The Academic Paper of Awesomeness

The day of reckoning draws dearer, our papers are due tonight! I guess I could've posted about my progress earlier in the week, but as I'm sure we can all attest to, this week has been insane!! Either way I would very much appreciate your input, even at the eleventh hour.

As I'm sure some of you may have already inferred by my comments about it in class, (and I apologize if they've gotten annoying, I just really like this topic) my academic paper is about the political ramifications of applying print to legal texts.

 Here's my intro paragraph:

"The American Revolution, the English Civil War, and the French and Russian Revolutions, all are examples of unprecedented political and social change that occurred after a particularly pivotal event in history – then invention of the printing press. The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history. This primarily brought about a change in the way people communicated legal knowledge, and thereby how they communicated their ideas on the subject. There are two main results of printed law that directly caused this change: greater public access to uniform legal decisions and court proceedings, and a more public discourse regarding law and its functions leading to the wide dissemination of political ideas. While some may argue that the transition from spoken to written law or some other turning point in history was more groundbreaking in its nature, it’s quite apparent that the transition from oral and written legal traditions to the printed word had an effect with far greater scope than those of other developments."


In case you didn't catch it, my thesis is, "The application of printing to the law led to greater political change than any other singular event in history." I think it's simple, provocative, and gets my point across. 

What are your thoughts? Did this really lead to more political change than ANY other single event in history? The only one I could think of was possibly The American Revolution, which I believe depended a lot on print knowledge in the first place. I think it's a pretty divisive statement, so I'm sure there will be someone who disagrees with me. Thanks in advance for your input!

Stop the Press!

In my last blog post about the origins of printed law I briefly touched on how the advent of print in the Islamic world didn't have too much effect on their laws. This is because they followed Sharia law, which they believe to be a divine code set forth in the Quran and by the example of the prophet Muhammad. Because of the sanctity of law in their society, they were very much opposed to defiling their written traditions with the use of printing. In fact not only the printing of Islamic holy laws was forbidden, but the use of the printing press in general was strongly resisted. As a Middle Eastern studies major I thought this cultural conflict was rather fascinating, so that is what my blog post for this week will be about. This article turned out to be an invaluable source for researching this topic. Follow after the jump and see for yourself!

Moving Forward and Back

This is the Tsunami  by Hokusai which was printed is a very interesting way by the Japanese people. They used wood block printing to make this picture of a wave. What is wood block printing?