When the Cross Met the Lotus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Filial Piety ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Chinese Rites Controversy

Chapter 1 considers the Catholic presence in Tonkin and its interaction with Vietnamese religions. It begins by describing the sociopolitical situation of Tonkin as a land of two kings. The chapter then narrates the development of Vietnamese Christianity from its beginning in the Jesuit, Augustinian, and Dominican missions to the eighteenth century. The chapter charts the varied reception of Christianity by the ruling class of Tonkin, and Christianity’s relationship with Confucianism. It ends with a narrative of the protracted Chinese Rites Controversy, describing the attempts to reconcile Catholic dogma with Vietnamese cultural and religious practices, especially regarding those pertaining to filial piety, and a description of the Controversy’s long-lasting effects in Vietnam.

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

Who Was This Man?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
Military Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.

The Artist-Philosopher

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-77
Author(s):  
Kate Fullagar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
British Society ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Close Friendships ◽  
The World

Chapter 2, much like Chapter 1, traces the first several decades of an eighteenth-century life, dwelling on what childhood can reveal about a whole society; when lives might be said to begin in a given culture; and how the protagonist moved within his world to reach mid-life. Its focus is the artist--philosopher Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’s life embodies a deep conflict in British society of the time—the conflict over empire. We see Reynolds’s character develop gradually as both conservatively sceptical about Britain’s recent expansionist thrust into the world and keenly eager to make the most of all that imperial commerce was now bringing into his native country. Reynolds’s ambivalence is also reflected in his art theories, local politics, and even domestic life. While narrating his rise to artistic pre-eminence (and a philosophical devotion to neoclassical aesthetics), the chapter also shows how Reynolds built increasingly close friendships to key male literary figures of the time—especially Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. Through his connection to the Tory Johnson and the Whiggish Burke, we get a glimpse into Reynolds’s otherwise elusive, hard-to-read political views—especially during Britain’s greatest imperial push to date, the Seven Years War.

The Old World Meets the New

2018 ◽  
pp. 22-46
Author(s):  
Craig Bruce Smith
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French And Indian War ◽  
Early American ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Indian War ◽  
American Society ◽  
Southern Colonies ◽  
American Concept ◽  
Original Concept

This chapter stretches from the early eighteenth century to the end of the French and Indian War. With a focus on how European ideals permeated early American society, Chapter 1 traces Washington and Franklin’s individual definitions of honor and virtue and how they changed over time. It discusses how their mindsets were largely the result of self-education and personal experience, allowing for a comparison between the northern and southern colonies. It also illustrates the extremely early emergence of an American concept of honor, highlighted by Franklin’s 1723 original concept of merit-based “ascending honor”. The chapter shows Americans as first moving closer to Europe ideologically, before a transformation in ethical ideals saw a greater divergence from the mother country. It also frames the Revolution as being sparked by these preexisting ethical changes.

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