American Staple

     Survivalists tout the recitation of the rule of three: three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Food is an integral part of human existence, society, culture, and economics, yet as vital as vittles are, alterations to dietary patterns often attract little social comment. Practitioners of old patterns may remark upon differences from memories, but the majority of a collected social gathering will dismiss those claims as insignificant.
     In the previous two centuries industrialization has impacted travel, production, work, communication, farming, war, and every other facet of civilization. The Industrial Revolution has additionally impacted food stuffs, preservation, and availability from Napoleonic France's innovations with canned goods to the adoption of the electric oven.
     The Silk Road's prominence in Europe gained its name from silk and china but maintained relevance mostly for the spices that preserved and improved upon the winter stores of bedraggled Europeans. Black pepper was sold for over $50/lb (0.5kg) which today can be bought for $3/lb (0.5kg). Spices were used to improve the taste, but, importantly, spice was used to preserve quality and mask the task of rot. Meat and vegetables do not greatly endure intact from the harvest to the planting. Thus, with the revolution of agriculture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, preservation technology shadowed production technology. Napoleon's canned goods allowed his soldiers to fight through the winter and carry rations long distances. Pasteurization purified and preserved milk from bacteria, and germ theory helped cleanse and preserve our food stores against the degradation of mold, fungus, and bacteria.
     Beyond preservation, the changing nature of the home impacted food. From the turn of the twentieth century, gas and oil increasingly replaced coal, and as World War I consumed a majority of energy reserves, Americans turned to electricity. As the century wore on, appliances that used electricity became integrated into the middle class household. By the Great Depression, nearly all middle and high class kitchens had replaced the coal furnace with a gas or electric stove. The replacement of the soot and coal dust with clean burning gas allowed the kitchen to become one of the cleanest rooms in the house, challenged only by the bathroom with its new indoor plumbing. Gas and electric stoves and ovens easily maintained temperature and removed the burdensome task of keeping the coal furnace stoked. Cooks and recipes adapted to these technologies.
     Industrialization also changed the types of foods that were prepared. Railroads in England allowed fish to be brought inland to become a dietary delight, and now, is one of the stereotypes of British foods: fish and chips. Americans were able to send fruits from the North like pears and plums in exchange for the tomatoes and peaches of the South. A wider variety of canned foods was also available, and refrigeration allowed for the development of new foods and techniques altogether.
     Food processing changed how traditional foods tasted and needed to be cooked. Cornmeal, a staple for the Midwestern and Southern diets of the American South, used to be ground by water-powered millstones and filtered kernels through a single-sized grate. The large chunks of corn in the meal provided a flavorful, richly-nourishing bread. As the South embraced industrialization by the Great Depression, steel rollers replaced the millstones and produced a very fine, kernel-free cornmeal. The new texture changed the taste and preparation of cornbread and had a net-negative impact on its consumption in the South in the decades since as it has been replaced with wheat breads and sugared foods.

     As farm work subsided to factory work which transitioned to office work, the dietary patterns changed as well. Family sizes shrank as did caloric needs, and the preparation time diminished as processed foods reduced the amount of labor for the cook. These new experiences facilitated the Joy of Cooking cookbook that has sold over eight million copies. While meals were easier to prepare, fewer were eaten at home. Restaurants allowed office workers to eat closer to work instead of returning home. Thus, as food became faster, the locations of its consumption increased in variety.
     Plastics and Teflon further impacted cooking as containers became disposable and hassle-less to clean. Plastics renovated the style of the kitchen, but changes were still incomplete, and microwaves, introduced in the 1950s, became household items by the 1970s.
     From the type and availability of wide variety of food year round to the preparation, storage, and clean-up of the modern diet, the Industrial Revolution's impact on the kitchen and waist-line of modern peoples is imperceptibly huge. While no recent changes have completely revolutionized diets or cooking in the last few decades, with the advent of microchips and personalized diet data, the future's renovations to America's favorite room may be as dramatic and startling as the one's witnessed in the last century.


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Agatha Tyche

Journey of Why: Brewing Hatred

     The animosity between England and France molded the course of European history as decidedly as Charlemagne, the Catholic Church, and the New World, but over the last century, the two perennial powers reached a cordial accord. Seven-hundred years the two kingdoms warred against one another. Battles were waged on French soil, across Europe, in every ocean, and touched every continent of the world. With a record stretching back to the turn of the first millennium, why was the chaos of war ignited?
     The birth of what Europe is can be credited to the boundaries of the Roman Empire, but Charlemagne became the ancestor of most European monarchs and established political boundaries for the disparate peoples. After the death of Charlemagne, his empire was weakened and split between his sons who divided the lands for separate rule. This division of strength allowed an already ambitious Scandinavian people to control the seas, coastlines, and rivers of much of Europe. Charles the Simple, king of what became France, secured his northern coast bordering the English Channel by giving land and title to Rollo, a viking warlord who vowed to defend against other Viking invaders. He took the title Duke of Normandy and was baptized as a Christian under the name of Robert.
     The descendants of Rollo maintained their holding along the coast for centuries and actively expanded their lands with William I's conquest of England in 1066. For a time, the kings of England remained Dukes of Normandy and held court in France. In 1204 King John lost his Duchy and barely held his throne, and his son, Henry III, finalized this cession with the Treaty of Paris in 1259. Under these contentious agreements, England and France both justified their rule over the coast of Normandy and excused countless deaths and centuries of hate.
     Essentially, the core of the dispute is that the French king felt threatened that one of his feudal lords controlled such significant holdings and sought to disperse that power. By removing the French-located seat of the English monarchs, the French kings allowed their English opponents an isolated realm to consolidate power and violently re-deploy forces in their historic mainland holdings
     Only a century after the Treaty of Paris, Edward III began re-asserting English claims within France and ignited the Hundred Years War. From that time on, the two kingdoms were in a state of tension with brief recovery periods disrupting the decades of war. With few exceptions, England and France fought against each other in every European War, trade agreement, and political alliance until the twentieth century. Feeling that their bloodlines, power, and rightful lands compelled a stronger case for the French throne than the incumbent, the English began raiding the coastal region of France in 1337. After a century of war and occupation of the French throne, Joan of Arc is credited with rallying the French forces in Southern France to begin the successful, permanent expulsion of English kings from French lands.
     The generations-long, bloody war destroyed relations between the two kingdoms. Between the Hundred Years War and World War I, the British and French Empires opposed each other's movements as a matter of political determination. If a nation sought to ally itself with France, by default, it sided against the British.
     In a period where Spain's naval dominance and New World wealth positioned her for an expansion of control through Europe, British and French forces formed a brief alliance to deter Spanish expansionist desires. This resulted in Henry VIII and Francis I meeting at the gloriously expensive Field of the Cloth of Gold where the two nation's knights jousted and feasted but failed to build upon their loose alliance and were at war again shortly after.
     As Britain developed her navy for New World trade in conjunction with the Spanish navy's slow decline from prominence, the British Isles became impenetrable since no nation could land an army on her shores. The monarchy remained less fortified and on two occasions was temporarily ousted from power. Charles I was executed and power was consolidated around Oliver Cromwell. Two generations later, James II endured the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that later inspired the American Revolution, another low point for the British crown.
     Of all the nations of Europe that traded alliances through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France and Britain remained embattled through the Wars of Austrian Succession and American and French Revolutions.
     Despite that history of animosity, the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars aided the two nation's cooperation. With the victory at Trafalgar, the British Navy was the undisputed champion of the seas. The Concert of Vienna in 1816 formalized the Greats Powers' foreign policy with each other and established the peace of The Long Century. With British imperial might expanding globally and French imperial might re-solidifying new political movements domestically and abroad, the two empires became rough, tense political allies and opposed Russia's expansion into Ottoman lands in the Crimean War.
     As the Asian region became saturated by European influences and ignited the Scramble for Africa in the last part of the nineteenth century, tensions between France and Britain resided on the brink of war. Through compromise and careful negotiation, the two powers made effective use of diplomacy to avoid bloodshed. With the conclusion of the Fashoda Incident of 1898 in modern South Sudan over disputed land claims, Britain cemented its strength in controlling the area which mollified France and began the de-escalation of tensions that aided in the establishment of a more permanent alliance between the two nations.
     France sought a strong ally because of fear of Germany whose unification and rapidly expanding industrial production outpaced the French. Germany's naval arms race with the British fleet during the same period also worried Britain who agreed to more friendly relations with France to match Germany's new might and maintain the balance of European power.
     The crowning of Francophile Edward VII in 1901 invigorated the political interactions of two of the world's largest empires. Edward VII managed to secure the Entente Cordiale in 1904. English-French relations changed from five centuries of continuous war to peaceful co-existence through the nineteenth century and concluded with four decades of cultural exchange that created a special political relationship between the two nations and solidified desires for the maintenance of the status quo.
     After contention over the rightful king of France in the 1300s, millions of dead, religious zeal and spite, and political posturing as large of the Colossus of Rhodes, England and France made amends. After Napoleon's attempt to conquer Europe created a tense political stasis and after Britain's global empire reduced its insecurities, the threat of a nation stronger than either England or France forced them to conclude: England AND France.

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Agatha Tyche

Universal Anti-Trust

     International corporations are large conglomerates of multifaceted funds and diversified interests that extend over political boundaries. With manufacturing, production, and markets regulated by multiple governments, international corporations would seemingly be restricted by layers of restrictions by various political powers. Because of significant economic leverage, many if not most of the largest international corporations are raised above the laws for certain portions of their activity and use this positioning to reduce tax burden, lower wages, and avoid the scrutiny of the harshest legal requirements. Additionally to intentional skirting of straight-forward interactions, international corporations transcend their nation of residency and create market competition globally between nations that can interfere or interrupt financial, political, and possibly military interactions between countries involved.
     The technology companies that dominate the computer and cellular phone industries originated in the United States but have moved their production and funds overseas to reduce costs and tax burdens while maintaining a huge market within their country of origin. While the populace feels manipulated and rankled by this fiscal betrayal, the impact also affects tax revenues.

     International corporations are large conglomerates of multifaceted funds and diversified interests that extend over political boundaries. With manufacturing, production, and markets regulated by multiple governments, international corporations would seemingly be restricted by layers of restrictions from various political powers. Because of significant economic leverage, many if not most of the largest international corporations are raised above the laws for certain portions of their activity and use this positioning to reduce tax burden, lower wages, and avoid the scrutiny of the harshest legal requirements. Additionally to intentional skirting of straight-forward interactions, international corporations transcend their nation of residency and create market competition globally between nations that can interfere or interrupt financial, political, and, possibly, military interactions between countries involved.

     The technology companies that dominate the computer and cellular phone industries originated in the United States but have moved their production and funds overseas to reduce costs and tax burdens while maintaining a huge market within their country of origin. While the populace feels manipulated and rankled by this fiscal betrayal, the impact also affects tax revenues. Since the maritime globalization of markets, corporations have dominated quantity, volume, and competition of international goods. The East India Trading company controlled enormous resources and fielded a company navy and army which in India alone had over 200,000 participants.

     While the time of political imperialism has ended, corporate imperialism has continued and, arguably in the last three decades, increased. Because of mismanagement, rate and interest manipulation, and lack of accountability, large corporations created a financial bubble in the United States in the early 2000s and were responsible for the collapse of global markets. The burden for those mistakes has been shouldered by the lower classes, and the recovery since that market collapse has been snatched by the instigators of the financial disaster, largely the giants of the business world.

     Many corporations are international. This allows an interplay between markets and cultures. Beneficially, this unites countries with common interest, incentives peace, and encourages the innovation and productivity that occur when different viewpoints meet. Nonetheless, giant conglomerate companies can unite to manipulate resources, prices, and competition. Corporations function more like countries than businesses because their interests transcend political boundaries. With the major exception of Chinese government-run companies, the largest, wealthiest entities in the world are corporations. If Walmart, the largest corporation, was a country, it would rank twenty-fifth globally. That places Walmart just behind Argentina’s incredible production of meat, soybean, and mining. Oil giants like Exxon-Mobil would be similarly ranked.

The interests of those companies are themselves regardless of their country of origin or headquarters. The United States in the largest producer and exporter of soybean in the world, but if Monsanto initiates extensive soybean production in Brazil, the second largest soybean producer, that reduces the United States’ market percentage. By aiding Brazil’s production, Monsanto reducing the market power of the United States, its host country.

     This international economic approach of corporation over country goes back centuries, but with much of the European world being absolutely dominant economically and militarily in that world, the competition created by market entities exerts notable impact on the effectiveness on a nation to negotiate control of its resources and productions.

     In the globalizing world with a strong back-lash to freedom of trade in the far-right political movements of European and America, will the largest corporations of the world, largest based in those Western nations, continue their business regardless of the political antagonism they create, or will the non-Western world with its increasing population and market power welcome those expatriate companies and inherit market dominance? Money moves the world, and governments, by nature, have a negative budget.

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Agatha Tyche

Hydropower

     Water is one of the necessities of life and civilization. Every major civilization has been based on a water source. The Yangtze, Indus, Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Amazon, Mississippi, Thames, Seine, and Tiber rivers established powerhouse trade cities that fostered substantial armies paid for by prosperous trade. The Mediterranean, the great Roman Lake, allowed Rome to consolidate its hold on a huge portion of the world. England turned the Atlantic Ocean into a pond and cut through Egypt’s sandy plains to ease access to the crown jewel of its empire.
     Water is critical to trade, war, and national identity. Xenophon marched his 10,000 Greek mercenaries through Anatolia to return home while dogged by Persian forces. Upon arriving at the coast, his men smelled salt, heard waves, and began shouting ecstatically, “The sea! The sea!” Greece beat off Persia’s invasion at Salamis Bay, Japan swallowed the Pacific early in WWII, and Trafalgar not only defeated Napoleon’s last hope of dominance but also secured British naval superiority for a century which allowed the creation and endurance of the far-flung British Empire. America increased its imperial colonies as its navy also increased.

     Alfred Mahan’s 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History created intense analysis of naval power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely on the foundation of Mahan’s initial principles of geopolitics. Covering the interactions of trade and results of war from 1660-1783, Mahan provided a revolutionary analysis of the rise of the British Empire. Six categories  promoted oceanic control: geographic position, physical conformation, extent of territory, population, character of the people, and character of the government.
     British dominance of the seas resulted from expansionist efforts to control its colonies combined with a decline in competitors' strengths concluding in a dominant military, economic, and political power. From this observation, Mahan promoted US expansionist policies for the increasingly economic strength of US power. Access to foreign markets was fundamental in promoting US manufacturing abroad and need access to those markets. Access that needed on a merchant navy, a military navy, and a naval base network for trade and supplies.

     In the twenty-first century, more than 90 percent of trade traverses shipping lanes. Resonating with politicians and reinforced by the Spanish-American War, annexation of Hawaii, and the Panama Canal, the United States secured refueling stations on small island bases throughout the Pacific. Despite these early American efforts to expand its naval prowess, France and Germany were the nations that most quickly took hold of the lessons of history presented by Mahan to overhaul their naval structure. World War I changed the focus and ability of these nations to contend for the world’s waves. France saw the failure of the Dardanelles invasion at Gallipoli and the effectiveness of submarine warfare as sufficient deterrents to the expansion of its navy. Germany nearly ousted Britain from its pre-eminent position as queen of the world’s oceans, but by keeping its fleets in safe harbors, Germany refused to demonstrate its new strength and lost its navy in the Treaty of Versailles.
     Safety of the seas is a key feature of American naval might and projection of global soft power since freedom of travel subtly shifts nations to trade and military alliance with the dominant naval power. Though global naval law has seen a perpetual continuance over the last two centuries, permanence is the illusion of every age and empire. Because of the close ties and goals between British and American power, global law saw little change with the switch in power from one nation to the next. With British withdraw from Far East waters in 1904, Japan filled the power vacuum with a new regime, new laws, and a new approach to governance of trade routes.
     Since World War II, the United States has been an unstoppable naval force despite exertions to maintain its unassailable air force and land army. Aircraft carriers and advancing technologies have maintained the power of the seas. The American navy has secured and support its private economy through safety and access to markets which makes the navy is the most important peacetime military branch of any major nation. Navies reassure allies of support, dissuade enemies from developing competition, and are cheaper and more mobile than land-based military bases which can be seen as imperial. A navy is the most cost-efficient, powerful, and maneuverable option in the projection and maintenance of power and trade.
     Under America’s second president in the twenty-first century, the navy has been diminished. The reasoning behind this is to reduce public spending, but two side effects have been observed. First, reduced American global presence has been credited with the invasion of Crimea by Russia in 2014 and the establishment of man-made islands in the South China Sea.
     An American defined the idea that America embraced – that naval power elevates a country’s international standing. The lesson has slowly slipped from the public mind, and self-degradation of its own strength may be a major cause of the United States economic decline. Water has always been the functional determinant of a people's wealth, and with command of the seas in the modern world, the wealth is nearly limitless.

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Agatha Tyche

Revolutionary World

     Sometime in the summer of 1789, one of the most powerful nations in the world collapsed into shambles. As the palace of civilization collapsed, the reverberations and shock rippled in catastrophy throughout the world. Even the shock waves were so powerful that historians designate this event as the birth of modern Europe.
     As France committed seppuku, the other nations and nobles of Europe circled the corpse, sending in small scouting and claimant parties to secure land, resources, and influence. From that xenophobic invasion fear, the French united behind a skillful, innovative commander who led the defense of his nation so well that his armies march past their own borders to capture the heart and breath of the continent. It was after those years of tumultuous uncertainty when Paris gutted her heart and brain tens of thousands of times that the first steps of ingenuity took hold and sprouted from the blood that soaked the land.
     One of the most immediate and frightening products of that call to arms across the countryside of one of the largest nations, of every measure, was the implementation of total war. All men fought. All women worked. All industry produced maximum output for the effort of the war. The war of one man but also of one country to define itself and its legacy to history. One man and one nation held off the invasion of a continent then nearly broke that continent into the submission of his own will. The lessons of total war became clear when great nations battled again on the same lands a century later.
     That mobilization of every resource saw incredible changes to the tapestry of humanity. Since full societal mobilization needed manpower, slaves were freed and peasants became generals. Men took hold of their lives and sought out their brothers as proclamations of nationalism rang forth through the streets of Paris and every city her armies conquered. The newly liberated society was free from the oppression of feudalism as well as the encompassing ownership of the Catholic Church. Frenchmen used their Enlightened ideals to philosophize, invent, and explore the realms of medicine, psychology, and art with profound techniques. Napoleon held prizes for scientific innovations. From those efforts, the world gained graphite and pencils, chemical batteries, and canned foods.
     These changes in art and philosophy created a new world for the mind as well as a new political map and ideologies. Record keeping, cataloging expeditions and discoveries, and the analysis of history all developed from these changes. While art, science, and philosophy founded the bedrocks of their modern principles, the political world also departed from the ruts of history. The French Revolution murdered the oldest royal aristocratic line in Europe, but from that came democratic political parties that spoke the minds of the people. The political spectrum changed so drastically that terms "left" and "right" stemmed from the pattern that representatives of ideological views sat by during sessions.
     No period of upheaval can afford to endure continuously. After ten years of executions and fifteen years of war, France settled into a calmer ritual, and dust across the empire finally settled on the battlefields. Instead, the energy of the people turned from swords to shouts as revolutions seized the cities of Europe in 1848 with cries of nationalist fervor. Napoleonic laws influenced the laws of modern France and were reflected in the colonial holdings during the Imperial Age.

     Napoleon's reforms changed how Europeans saw themselves. Through simplification of the borders of splintered peoples in Germany, Italy, and Poland, the energies of nationalism sought unity. The calm of the Long Century was broken up by civil wars of unification for Germans and Italians that emerged as powers in their own right over the next one-hundred years. By removing the old codes and houses, Napoleon ushered in a century of alternation. The old regimes in Britain, Austria, and Russia continued after Napoleon, but the power and structure of society was shifted. One man used the energies of one people to shift a continent, and from that leverage, one man shifted the world.

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Agatha Tyche

Vanity of War

     Outside of the descriptions of glory and gold obtained by victorious kings in battles against the enemy, war is only ever described as the worst imaginable descriptors. Rough, dirty, raw, terrifying, and horrendous, war has never been for the weak stomach or the soft of heart.
     As the weapons of modern war developed alongside improved medical techniques, the devastatingly wounded soldiers of World War I trenches found themselves in an odd spot of history. They were injured in record numbers, but they did not die. Shrapnel from large and small artillery shells ripped uneven gashes into the bodies and faces of trench-bound soldiers. The trenches themselves, leaving the head most prone to injury in the line of fire from enemy marksmen, were effectively suited to harm the minds and faces of men.

     Because of the high survival rate and the horror that facial disfigurement created, the British and French governments set up departments to handle reconstruction of veteran faces. In its infancy, plastic surgeons developed skin and bone grafts to regrow faces, notably Harold Gillies; while the most serious facial injuries required masks, often made of thin sheets of copper, to hide the disfigurements. After the first day of the battle of Somme, a flood of two thousand facially injured soldiers appeared at the hospital for Harold Gillies. Because multiple, gradual surgeries were required for most patients, of the 5,000 men cared for in the years of the hospital's operation, over 100,000 surgeries were performed, some 11,000 by Dr. Gillies himself.
     While World War I saw the terrible capabilities of man's ability to war, the pressures of the war saw innovation in many other areas. Communication, travel, flight, and medicine all benefited from the focused efforts made during the war. Despite the ingenious attempts of aiding, caring for, and recovering the personality of the wounded, plastic surgery could only do so much. Not even half of facial injuries in Britain were ever addressed, only the most grievous cases. Of an estimated 20,000, the success of those 5,000 seems a much smaller number. Given the knowledge, skill, and successes of the time, remarkable achievement were accomplished by the surgeons, nurses, and patients that worked long years after the war to finish their work.
     Unfortunately, even regrowing faces only covers the wounds. Psychological effects continued for a lifetime for the soldiers and their families. One of the overseeing doctors observed, "The psychological effect on a man who must go through life, an object of horror to himself as well as to others, is beyond description. It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted person to feel like a stranger to his world. It must be unmitigated hell to feel like a stranger to yourself."
     Much like the actual battlefields of the Great War, these small victories of one man seem inconsequential given that a thousand men could fall for no ground, yet it is the efforts of the soldiers that stayed brave through their treatment and the doctors who served to find methods that paved hope for the future's peace. A peace, that while short lived, learned some of the lessons of this earlier punishment of the thirst for glory and the vanity of war.

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Agatha Tyche

The Black Death of Politics in Medieval Europe

     The Black Plague killed at least one-third of the population of Europe between 1346 and 1350. Almost overnight, it seemed, one out of every three faces vanished from the human community. Famine and war, along with little immune resistance to the disease, set the perfect stage for one of the worst natural disasters ever. The Black Plague forced and influenced changes in governmental policies and religious views in the European Medieval Period.
     Power before the Black Plague was firmly established in the feudal system and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. Primarily, manors had control over the majority of the population, but their power was slowly weakening. With favorable weather and good crop years, the population greatly expanded in the 1200s, and serfs could buy their way out by paying a fee to the lord. With serfs leaving manors, the yeomen gradually became more significant.
     In England, the king had begun to send out royal justices twice a year to aid serfs in their plight of gaining freedom. Once the peasants were free, their taxes went directly to the king, ignoring local lords altogether. Kings received a higher percentage of the taxes, and lords did not have to support such a large peasant population on a small piece of land. This transition occurred smoothly because kings held divine rights and, consequentially, absolute authority. The slow change in political power away from local lords was lubricant that initiated large scale revolution centuries later after the seeds of change were tended.
     Outside the king, power, wealth, and influence rested with the Roman Catholic Church which governed nearly every aspect of the people’s lives. Even politics were affected since laws were formed by reason (practical application of previous governing), church influence, and cleric involvement. Control was cemented by fear of excommunication.
     During the plague years, disorder and chaos ruled the plague-stricken world. Governmental officials of every rank, everywhere died regularly or fled to a secluded areas because no one was safe. Judges deserted the courts and the common people did what they pleased. People lost hope for the future and did not make provision for it. As Giovanni Boccaccio says in The Decameron, “Thus it came about that oxen, asses, [and] sheep . . . were driven away and allowed to roam freely though the fields, where the crops lay abandoned and had not even been reaped, let alone gathered in.. A large portion of people focused completely on deriving as much pleasure from life as possible while they could. It was a common thought that today was the end with no tomorrow, and people went uncontrolled by anything except fear and their own desires.

     Religion tried to gather a firmer grip but lost its stranglehold in the Middle Ages during and after the Black Death. Pope Clement VI recognized the large percent of death in the clergy and allowed changes in some regulations for simple church activities to make up for clergy shortages. The sheer number of funerals, prevented tradition. Instead of long parades of mourners grieving over the loss of a loved one, few processions had more than a handful of those closest to them follow the body to the graveyard and, without service or respect, throw the body into the grave. Traveling monks preached conviction to purify life from sin to abate the plague. Despite all the efforts of the Catholic Church to maintain its powerful position, many people turned to magic for salvation from the plague.
     Flagellants believed they could take on the sin of the world by suffering and eliminate the Black Plague. Flagellants beat themselves with flagella which were the nine-tailed whips used to beat Jesus. These people, in desperation after the failure of the church, prayer, magic, and medicine, beat themselves hoping to appease God’s wrath. Pope Clement VI outlawed the movement. The sense of panic during the ceremonies occasionally caused riots in the cities, and the teachings of the flagellants undercut the Catholic church’s authority.
     Immense changes occurred because of the Black Plague; some changes were evident immediately after, but the most significant ones came years later. The common people became more independent. Before the plague with large populations, wages were low; after the death of swathes of workers, wages increased. With most of the population employed, laborers had a strong sway in determining wages. Workers voiced their opinions and forced lords to pay higher prices. Coffers were quickly emptying because of inexpensive grain prices and increasing pay. The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 displayed the newly found power of the working class. If landowners died and no heirs came forward, the church claimed the land; but peasants cultivated the land and eventually claimed it themselves. Death of public officials and clergy members allowed a class change as peasants were moved to the upper class.
     The independence attitude that developed after the fall of the feudal system brought inspiration. There was a great demand for education with secular views overwriting the church encouraging a turn to philosophy for explanations instead of religion. The philosophies of the Enlightenment and Reformation began to form and challenge the old teachings of the Roman Catholic Church shortly after the plague. The Black Plague made people realize the church was not perfect.
     The Medieval World was an ideal setting for the Black Plague. Weak immune systems from famine, stress and fear of death were prevalent. Noble houses and the Roman Catholic Church had control over most of Europe, but serfs were breaking apart the feudal system. The Black Plague rerouted some power to the working class, but authority still rested in the hands of nobility for the time. The Reformation traced its roots to this time where people became skeptical about religious views. The Renaissance also found its origin in this time where individualism and an eagerness for learning began. The Black Plague introduced to the modern world new ideas in government, religious views, change in social class, and education.

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Agatha Tyche