scholarly journals What guns meant in eighteenth-century Britain

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Priya Satia
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ethical Systems ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article briefly summarizes the place of guns in British society and culture in the long eighteenth century. My approach is that of a historical anthropologist, examining the meaning of guns from the way they were used and depicted. I examine the way guns were used and understood in civilian and military realms, especially their meaning and role in the expansion of the British Empire. Finally, the essay discusses whether and how this history should influence our understanding of the Second Amendment, which was written in the eighteenth century. It concludes that history substantiates both sides of the current debate about gun use in America and that we must therefore turn to other ethical systems of judgment to resolve that debate.

scholarly journals Preparing for an Imperial Inheritance: Children, Play, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Troy Bickham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Juvenile Literature ◽  
Supplementary Education ◽  
Board Games ◽  
Conscious Effort ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract In examining how children engaged with the British Empire, broadly defined, during the long eighteenth century, this article considers a range of materials, including museums, printed juvenile literature, and board games, that specifically attempted to attract children and their parents. Subjects that engaged with the wider world, and with it the British Empire, were typically not a significant part of formal education curricula, and so an informal marketplace of materials and experiences emerged both to satisfy and drive parental demand for supplementary education at home. Such engagements were no accident. Rather, they were a conscious effort to provide middling and elite children with what was considered useful information about the wider world and empire they would inherit, as well as opportunities to consider the moral implications and obligations of imperial rule, particularly with regard to African slavery.

Church Building and Architecture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis P. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Church

Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.

The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Street Level ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth-century Britain thought of itself as a polite, sentimental, enlightened place, but often its literature belied this self-image. This was an age of satire, and the century’s novels, poems, plays, and prints resound with mockery and laughter, with cruelty and wit. The street-level invective of Grub Street pamphleteers is full of satire, and the same accents of raillery echo through the high scepticism of the period’s philosophers and poets, many of whom were part-time pamphleteers themselves. The novel, a genre that emerged during the eighteenth century, was from the beginning shot through with satirical colours borrowed from popular romances and scandal sheets. This handbook is a guide to the different kinds of satire written in English during the ‘long’ eighteenth century. It focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Outlier chapters extend the story back to first decade of the seventeenth century, and forward to the second decade of the nineteenth. The scope of the volume is not confined by genre, however. So prevalent was the satirical mode in writing of the age that this book serves as a broad and characteristic survey of its literature. The Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire seeks to reflect developments in historical criticism of eighteenth-century writing over the last two decades, and to provide a forum in which the widening diversity of literary, intellectual, and socio-historical approaches to the period’s texts can come together.

The Way In

The Closet ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 12-40
Author(s):  
Danielle Bobker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Social Transition ◽  
Directed Attention ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain ◽  
A Site ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
The Way

This chapter outlines the broad historical and conceptual foundations for the focused explorations on the closet. It analyzes the domestic privacy and modern selfhood that has overshadowed the closet's origins as a site of politicized intimacy and its flexibility as a locus of interpersonal relations in eighteenth-century Britain. It also assesses how the emergence of democratic social feelings has generally directed attention away from the closet and toward more obviously heterogeneous scenes of sociability, such as the coffee house. The chapter considers the closet's peculiar aptness as a setting and symbol of social transition. It explains how the closet is widely recognized as a place where reciprocal feelings could flourish against a backdrop of rigid status distinctions and how it revealed the exhilarating and also uncomfortable new processes and prospects of inclusion.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

This introductory chapter briefly considers why the British American colonists had broken away from an empire that they had long revered. Americans like to think of themselves as fundamentally different from Europeans—both more democratic and more libertarian. But during the eighteenth century, Britain and its North American colonies were actually becoming more alike. However, the United States followed a different path from the dramatic transformation that painted the globe French blue and British red. That path reflected the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire.

British Society in India under the East India Company

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British Society ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
White People ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Anglo Indian ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

The British in India have always fascinated their fellow countrymen. From the eighteenth century until the demise of the Raj innumerable publications described the way of life of white people in India for the delectation of a public at home. Post-colonial Britain evidently still retains a voracious appetite for anecdotes of the Raj and accounts of themores of what is often represented as a bizarre Anglo-Indian world. Beneath the welter of apparent triviality, historians are, however, finding issues of real significance.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Livesay
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The Core ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

The conclusion reiterates the core argument of the book. It contends that mixed-race Jamaicans who left for Britain were critical to the debates around race and slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world. In particular, their experiences show the ways family relationships influenced racial standing in the long eighteenth century. When definitions of family were loose, elites of color could successfully integrate in the British Empire. When definitions of family constricted, it became much more difficult to avoid being lumped into discriminated categories around Africanness. Overall, the conclusion reasserts that racial ideologies and prejudices were more complex than previously thought, both in the nakedly abusive society of Jamaica as well as the seemingly more tolerant location of Britain.

A Long Eighteenth Century? What Eighteenth Century?

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Dejean
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
English Studies ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Way ◽  
New Look

When i agreed to contribute to this issue, i wanted to focus a debate about periodization for once solely on foreign languages and not, as is usually the case, on a single foreign language in comparison with English. To do this, I intended to take a new look at one of the most successful examples of the new periodization: the long eighteenth century. The concept first came to the fore and gained wide critical currency in English studies and in history. In these fields, a number of differently long eighteenth centuries have been proposed and practiced—an eighteenth century that begins as early as 1660, for example, and one that ends as late as 1832. Among the many consequences of the various choices of chronological limits for the long eighteenth century, probably the most significant is the way in which the Enlightenment's role is heightened or diminished in each version of the period. Since in intellectual and literary terms the Enlightenment's impact was felt all over western Europe in the 1700s, I decided that this should be one issue of periodization whose presence would be by now visible in most if not all modern foreign languages. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong. And what I learned on the way to that realization caused me to shift course radically.

The fossilist and his engraver: Samuel Springsguth’s illustrations of James Parkinson’s Organic Remains

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherry Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Parkinson’S Disease ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Parkinson's Disease ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Paralysis Agitans ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Organic Remains ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACT James Parkinson was an apothecary surgeon, political activist, and paleontologist during the latter part of the long eighteenth century. He is most famous for his 1817 work, An Essay on the Shaking Palsy, in which he was the first to describe and define the symptoms of paralysis agitans, a condition now known as Parkinson’s disease. During his lifetime, however, he was internationally renowned for his three-volume study of fossils, Organic Remains of a Former World. Sales of this work continued for 25 years after Parkinson’s death, even though much of its scientific content had become redundant. This was due to the beauty and fidelity of its illustrations, although Samuel Springsguth, the illustrator and engraver, is never explicitly acknowledged in the work. By examining several extant fossils known to have been in Parkinson’s collection and illustrated in his works, it has been possible to gain some insight into the way that Parkinson and Springsguth worked together when illustrating these volumes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document