John Bull and the American Revolution: The Transatlantic Afterlives of Arbuthnot's Character

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Leah Orr
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
British Government ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Newspaper Articles

AbstractHow did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

Impure Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Keel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Racial Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Anti Jewish

Chapter 1 examines the thought of the eighteenth-century ethnologist Johann F. Blumenbach, whose 1775 work On the Natural Variety of Mankind is often represented as precipitating the secular turn in the modern study of race. The chapter offers an alternative account of the intellectual ancestry alive in Blumenbach’s racial theories by recovering the Christian sources of his thinking. Political and philosophical anti-Judaism prevalent in late eighteenth-century Germany, the transformation of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther into a pioneer of German national identity, and the anti-Jewish writings of Johann David Michaelis in the emergent field of biblical geography at Göttingen University were all crucial political, religious, and intellectual influences during the time Blumenbach developed his racial theories. Drawing on the notion that the epistemological origins of racial science are fundamentally mongrel, this chapter argues that Blumenbach’s racial theories were not an expression of pure, untainted, secular rationality.

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