Many People, Three Ideologies

To begin our lesson on the ideologies of the 19th century, we were given an essential question. The essential question is as follows, "What were the major political ideologies of the 19th century and how did they influence social and political action?". After we were given the question, we took some time to look at the words conservative, liberal, and nationalism. We defined them ourselves and used them in a sentence. Then, we discussed what exactly an ideology is and learned that ideologies are ideas that are formed by someone or a group of people, that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. Now we had an idea on what the ideologies that we were going to look at were going to be by defining the words in the beginning and broke off into groups.


The class was divided into six groups; two groups per ideology. In the groups, we were asked to make a sixty second presentation on our assigned ideology. My group got conservatism and decided to do a common craft video. You can view it below.

Our presentation gives a definition and overview of the beliefs of conservatism with the audio and images. Conservatives believe that the traditional political and economic ways should be kept in use. They do not believe in reform and do not want a revolution. They wanted to preserve the system of aristocracy and set social structures. They liked traditional monarchies. This influenced social and political action because it was giving power to specific people like the monarch.



Another ideology is liberalism. Liberalism is the idea that the middle class has a say in government and that everyone has god given natural rights that need to be protected. Liberalism prevented tyrannic rule and promoted freedom of though and natural rights. However, liberals did not want a democracy, instead they left out the women and poor but gave the middle class a say. It influenced the social and political action because the liberals had opposite ideas from the conservatives and made the middle class happy, but not the poor. The last ideology is nationalism. Nationalism is when a nation wants to be united and the best and strongest nation it can be. They wanted to be strong and able to conquer others and drive out foreign rulers. Nationalists believed that people were bound together by sharing the same culture, language, and history. The nationalists would not focus on social classes and power as much as how they should all be united as one strong nation.