Justifying Revolution

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary L. Steward
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Resistance Theory ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Previous Scholarship

This work explores the patriot clergymen’s arguments for the legitimacy of political resistance to the British in the early stages of the American Revolution. It reconstructs the historical and theological background of the colonial clergymen, showing the continued impact that Stuart absolutism and Reformed resistance theory had on their political theology. As a corrective to previous scholarship, this work argues that the American clergymen’s rationale for political resistance in the eighteenth century developed in general continuity with a broad strand of Protestant thought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The arguments of Jonathan Mayhew and John Witherspoon are highlighted, along with a wide range of Whig clergyman on both sides of the Atlantic. The agreement that many British clergymen had with their colonial counterparts challenges the view that the American Revolution emerged from distinctly American modes of thought.

“The Great Part of It Was Stolen”

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-31
Author(s):  
Gary L. Steward
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Made In

This chapter analyzes the justification of political resistance provided to the founding generation by Boston Congregationalist minister Jonathan Mayhew. Mayhew’s arguments made in 1750 influenced John Adams and a number who were active participants in the American Revolution. The source and context of Mayhew’s arguments is considered, first in light of eighteenth-century discussions in Britain, and then in light of the Protestant theological tradition. This chapter argues that Mayhew’s thought on the question of political resistance did not deviate from his inherited Protestant tradition. It is best understood as a renewed assertion of views found commonly within Reformed Protestantism, going back to at least the sixteenth century. Although Mayhew embraced unorthodox theology in other areas, he shared his views on political resistance with a number of more conservative clergymen who were united in their long-standing opposition to the claims of the Stuart absolutists.

The Private Sublime in Public Discourse: War Poetry of the American Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 140-159
Author(s):  
John Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Charlotte Smith ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Direct Experience ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
A Minor

This essay examines how poetry of the American Revolution contributed to the broader tradition of Anglophone war poetry through the “private sublime,” which would start as a minor and relatively unknown development, but eventually become one of the primary modes of depicting war, both in the later eighteenth century and the present day. It focuses specifically on two poets who formulated the private sublime: Freneau in the 1781 British Prison-Ship and Ann Eliza Bleecker in the poems that she wrote after her daughter’s death in 1777. While Freneau’s poetry emphasizes terror and beauty, Bleecker fashions a private sublime by aligning her own suffering with that of war combatants. This essay then turns briefly to Charlotte Smith, who depicts distant war via her own intense and highly aestheticized emotions. As Smith demonstrates, then, the private sublime emerged in the poetry of authors with direct experience of war in America, but was later adapted by a wide range of authors who experienced war at a far greater distance.

Injecting Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Dacome
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Blood Vessels ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Anatomical Models ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cabinet Of Curiosities

Chapter 7 furthers the analysis of the role of anatomical models as cultural currencies capable of transferring value. It does so by expanding the investigation of the early stages of anatomical modelling to include a new setting. In particular, it follows the journey of the Palermitan anatomist and modeller Giuseppe Salerno and his anatomical ‘skeleton’—a specimen that represented the body’s complex web of blood vessels and was presented as the result of anatomical injections. Although Salerno was headed towards Bologna, a major centre of anatomical modelling, he ended his journey in Naples after the nobleman Raimondo di Sangro purchased the skeleton for his own cabinet of curiosities. This chapter considers the creation and viewing of an anatomical display in di Sangro’s Neapolitan Palace from a comparative perspective that highlights how geography and locality played an important part in shaping the culture of mid-eighteenth-century anatomical modelling.

scholarly journals Asia's Declining Death Penalty

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
David T. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Human History ◽  
Late Qing Dynasty ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Ancient Israel ◽  
Capital Crimes

For most cultures and most of human history, the death penalty was taken for granted and directed at a wide range of offenders. In ancient Israel, death was prescribed for everything from murder and magic to blasphemy, bestiality, and cursing one's parents. In eighteenth-century Britain, more than 200 crimes were punishable by death, including theft, cutting down a tree, and robbing a rabbit warren. China of the late Qing dynasty had some 850 capital crimes, many reflecting the privileged position of male over female and senior over junior.

Resisting Independence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brad A. Jones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
Close Study ◽  
New Nation

This book maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities — New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland — the book argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. The book reimagines loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. The book reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task — to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. The book describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.

Notes towards a Franco-American Mediterranean “From Below”

Rough Waters ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 63-76
Author(s):  
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Cultural Exchange

This chapter explores the day-to-day lives and interactions of seamen and maritime crew within Franco-American shipping at the end of the eighteenth century. It analyses what it considers ‘culturally substantive’ relationships between crew-members, where friendship, language-exchange, and working knowledge of each other's’ maritime and naval systems developed between French and American seamen during the American Revolution and the Franco-American Alliance of 1778. These results come from the study of diplomatic and military records. It clarifies that maritime labour facilitated cultural exchange, and that to view this period as either Atlantic or Mediterranean is too narrow a specification for such an intermingled period of history.

Conclusion

2010 ◽  
pp. 227-232
Author(s):  
Sharon Flatto
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Independent Judiciary ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Jewish Learning

This chapter depicts the efflorescence of Prague's rabbinic culture and the mystical character that animated it during the latter half of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates how traditional society flourished during Ezekiel Landau's tenure despite the dramatic political changes imposed on Prague Jews, beginning with Joseph II's Toleranzpatent of 1781. It also recounts how the Jewish community maintained its independent judiciary system, housed several academies of higher Jewish learning, and was home to over fifty prominent rabbinic figures. The chapter talks about Prague's rabbinic scholars who produced a wide range of writings, focusing primarily on talmudic, halakhic, and kabbalistic matters. It reviews Landau's several talmudic commentaries, numerous sermons, glosses on kabbalistic treatises, and a two-volume collection of responsa that immediately gained authoritative status.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Jenny Strauss Clay ◽  
John F. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Vase Painting ◽  
Roman Literature ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Previous Scholarship

This chapter positions the book within the larger discussion of Hermes and Mercury in previous scholarship, and surveys the contributions in the volume against the background of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. The volume brings together a wide range of disciplines, including Greek and Roman literature, epigraphy, cult and religion, vase painting and sculpture. The book tracks Hermes from the naughty babe in his cradle to awesome kosmokrator, from shadowy Cyllene to Hellenized Egypt and Augustan Rome, and traces continuities that cross generic and temporal boundaries, but also transformations of the wayward god, who easily adjusts to new settings and morphs into Mercury and Thoth.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Carlton F.W. Larson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
The Law

The Introduction opens with a vignette of James Wilson, prominent attorney and signer of the Declaration of Independence, fighting for his life against members of the Philadelphia militia in the “Fort Wilson” incident of 1779. It then turns to the primary themes of the book: treason and juries. Treason was a central issue of the American Revolution, shaping the early debates over the legality of British actions, the treatment of British adherents, and eventually the suppression of internal rebellions. Juries played a critical role in this process, and this book provides the most detailed analysis of eighteenth-century American jurors yet written. The book focuses on Pennsylvania, as this was the most critical jurisdiction for the law of treason.

Political, Social, and Cultural Legacies

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-252
Author(s):  
J.S. Grewal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Considerable Importance ◽  
Main Stream ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Legacies

A long struggle for political power that culminated in the establishment of Khalsa Raj in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was the most striking legacy of Guru Gobind Singh. Significantly, a wide range of literature was produced during this period by Sikh writers in new as well as old literary forms. The Dasam Granth emerged as a text of considerable importance. The doctrines of Guru Granth and Guru Panth crystallized, and influenced the religious, social and political life of the Khalsa. The Singhs formed the main stream of the Sikh Panth at the end of the century. Singh identity was sharpened to make the Khalsa visibly the ‘third community’ (tisar panth).

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