Ap Euro Essay

Submitted By hallywojmen
Words: 640
Pages: 3

Sydney Wichmann
August 11, 2014
AP European History

A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester presented some of the most important events in human history that contributed to how the world is in today time. William Manchester's intent was to demonstrate the significance of the early 16th century. To accomplish this,
Manchester had to clearly show the state of the world before the 16th century. The first portion of the book The Medieval Mind gave readers a look at how times in the medieval were. It explained much of Christianity and monarchies during medieval times. The portion of the book after the Medieval Mind was The Shattering. This portion covered the most amount of information. Manchester gave frequent examples of violence, intolerance, superstition, injustice, and corruption that swayed the reader to produce the opinion that the time period was brutal and inhumane. The author also explained the continuous conflicts among the Catholic Church and humanists due to hypocrisys of the church. With a regularity of
“recreational homicide” (pg 38) by all sorts of people during the time period, including religious figures, and the cruel and extreme punishments endured for not following each of the strict interpretations of the bible, the book portrayed the majority of the beginning of the Middle Ages as a time that most human beings in modern day are grateful they did not have to live through.
The attitude of the author later changed during the third part of the book One Man Alone. This portion of the book focused on the miraculous accomplishments of European Explorers, and how their exploration was an “inexact science” (pg 236) due to the lack of tools and knowledge

used today. The author praised explorers such as Magellan for their extremely heroic behavior during such a time, and compared him to people such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin
Roosevelt.. The author looked at the strangely disturbing side of history, but also explained how amazing the curiosity of explorers and the discoveries during the age of exploration were. Reading the first few pages of this book might have made teenage readers that were used to reading books like Twilight and The Fault In Our Stars all summer say, “A World Lit

Only By Fire? More like I want to light this book on fire!”. The author did a great job of supplying information in long sentences that the