The Early Search for a National Past in Europe (1789–1820)

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
The Alps ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Of Greece

In the nineteenth century, the allure of the past of the Great Civilizations was soon to be contested by an alternative—that of the national past. This interest had already grown in the pre-Romantic era connected to an emerging ethnic or cultural nationalism (Chapter 2). However, its charm would not be as enticing to the lay European man and woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who were much more under the influence of neoclassicism (Chapter 3). The Western European nations had no monuments comparable to the remains of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Before the Roman expansion into most of Western Europe in antiquity, there had been few significant buildings, apart from unspectacular prehistoric tombs and megalithic monuments whose significance was unrecognized by the modern scholar. Roman remains beyond Italy were not as impressive as those found to the south of the Alps. Because of this it seemed much more interesting to study the rich descriptions the ancient authors had left about the local peoples and institutions the Romans had created during their conquest. Throughout the eighteenth century the historical study of medieval buildings and antiquities had also increasingly been gaining appeal. In Britain their study instigated the early creation of associations such as the Society of Antiquaries of 1707, but even this early interest did not lead to medieval antiquities receiving attention in institutions such as the British Museum, where they would only receive a proper departmental status well into the nineteenth century (Smiles 2004: 176). In comparative terms, the national past and its relics were perceived by many to be of secondary rate when judged against the history and arts of the classical civilizations. During the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath, for example, the national past would not be as appreciated by as many people and antiquarians as that of the Great Civilizations (Jourdan 1996). This situation, however, started to change in the early nineteenth century. There were three key developments in this period, all inherited from Enlightenment beliefs, which were the foundation for archaeology as a source of national pride. The effects of these would be seen especially from the central decades of the century.

Liberty, Property and Popular Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
The University

Few scholars can claim to have shaped the historical study of the long eighteenth century more profoundly than Professor H. T. Dickinson, who, until his retirement in 2006, held the Sir Richard Lodge Chair of British History at the University of Edinburgh. This volume, based on contributions from Dickinson's students, friends and colleagues from around the world, offers a range of perspectives on eighteenth-century Britain and provides a tribute to a remarkable scholarly career. Dickinson's work and career provides the ideal lens through which to take a detailed snapshot of current research in a number of areas. The book includes contributions from scholars working in intellectual history, political and parliamentary history, ecclesiastical and naval history; discussions of major themes such as Jacobitism, the French Revolution, popular radicalism and conservatism; and essays on prominent individuals in English and Scottish history, including Edmund Burke, Thomas Muir, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. The result is a uniquely rich and detailed collection with an impressive breadth of coverage.

Living Same-Name Siblings and British Historical Demography

2011 ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Galley ◽  
Eilidh Garrett ◽  
Ros Davies ◽  
Alice Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Historical Demography ◽  
Vital Registration ◽  
Regional Variations ◽  
Quantitative Evidence ◽  
Registration Data ◽  
Vital Registration Data ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Isle Of Skye

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative evidence of this phenomenon, but an analysis of the rich census and vital registration data for the Isle of Skye reveals that this practice was widespread, with over a third of eligible families recording same-name siblings. Our results suggest that further research should focus on regional variations in sibling name-sharing and the extent to which this northern pattern occurred in other parts of Britain.

German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-119
Author(s):  
Doron Avraham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Devotion ◽  
Alternative Meaning ◽  
Christian Conservatives ◽  
Prevailing View

In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists—among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people's confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism.

Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France

1989 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
North Americans ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Iconography ◽  
The Many ◽  
The French Revolution

Maurice Agulhon, in his classic French historical study, revealed how the changing political fortunes of Republicanism were reflected in the many metamorphoses that statues of the Republic had undergone in the century after the French Revolution. This study and a number of important works by North Americans, like those of James Leith and Lynn Hunt, are also important in making us understand French political iconography.

scholarly journals Nineveh sails for the New World: Assyria envisioned by nineteenth-century America

Iraq ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Steven W. Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Sir Isaac Newton ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Isaac Newton ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Revival Movement

In order to understand the unique reception of ancient Assyria in nineteenth-century America, it is necessary to describe the British public's own reception of the earliest British Museum exhibits, together with the marketing of publications of Layard and others. And, in order to grasp something of both Britain's and America's keen fascination with the earliest images of Assyria, I must introduce you briefly to the changing perceptions and tastes in admissible historical representation that, I believe, drove this fascination.The British public's breathless enthusiasm for the monuments from Bible lands had radical origins in English soil. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarians surveyed, sketched and wove theories about the prehistoric relics that dot the English landscape, occasionally linking them with a mythical Christian past. William Stukeley, for example, student and first biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, made something of a career out of surveying Avebury and Stonehenge, in an early eighteenth-century quest for evidence that could link the Britons of Celtic fame with the peoples and the received timeline of the Bible. By the early nineteenth century, the Gothic Revival movement had begun in earnest. Its proponents saw this project as a moral mainstay in the revitalization of English society and culture. English prehistoric and medieval monuments would be measured, drawn, catalogued, published, and ultimately by so doing, laid at the feet of the British public. The Napoleonic wars accelerated this movement, for Continental sightseeing was impossible, so the classic Grand Tour evaporated down to an insular walking tour. This of course fuelled the sense of British national destiny:Works on topography… tend to make us better acquainte d with every thing which exists in our native land, and are therefore conducive to the progress of real knowledge, to the diffusion of rational patriotism, and to virtuous sentiments and propensities …

Tatiana's Garden: Noble Sensibilities and Estate Park Design in the Romantic Era

Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-349
Author(s):  
Priscilla R. Roosevelt
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Garden Design ◽  
Universal Form ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Estate Owner ◽  
Park Design

In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.

scholarly journals Russia’s Scriptural “Reformation” in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 73-102
Author(s):  
Barbara Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Biblical Translation ◽  
The Church

The Russian Orthodox Church never experienced a movement that placed the authority of Scriptures over that of the Church, which was characteristic of the Protestant reformations in Western Europe. Nevertheless, an increased emphasis on the Scriptures and a desire to translate the Bible into the vernacular arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Russia. Aside from the work of the Russian Bible Society, scholars have not shed much light on this trend as it occurred within clerical education. This article argues that the episode of the Bible Society was a critical chapter within a larger story of important theological and pedagogical shifts within Russian Orthodox education and values. The roots of the Russian biblical translation effort extend back to the eighteenth century, when ethnic Russian clerical scholars gained the linguistic abilities in Greek and Hebrew to translate based on the ancient texts, and when more attention began to be paid to both vernacular Russian instruction and Scriptural study in the ecclesiastical schools. These trends flourished more deeply in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, although Russia did not undergo a reformation in the Western sense of the word, it underwent similar internal reforms that brought the Scriptures into a more central role in the church without undermining Church authority and tradition.

Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and Its European Reception

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Ries
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
The State ◽  
Johann Gottlieb Fichte ◽  
State Terror ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Mikhail Bakunin ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter challenges the widespread assumption that terrorist ideology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by such figures as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, the chapter argues, the foundations of terrorism were laid at the end of the eighteenth century by the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his disciples, who in turn exerted a strong influence on later radical thinkers. In showing how the intellectual reverberations of the French Revolution gave rise to anarchist ideology as well as acts of terrorism in Germany, the chapter traces a link between the state terror of the French Revolution and the emergence of insurgent terrorism.

The Way of Napoleon: The Uniformisation of Esprit de Corps in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Ensemblance ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 112-139
Author(s):  
Luis de Miranda
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
French Society ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
National System ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Military

After 1800, esprit de corps was often nationally manufactured, and Napoleon was its first engineer. French society became a reflection of the military. This chapter shows how the Bonapartists succeeded in building a national system of rewards and interdependent privileged corps in which ‘esprit de corps’ was encouraged according to a military model of general agonism. The transformation of the organisation of labour, of the army, and of education after the French Revolution is narrated. This chapter is essential to understand not only today’s France, but also most nation-states, functioning more or less under a similar model. The author also analyses the decline of labour communities and their form of belonging since the eighteenth century. The Revolutiondiscredited the esprit de corporation, and capitalist merchants were often thankful for the republican defence of more competitive and less-regulated entrepreneurship.

The Theological Revival in The French Reformed Church, 1830–1852

1968 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-49
Author(s):  
J. Lynn Osen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
July Monarchy ◽  
Second Republic ◽  
Financial Position ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The French Revolution

The French Reformed Church merged from the period of the French Revolution and Napoleon stengthened by government recognition and support but weakened by the ideological offensive of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Although it enjoyed a secure official and financial position, it had yet to reconcile itself intellectually with the contrasting currents of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism. This process of assimilation and reconciliation took place after 1815 and culminated, during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic, in a theological awakening and renewal.

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