of modernity , while writers of the 19th Century such as Chateaubriand , Novalis and Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw it as
20088-664: The early nineteenth century, caused Edinburgh to emerge as the cultural capital of Britain and become central to a wider formation of a "British Isles nationalism". Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage. Theatres had been discouraged by the Church of Scotland and fears of Jacobite assemblies. In the later eighteenth century, many plays were written for and performed by small amateur companies and were not published and so most have been lost. Towards
20274-444: The end of the century there were " closet dramas ", primarily designed to be read, rather than performed, including work by Scott, Hogg, Galt and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), often influenced by the ballad tradition and Gothic Romanticism. Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature , more so than in the visual arts. The 18th-century precursor to Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with
20460-563: The environment. Ibn Khaldun's work was later translated into French, especially for use in Algeria, but in the process, the work was "transformed from local knowledge to colonial categories of knowledge" . William Desborough Cooley 's The Negro Land of the Arabs Examined and Explained (1841) has excerpts of translations of Khaldun's work that were not affected by French colonial ideas. For example, Cooley quotes Khaldun's describing
20646-414: The exotic and historical settings pioneered by the Romantics, but experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced, often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the poems of Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art was often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about
20832-668: The fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment , a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment , is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution , which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but
21018-499: The first historical novel. It launched a highly successful career, with other historical novels such as Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820). Scott probably did more than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century. Other major literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets and novelists James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and John Galt (1779–1839). Scotland
21204-409: The flamboyant Théophile Gautier , whose prolific output in various forms continued until his death in 1872. Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period, but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological insight into his characters and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction. As a survivor of
21390-680: The great African civilization of Ghana (in Cooley's translation): "When the conquest of the West (by the Arabs) was completed, and merchants began to penetrate into the interior, they saw no nation of the Blacks so mighty as Ghánah, the dominions of which extended westward as far as the Ocean. The King's court was kept in the city of Ghánah, which, according to the author of the 'Book of Roger' (El Idrisi), and
21576-522: The human species into five races in 1779, later founded on crania research (description of human skulls), and called them (1793/1795): Blumenbach argued that physical characteristics like the collective characteristic types of facial structure and hair characteristics, skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on geography and nutrition and custom. Blumenbach's work included his description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This
21762-458: The idea of a nation, while the southern Aryans of Iran and India were passive and meditative and focussed on religion and philosophy. Though he occasionally used the term "Aryan race" afterward, Müller later objected to the mixing of the linguistic and racial categories, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms". In his 1888 lecture at Oxford , he stated, "[the] science of Language and
21948-503: The intellectual quest for "the German language and traditions" and a desire to "discard the cold, artificial logic of Enlightenment ". After Darwin 's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species and publicization of the theorized model of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), the Romantics convicted that language was a defining factor in national identity , combined with the new ideas of Darwinism . The German nationalists misemployed
22134-416: The introduction of anthropological techniques such as anthropometrics , invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon . They measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes. Stefan Kuhl wrote that the eugenics movement rejected the racial and national hypotheses of Arthur Gobineau and his writing An Essay on the Inequality of
22320-495: The late 1820s. Cliques of pro- and anti-Romantics developed, and productions were often accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the two sides, including the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that "Shakespeare, c'est l'aide-de-camp de Wellington" ("Shakespeare is Wellington 's aide-de-camp "). Alexandre Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes beginning with Henri III et sa cour (1829) before turning to novels that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in
22506-552: The late 1860s, however, Darwin's theory of evolution had been thought to be compatible with the polygenist thesis (Stepan 1982). Darwin thus used Descent of Man to disprove the polygenist thesis and end the debate between polygeny and monogeny once and for all. Darwin also used it to disprove other hypotheses about racial difference that had persisted since the time of ancient Greece, for example, that differences in skin color and body constitution occurred because of differences of geography and climate. Darwin concluded, for example, that
22692-400: The late 19th century and early 20th century, the tension between some who believed in hierarchy and innate superiority, and others who believed in human equality, was at a paramount. The former continued to exacerbate the belief that certain races were innately inferior by examining their shortcomings, namely by examining and testing intelligence between groups. Some scientists claimed that there
22878-521: The lives of the poor in his native Lake District , or his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in his long poem The Prelude , never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the volume was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , which showed the Gothic side of English Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured. In the period when they were writing,
23064-444: The manner of Scott, most famously The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo , both of 1844. Victor Hugo published as a poet in the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with Hernani —a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearean style that had famously riotous performances on its first run in 1830. Like Dumas, Hugo is best known for his novels, and was already writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), one of
23250-408: The means but the goals that they pursue; these goals represent the self-expression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of some "external" voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate
23436-433: The melting away of the very notion of objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism , with a gradual recovery coming only after World War II. For the Romantics, Berlin says, in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and groups—states, nations, movements. This
23622-453: The method and advocacy for the ideology of a Germanic master race . Max Müller popularized the term Aryan in his writings on comparative linguistics , and is often identified as the first writer to mention an Aryan race in English. He began the racial interpretation of the Vedic passages based upon his editing of the Rigveda from 1849 to 1874. He postulated a small Aryan clan living on
23808-526: The mid-century the undoubtedly Romantic novels of the Yorkshire -based Brontë family appeared, most notably Charlotte 's Jane Eyre and Emily 's Wuthering Heights , both published in 1847, which also introduced more Gothic themes. While these two novels were written and published after the Romantic period is said to have ended, their novels were heavily influenced by Romantic literature they had read as children. Byron, Keats, and Shelley all wrote for
23994-410: The mixing of distinct races. This he saw as a degenerative process. According to his definitions, the people of Spain , most of France , most of Germany , southern and western Iran as well as Switzerland , Austria , Northern Italy , and a large part of Britain , consisted of a degenerative race that arose from miscegenation. Also according to him, the whole population of North India consisted of
24180-426: The most importance in familial or tribal affiliation rather than an individual's physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Societies still tended to equate physical characteristics, such as hair and eye colour, with psychological and moral qualities, usually assigning the highest qualities to their own people and lower qualities to the "Other", either lower classes or outsiders to their society. For example,
24366-411: The movement have influenced modern political theory, both among liberals and conservatives . Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as the glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval over the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution , and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment , especially
24552-607: The movement. Though his novels celebrated Scottish identity and history, Scott was politically a firm Unionist, but admitted to Jacobite sympathies. Several Romantics spent much time abroad, and a famous stay on Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel Frankenstein by Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Shelley and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William Polidori . The lyrics of Robert Burns in Scotland, and Thomas Moore from Ireland, reflected in different ways their countries and
24738-483: The movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French revolutionaries. A confluence of circumstances led to Romanticism's decline in the mid-19th century, including (but not limited to) the rise of Realism and Naturalism , Charles Darwin 's publishing of the Origin of Species , the transition from widespread revolution in Europe to a more conservative climate, and
24924-436: The much older William Blake , followed later by the isolated figure of John Clare ; also such novelists as Walter Scott from Scotland and Mary Shelley , and the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb . The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads , with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with
25110-557: The nature and purpose of art, above all the pre-eminent importance of originality, remained important for later generations, and often underlie modern views, despite opposition from theorists. In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of " sensibility " with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe , Charles Maturin and Nathaniel Hawthorne , based their writings on
25296-632: The notion that the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were distinct progenitors of a superior specimen of humankind, and that their descendants up to the present day constitute either a distinctive race or a sub-race of the Caucasian race , alongside the Semitic race and the Hamitic race . This taxonomic approach to categorizing human population groups is now considered to be misguided and biologically meaningless due to
25482-414: The novel and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera. This movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and Courbet in painting; Stendhal and Goya were important precursors of Realism in their respective media. However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style against which Realists rebelled, continued to flourish in many fields for
25668-475: The now-pseudoscientific study of phenotypical differences developed during the nineteenth century and evidence in support of such theories were sought from the study of language and reconstructions of language families. Scholars of this era established the ethnological term "Aryan" as the race that had spoken the Proto-Indo-European language, and in this context, the term was often used as a synonym for "Indo-Europeans". Scholars point out that, even in ancient times,
25854-510: The organization NSDAP/AO to disseminate Nazi propaganda among the ethnic German minorities considered Volksdeutsche in central and eastern Europe. Nazi racial theories considered the "purest stock of Aryans" the Nordic people , identified by physical anthropological features such as tallness, white skin, blue eyes, narrow and straight noses, doliocephalic skulls , prominent chins, and blond hair, including Scandinavians , Germans , English and French , with Nordic and Germanic people being
26040-618: The past as a nobler era , a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious , and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime . The Romanticist movement had a particular fondness for the Middle Ages , which to them represented an era of chivalry , heroism, and a more organic relationship between humans and their environment. This idealization contrasted sharply with the values of their contemporary industrial society, which they considered alienating for its economic materialism and environmental degradation . The movement's illustration of
26226-422: The peak Romantic period, other than Walter Scott, was Jane Austen , whose essentially conservative world-view had little in common with her Romantic contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum and social rules, though critics such as Claudia L. Johnson have detected tremors under the surface of many works, such as Northanger Abbey (1817), Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817). But around
26412-462: The present day. The movement is the reference for the modern notion of " romanticization " and the act of "romanticizing" something. For most of the Western world, Romanticism was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. The first Romantic ideas arose from an earlier German Counter-Enlightenment movement called Sturm und Drang (German: "Storm and Stress"). This movement directly criticized
26598-428: The primate family. Furthermore, they contemplated whether homo sapiens should be classified as one species with multiple varieties or separate species. In the 16th and 17th century, scientists attempted to classify Homo sapiens based on a geographic arrangement of human populations based on skin color, others simply on geographic location, shape, stature, food habits, and other distinguishing characteristics. Occasionally
26784-520: The process known as the Holocaust . The ethnic Germans considered Volksdeutsche joined the local SS organizations under NSDAP/AO and participated in Nazi-sponsored pogroms in eastern and central Europe during the Holocaust, including seizures of Jewish property. The Aryan race belief was used by the Nazis to justify the persecution, depicting the victims as the "antipode and eternal enemy of
26970-411: The proponents of Aryanism and Nordicism. The racial interpretation of Aryans stems from the now-discredited culture-historical archaeology theory of Gustaf Kossinna , who asserted a one-to-one correspondence between archaeological culture and archaeological race . According to Kossinna, the continuity of a "culture" exposits the continuity of a "race" which lived continuously in the same area, and
27156-485: The publication of his second great book on evolution, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex . Darwin's publication of this book occurred within the heated debates between advocates of monogeny, who held that all races came from a common ancestor, and advocates of polygeny, who held that the races were separately created. Darwin, who had come from a family with strong abolitionist ties, had experienced and
27342-415: The questions of who, why and with what effect social significance is attached to racial attributes that are constructed in particular political and socio-economic contexts', and thus, addressing the "folk" or "mythological representations" of race. After Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) traveled to the United States, he became a prolific writer in what has been later termed the genre of scientific racism. Agassiz
27528-411: The reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest". (Stepan, p. 79–80). Though Charles Darwin 's evolutionary theory was set forth in 1859 upon publication of On the Origin of Species , this work was largely absent of explicit reference to Darwin's theory applied to man. This application by Darwin would not become explicit until 1871 with
27714-451: The reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves." This quality in Romantic literature, in turn, influenced the approach and reception of works in other media; it has seeped into everything from critical evaluations of individual style in painting, fashion, and music, to the auteur movement in modern filmmaking. The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has
27900-399: The relationship between people and Nature. Romantics generally believed a close connection with Nature was beneficial for human beings, especially for individuals who broke off from society in order to encounter the natural world by themselves. Romantic literature was frequently written in a distinctive, personal "voice". As critic M. H. Abrams has observed, "much of romantic poetry invited
28086-508: The resemblance of a culture in a younger layer to a culture from an older layer indicates that the autochthonous tribe from the homeland had migrated. Kossinna developed an ethnic paradigm in archaeology called settlement archaeology and practiced the nationalistic interpretation of German archaeology for the Third Reich . The obsolete North European hypothesis was endorsed by Kossinna and Karl Penka , including German nationalists, which
28272-484: The rest of the century and beyond. In music such works from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually use these terms; in English literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period further. In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and belief that
28458-562: The same time and then distributed throughout the continents where God meant for them to dwell. His lectures on polygenism were popular among the slaveholders in the South, for many this opinion legitimized the belief in a lower standard of the Negro. His stance in this case was considered to be quite radical in its time, because it went against the more orthodox and standard reading of the Bible in his time which implied all human stock descended from
28644-668: The science of Man cannot be kept too much asunder [...] it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar", and in his Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (1888), he writes, "[the] ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes, and hair, is a great sinner as a linguist [...]". European scholars of 19th century interpreted the Vedic passages as depicting battle between light-skinned Aryan migrants and dark-skinned indigenous tribes, but modern scholars reject this characterization of racial division as
28830-441: The scientific rationalization of Nature. The movement's ideals were embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography , education, chess , social sciences , and the natural sciences . Romanticism had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism , liberalism , radicalism , and nationalism . Romanticism prioritized
29016-528: The stage, but with little success in England, with Shelley's The Cenci perhaps the best work produced, though that was not played in a public theatre in England until a century after his death. Byron's plays, along with dramatizations of his poems and Scott's novels, were much more popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through these versions several were turned into operas, many still performed today. If contemporary poets had little success on
29202-563: The stage, the period was a legendary one for performances of Shakespeare , and went some way to restoring his original texts and removing the Augustan "improvements" to them. The greatest actor of the period, Edmund Kean , restored the tragic ending to King Lear ; Coleridge said that "Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." Although after union with England in 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and wider cultural norms, its literature developed
29388-459: The term "Aryan" takes on an ethnic meaning attesting to Indo-Iranians, there is no grounds for ascribing this semantic use to the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction of lexicon *h₂eryós i.e. there is no evidence that the speakers of proto-language referred to themselves as "Aryans". However, in the 19th century, it was proposed that ā́rya- was not only the tribal self-designation of Indo-Iranians, but self-designation of Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves,
29574-767: The term "race" was used, but most of the early taxonomists used classificatory terms, such as "peoples", "nations", "types", "varieties", and "species". Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), French philosopher, attempted a rudimentary geographic arrangement of known human populations based on skin color. Bodin's color classifications were purely descriptive, including neutral terms such as "duskish colour, like roasted quinze", "black", "chestnut", and "farish white". German and English scientists, Bernhard Varen (1622–1650) and John Ray (1627–1705) classified human populations into categories according to stature, shape, food habits, and skin color, along with any other distinguishing characteristics. Ray
29760-424: The themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different variations of the " Byronic hero ", and his own life contributed a further version. Scott meanwhile was effectively inventing the historical novel , beginning in 1814 with Waverley , set in the 1745 Jacobite rising , which was a highly profitable success, followed by over 20 further Waverley Novels over the next 17 years, with settings going back to
29946-437: The theory that each race is actually a separate species with separate sites of origin. Despite Huxley's monogenism and his abolitionism on ethical grounds, Huxley assumed a hierarchy of innate abilities, a stance evinced in papers such as "Emancipation Black and White" and his most famous paper, "Evolution and Ethics". In the former, he writes that the "highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within
30132-513: The three "black", "white", and "yellow" races were natural barriers, and that " race-mixing " breaks those barriers down and leads to chaos. He classified the populations of the Middle East , Central Asia , the Indian subcontinent , North Africa , and southern France as being racially mixed. Gobineau also believed that the white race was superior to all others. He thought it corresponded to
30318-422: The words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny , been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to Jacques Barzun , there were three generations of Romantic artists. The first emerged in the 1790s and 1800s, the second in the 1820s, and the third later in the century. The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in
30504-457: The world and founded the major civilizations, before being diluted through racial mixing with indigenous populations described as racially inferior, leading to the progressive decay of the ancient Aryan civilizations. In 1878, German American anthropologist Theodor Poesche published a survey of historical references attempting to demonstrate that the Aryans were light-skinned blue-eyed blonds. In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain published what
30690-427: The world was in the process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it was. Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great change was underway or just about to come were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art remained prominent, as did
30876-787: Was a biological determinant of race by evaluating one's genes and DNA . Different methods of eugenics, the study and practice of human selective breeding often with a race as a primary concentration, was still widely accepted in Britain, Germany, and the United States. On the other hand, many scientists understood race as a social construct . They believed that the phenotypical expression of an individual were determined by one's genes that are inherited through reproduction but there were certain social constructs, such as culture , environment , and language that were primary in shaping behavioral characteristics. Some advocated that race 'should centre not on what race explains about society, but rather on
31062-554: Was a best-seller at the time. While the Aryan race theory remained popular, particularly in Germany , some authors opposed it, in particular Otto Schrader , Rudolph von Jhering and the ethnologist Robert Hartmann , who proposed to ban the notion of Aryan from anthropology. The term was also adopted by various occultists and esoteric ideological systems of this era, such as Helena Blavatsky , and Ariosophy . Final solution Parties The racial policies of Nazi Germany ,
31248-747: Was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry . Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that 'individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other individual Africans as Europeans differ from Europeans'. Furthermore, he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind 'concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities'. "Finally, I am of opinion that after all these numerous instances I have brought together of negroes of capacity, it would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of
31434-555: Was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism . Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling , making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling, Hegel , Schiller and the brothers Schlegel ) a centre for early German Romanticism (see Jena Romanticism ). Important writers were Ludwig Tieck , Novalis , Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin . Heidelberg later became
31620-409: Was adopted by various racist and antisemitic writers such as Arthur de Gobineau , Theodor Poesche , Houston Chamberlain , Paul Broca , Karl Penka and Hans Günther during the nineteenth century for the promotion of scientific racism , spawning ideologies such as Nordicism and Aryanism . The connotation of the term Aryan was detached from its proper geographic and linguistic confinement as
31806-460: Was also popularised in France by figures that included Napoleon . Eventually it became clear that the poems were not direct translations from Scottish Gaelic , but flowery adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his audience. Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian cycle. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as
31992-711: Was also praised by Alfred Ploetz, founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene , who made him an honorary member of the eugenic organization. In 1938, the Reich Ministry of Education released the German biology curriculum which reflected the curriculum developed by the National Socialist Teachers League and emphasized the Social Darwinst interpretation of the evolution of human races. Hans Weinert , who had joined
32178-467: Was also the first person to produce a biological definition of species . François Bernier (1625–1688) is believed to have developed the first comprehensive classification of humans into distinct races which was published in a French journal article in 1684, Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races l'habitant , (New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it). (Gossett, 1997:32–33). Bernier advocated using
32364-437: Was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and Blackwood's Magazine (founded in 1817), which had a major impact on the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol suggest that publications like the novels of Scott and these magazines were part of a highly dynamic Scottish Romanticism that by
32550-460: Was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity , imagination , and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution . Romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favour of
32736-648: Was constructed as the hypothesized common proto-language of the Indo-European languages . Sir William Jones , who was acclaimed as the "most respected linguist in Europe" for his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), was appointed one of the three justices of the Supreme Court of Bengal . Jones, who arrived in Calcutta and began his study of Sanskrit and the Rig Veda , was astonished by
32922-455: Was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements. The significance to Romanticism of childhood innocence, the importance of imagination, and racial theories all combined to give an unprecedented importance to folk literature , non-classical mythology and children's literature , above all in Germany. Brentano and von Arnim were significant literary figures who together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Boy's Magic Horn" or cornucopia ),
33108-600: Was deemed unacceptable, and the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy of 1933 brought together important Nazi intellectuals Alfred Ploetz , Fritz Thyssen , and Ernst Rüdin to plan the course of Nazi racial policy, defining an Aryan as one who was "tribally related to the German blood and descendant of a Volk ". The term " Volksdeutsche " was used by Nazis to indicate "ethnic Germans" who did not hold German Reich citizenship; Volksdeutsche further consist of "racial groups"—minorities within
33294-562: Was disseminated through the Nazi think tank Ahnenerbe. Hitler regularly invoked Social Darwinist concepts of Ernst Haeckel such as higher evolution ( German : Höherentwicklung ), struggle for existence ( German : Existenzkampf ), selection ( German : Auslese ), struggle for life ( German : Lebenskampf ), in his Nazi racial ideology, which is the central theme in the chapter "Nation and Race" of Mein Kampf . Haeckel's Social Darwinism
33480-523: Was disturbed by cultures of slavery during his voyage on the Beagle years earlier. Noted Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that Darwin's writings on evolution were not only influenced by his abolitionist tendencies, but also his belief that non-white races were equal in regard to their intellectual capacity as white races, a belief which had been strongly disputed by scientists such as Morton, Agassiz and Broca, all noted polygenists. By
33666-474: Was earlier literature that they had discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The Gothic novel , beginning with Horace Walpole 's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture . Tristram Shandy ,
33852-503: Was encouraged, while the "inferior races" and people with physical or mental illness were deemed " life unworthy of life " ( German : lebensunwertes Leben , lit. ' lives unworthy of life ') and many were interned in concentration camps . The culmination of Nazi eugenicist and racial hygiene programs of sterilization and extermination aimed at creating an " Aryan master race " and eliminating "inferior non-Aryan types" such as Jews, Slavs, Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and
34038-655: Was later used by the Nazis to condone their genocidal and racist state policies. Kossinna identified the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the Corded Ware culture , and placed the Proto-Indo-European homeland in Schleswig-Holstein . He argued a diffusionist model of culture, and emphasised the racial superiority of Germanic peoples over Romans ( Roman Empire ) and French , whom he described as destroyers of culture as compared to Germanics. Kossinna's ideas have been heavily criticised for its inherent ambiguities in
34224-484: Was rejected by the Royal Society , and this became one of the many theories to be advanced and dropped by the early exponents of evolution . Despite rejection by Huxley and the science community, the paper is sometimes cited in support of racialism. Along with Darwin, Huxley was a monogenist, the belief that all humans are part of the same species, with morphological variations emerging out of an initial uniformity. (Stepan, p. 44). This view contrasts with polygenism,
34410-418: Was specifically a believer and advocate in polygenism , that races came from separate origins (specifically separate creations), were endowed with unequal attributes, and could be classified into specific climatic zones, in the same way he felt other animals and plants could be classified. These included Western American Temperate (the indigenous peoples west of the Rockies); Eastern American Temperate (east of
34596-509: Was suffused with the ideas of Gobineau, who believed the Nordic race had originated in northern Europe and spread through conquest; this had expressed approval of the Nazi eugenics policies and had critical influence on scientific racism. Günther's theories gained acclamation from Hitler, who later included his books as a recommended reading material for the Nazi Party members . After the Nazis came to power, selective breeding for supposed Aryan traits such as athleticism, blond hair and blue eyes
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