{"id":2926,"date":"2010-09-03T21:05:21","date_gmt":"2010-09-04T01:05:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=2926"},"modified":"2010-09-04T12:02:57","modified_gmt":"2010-09-04T16:02:57","slug":"the-perils-of-being-a-political-science-major","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/the-perils-of-being-a-political-science-major\/","title":{"rendered":"The National Portrait Gallery: A Homogenous Art Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, we visited the National Portrait Gallery, which should be called the Rich White Male Portrait Gallery.\u00a0 Generally all of the paintings were of white guys well into the Gallery’s 20th Century portions, with the exception of any female monarch.\u00a0 Starting in the 1950’s or so, there were a few more token minorities and\/or females throughout the remaining small portion of the museum.\u00a0 In my opinion, this lack of diversity is completely unacceptable for a vastly multicultural city like London.\u00a0 While wandering around the illogically designed museum (during which I frequently was forced to cross over my own path just to see the paintings in chronological order), I came across several paintings that caught my eye.\u00a0 The most notable of these is a portrait of Oliver Cromwell that was painted by Robert Walker circa 1649.\u00a0 As a political science major, I was drawn to this painting not so much for its artistic value (though it is a nice-looking painting) as for its sitter’s political accomplishments.<\/p>\n

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http:\/\/www.npg.org.uk\/collections\/search\/portrait\/mw01594\/Oliver-Cromwell?search=ss&firstRun=true&sText=cromwell&LinkID=mp01116&role=sit&rNo=0<\/p><\/div>\n

Cromwell is best known for serving as Lord Protector after the dissolution of the Monarchy at the end of the English Civil War.\u00a0 Fighting for the Parliamentary forces, he played a large part in Britain becoming a republic as opposed to the monarchic structure it had used for hundreds of years.\u00a0 This period of British history motivated several of the greatest philosophers of all time to venture into the world of politics, meanwhile formulating the basic ideas that have influenced every democratic government since.\u00a0 The likes of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke (both featured with Cromwell in the National Portrait Gallery), released these ideas in Leviathan and The Treatises of Government, respectively.\u00a0 Though they are often thought of as very similar, Hobbes and Locke were on opposite sides of the Monarchy (Hobbes) v. Parliament (Locke) war.\u00a0 Their ideas on the legitimacy of government (mostly related to the idea of social contract theory) serve as the cornerstone to the American system of government, which has in turn served as a template for governments all over the world.\u00a0 It’s clear that the victory by Parliamentary forces, led by Mr. Cromwell, in the English Civil War set the stage for one of the largest global political changes in the world’s history, which is why both the period and the man are so interesting to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, we visited the National Portrait Gallery, which should be called the Rich White Male Portrait Gallery.\u00a0 Generally all of the paintings were of white guys well into the Gallery’s 20th Century portions, with the exception of any female monarch.\u00a0 Starting in the 1950’s or so, there were a few more token minorities and\/or females […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6691],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-matthewm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}