1. Maps and Images for McKay 8e A History of Western Society Chapter 20 The Changing Life of the People Cover Slide Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

2. Chardin's Kitchen Maid The leading moral genre painter in France was Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779). During the 1730s Chardin began to depict middle-class people engaged in ordinary, everyday tasks, providing valuable evidence for the historian. In this painting, a young servant, lost in thought as she pauses in her work, perhaps thinks about her village and loved ones there. (National Gallery of Art, Washington. Samuel H. Kress Collection) Chardin's Kitchen Maid Copyright ©Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

3. David Allan, The Penny Wedding The spirited merry-making of a peasant wedding was a popular theme of European artists. In this painting, The Penny Wedding by David Allen, we see a "penny weding" in rural Scotland: guests paid a fee for the food and fun and any leftover money went to the newlyweds to help them get started. Music, dancing, feasting, and drinking characterized these community parties, which led the Presbyterian church to oppose them and hasten their decline. (National Galleries of Scotland) David Allan, The Penny Wedding Copyright ©Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

4. English food riot Nothing infuriated ordinary women and men more than the idea that merchants and landowners were withholding grain from the market in order to push high prices even higher. This cartoon depicts events of August 1800, when an angry crowd handed out rough justice to a rich farmer accused of hoarding. (Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum) English food riot Copyright ©Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

5. Peasant family reading the Bible Praised by the philosophic Diderot for its moralistic message, this engraving of a painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) captures the power of sacred texts and the spoken word. The peasant patriarch reads aloud from the massive family Bible, and the close-knit circle of absorbed listeners concentrates on every word. Only the baby is distracted. (Giraudon/Art Resource, NY) Peasant family reading the Bible Copyright ©Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

6. Teaching midwives Madame Angelique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray, a well-known Parisian midwife who taught women from impoverished villages of Auvergne, sought to reach a national audience. In 1757 she wrote and had published the first of several editions of her Manual on the Art of Childbirth. This plate from the text illustrates "another incorrect method of delivery." The caption tells the midwife that she should have rotated the baby within the womb to face the mother's back, so that the chin does not catch on the pubic bone and dislocate the jaw. (Rare Books Division, Countway Library of Medicine) Teaching midwives Copyright ©Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

7. Map: Literacy in France on the Eve of the Revolution Literacy in France on the Eve of the Revolution Literacy rates increased but still varied widely between and within states in eighteenth-century Europe. Northern France was clearly ahead of Southern France. (Copyright (c) Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.) Copyright ©Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.