Category Archives: The Virtual University

The course will be taught by Dr. Sebastian Ostritsch.

How do you know when—and where—big changes are happening? Paris in the late eighteenth century was experiencing massive advances in science and technology, a great political transformation, and experiments in industrialization. But in 1750, most of its people were poor. The highest class were the same land-owning nobility and monarchy that had ruled for centuries, and its streets were covered in mud and excrement. Yet its thinkers were also producing one of the most important archives of knowledge and thought the world would ever see—the Encyclopedia. Its existence may have been a signal of change to come.