Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America

Author(s):  
T. J. Tomlin

ABSTRACT What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.

1971 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Flanders

The literature of the current generation treating the Jacksonian period of American history suggests persuasively that although the citizenry of that time enjoyed widespread consensus about many important matters, many remained about which there was profound disagreement. American life abounded in antithetical and unresolved issues: tensions between pastoral and urbane, the unrequited yearning for a simpler way of life in a time when Americans were beginning to embrace more complex modes of economic, political, and social life; the conflict between an exuberant, secular American optimism about the promise of life and the often hysterical anxiety of the religious over a ripeness of sin and the approaching destruction of the wicked and the end of the world. And the slavery dilemma began to shake American society in the 1830–1850 generation. The idea of counter culture in early nineteenth century America should be considered against the background of such cultural tensions.


1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-404
Author(s):  
Catherine A. Brekus

On a Sunday morning in January of 1827, “all the taste and fashion” of Washington, D.C., streamed toward the Capitol to witness one of the most remarkable events to take place in the gentlemanly preserve of the Hall of Representatives: Harriet Livermore, a devout evangelical and the daughter of a former Congressman, had convinced the Speaker of the House to allow her to preach to Congress. With crowds of eager spectators spilling out of the Hall and into the street, Livermore ascended into the Speaker's Chair, which served as a makeshift pulpit, and silenced a crowd of a thousand with a sermon on the text, “He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” Included among her audience were congressmen, senators, and President John Quincy Adams himself, who sat on the steps leading up to her feet because he could not find a free chair. According to published reports, many in the audience wept quietly as she spoke. “It savored more of inspiration than anything I ever witnessed,” one woman marvelled. “And to enjoy the frame of mind which I think she does, I would relinquish the world. Call this rhapsody if you will; but would to God you had heard her!” Livermore's sermon was such a success that she was permitted to preach to Congress again in 1832, 1838, and 1843, each time to large crowds.


2007 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-196
Author(s):  
William G. Merkel

In “Gun Ownership in Early America,” published in theWilliam and Mary Quarterlyin 2003, Robert Churchill drew on probate inventories and militia records to make the case that arms ownership was pervasive in late colonial, revolutionary, and early national America. Churchill concluded with the observation that “[i]t is time to ponder what these guns meant to their owners and how that meaning changed over time.” In his substantial contribution to this volume ofLaw and History Review, Churchill takes up that challenge himself and advances the claim that widespread arms ownership engendered a sense of possessory entitlement, and that this notion of right informed constitutional sensibilities respecting guns and the Second Amendment. He acknowledges that a civic republican understanding focused on the militia was central to the framers' conception of the right to arms, but urges that another stream of discourse—individualistic, personal, and divorced from militia linked obligations—was present from the beginning. By the early nineteenth century, Churchill argues, this purely private view of the right to arms had become ascendant.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-144
Author(s):  
Kenneth E. Marshall

This article explores the little known yet intriguing life of Harry Compton (c. 1743–c. 1814), who first comes to our attention in the 1883 narrative of the life of his famed granddaughter, Silvia Dubois. An enslaved person turned independent businessman, Compton constructed a complex and evolving concept of masculinity in the face of oppression, encouraging us to understand black masculinity in slavery and freedom as a life-long pursuit of self-empowerment and personal reinvention. His story, which occurred mostly in rural New Jersey, adds nuance to scholars’ understanding of early black masculinity as a public performance that showcased one’s power and authority, or self-worth, while also providing an important example of black masculinity as a developing process. In telling Compton’s story, the article advances a number of narrative threads pertaining to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Jersey, including slavery, gender, culture and economy, and the law. An analysis of Compton allows the reader to learn a great deal about the world in which he lived and, ultimately, overcame through his dynamic masculinity performed in various public settings.


2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH BULLEN

This paper investigates the high-earning children's series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in relation to the skills young people require to survive and thrive in what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Children's textual culture has been traditionally informed by assumptions about childhood happiness and the need to reassure young readers that the world is safe. The genre is consequently vexed by adult anxiety about children's exposure to certain kinds of knowledge. This paper discusses the implications of the representation of adversity in the Lemony Snicket series via its subversions of the conventions of children's fiction and metafictional strategies. Its central claim is that the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of A Series of Unfortunate Events} models one of the forms of reflexivity children need to be resilient in the face of adversity and to empower them to undertake the biographical project risk society requires of them.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.


Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman

This chapter focuses on the reality of persons in a world of things. It begins and ends with some relevant views drawn from the Jewish philosophers Buber (1878–1965), Heschel (1907–72), and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–93). Framed by the Jewish concerns, it turns to a philosophical exploration of human personhood. The chapter begins by consiering Sellars's classic essay on the scientific and manifest images of “man-in-the-world.” Sellars shows how urgent and difficult it is to sustain a recognizable image of ourselves as persons in the face of scientism. With additional help from Nagel and Kant, it argues that persons cannot be conceptually scanted in a world of things. Notwithstanding the explanatory power of science, there is more to life than explanation. Explanation of what we are needs supplementing by a conception of who we are, how we should live, and why we matter. Those are questions to which Jewish sources can speak.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arathy Puthillam

That American and European participants are overrepresented in psychological studies has been previously established. In addition, researchers also often tend to be similarly homogenous. This continues to be alarming, especially given that this research is being used to inform policies across the world. In the face of a global pandemic where behavioral scientists propose solutions, we ask who is conducting research and on what samples. Forty papers on COVID-19 published in PsyArxiV were analyzed; the nationalities of the authors and the samples they recruited were assessed. Findings suggest that an overwhelming majority of the samples recruited were from the US and the authors were based in US and German institutions. Next, men constituted a large proportion of primary and sole authors. The implications of these findings are discussed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-32
Author(s):  
Nandi Syukri ◽  
Eko Budi Setiawan

Business Card is the most efficient, effective and appropriate tool for every business men no matter they are owners, employees, more over marketers to provide information about their businesses. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to bring and manage business card in large numbers also to remember the face of the business card owner. A Business Card application need to be built to solve all those issues mentioned above. The Application or software must be run in media which can be accessed anywhere and anytime such as smart phone. Kuartu is as business card application run in mobile devices. Kuartu is developed using object base modeling for mobile sub system. The platform of the mobile sub system is android, as it is the most widely used platform in the world. The Kuartu application utilizing NFC and QR Code technology to support the business card information exchange and the Chatting feature for communication. Based on the experiment and test using black box methodology, it can be concluded that Kuartu application makes business card owner to communicate each other easily, business card always carried, easy to manage the cards and information of the business card owner can be easily obtained. Index Terms— Business Card, Android, Kuartu, NFC, QrCode, Chatting.


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