As a part of his sweeping reform of French domestic policy, Napoleon made universal state-sponsored education available to the masses for the first time in the early nineteenth century. Napoleon believed the introduction of universal state-sponsored education would both help the people of France and allow him to recruit more and better military officers.

The Gutenberg printing press introduced movable type and made it possible to mass-produce books that were previously scribed by hand and therefore took a very long time to reproduce. The greatly increased availability of books contributed to a large increase of the number of people who learned to read.

The Enlightenment was a political and philosophical movement in the 1700's, centered on the belief in universal human rights that helped inspire democratic reforms in government and the American and French Revolutions.

The Glorious Revolution was the bloodless overthrow of England's King James II in 1688.

Dr. Theodor Geisel wrote children's books and is better known by his pen-name, Dr. Seuss.

During the Middle Ages (500-1350 CE), scientific knowledge did not evolve very much. Scholars studied the works of the old scientific thinkers, and accepted their findings as true without question. They began to ask questions and do experiments and found that the results did not always match up to the old accepted theories. This led to an explosion in scientific innovation and methodology which resulted in inventions and discoveries like the telescope, the barometer, the thermometer, the microscope and the scientific revolution. Scientific inquiry, observation and experimentation as we know it today was pioneered by the leaders of the scientific revolution- Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Nicolas Copernicus, Rene Descartes, Galileo and others.

The story of David and Goliath was a well known story which was often the subject of paintings and sculptures at the time. However, usually the artist depicted David victorious after battle or valiantly fighting during it. Everyone was shocked when Michelangelo chose to David all alone, looking confident and contemplative in the moments before the battle. His weapon, the sling shot, is not prominent in the sculpture, it is slung over his shoulder almost out of view as if to emphasize that this hero’s strength lay in his intellect and ingenuity not brute strength.

Sigmund Freud pioneered a new school of psychological interpretation called psychoanalysis. It allowed for the rigorous study, classification, and treatment of psychological disorders. Freud believed that there were many conscious and unconscious associations between dreams and the inner workings of a persons mind, and relied heavily on dream interpretation during his clinical work.