Humanism:

1. It means the service of humanity irrespective of caste, colour or creed.

2. The writers of the Renaissance age took up their subjects from the Bible. But their aim was the welfare of all mankind.
3. The power of reasoning of man is very fine; His inner faculties are unlimited. His body is the temple of living God. He is supreme among God's creations.

1. Christians had believed that the earth was a sinful place and the heavy burden of sin made it immobile. The earth stood at the centre of the universe around which moved the celestial planets.
2. Copernicus asserted that the planets, including the earth, rotate around the sun. A devout Christian, Copernicus was afraid of the possible reaction to his theory by traditionalist clergymen. For this reason, he did not want his manuscript, De revolutionibus (the Rotation) to be printed. On his deathbed, he gave it to his follower, Joachim Rheticus.
3. It took time for people to accept this idea. It was much later - more than half a century later, in fact - that the difference between ‘heaven’ and earth was bridged through the writings of astronomers like Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).
4. The theory of the earth as part of a sun-centred system was made popular by Kepler's Cosmographical Mystery, which demonstrated that the planets move around the sun not in circles but in ellipses. Galileo confirmed the notion of the dynamic world in his work The Motion. This revolution in science reached its climax with Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation.

The discovery of the Sumerian city of Ur has shed light on the lives of the early Mesopotamians. The Mesopotamian cities fell short in terms of town planning as compared to the Harappan centres but followed a uniform pattern nevertheless. The city was divided into three parts - the sacred area, the walled city on a mound and the outer town. The sacred area consisted of the temple tower or the ziggurat dedicated to the patron god of the city. There were also smaller temples of other gods. This area also had the storehouse as well as the offices. People resided in the walled city and the outer town areas. Houses were constructed along the streets, and each house had a central courtyard with rooms attached around it.

The movement known as Luddism, led by the charismatic General Ned Ludd, exemplified another type of protest. Luddism was not merely a backward looking assault on machines. Its participants demanded a minimum wage, control over the labour of women and children, work for those who had lost their jobs because of the coming of machinery, and the right to form trade unions so that they could legally present these demands.