Confining the Poor to Ignorance? Eighteenth-Century American Experiments with Charity Education

2007 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Braslaw Sundue
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Great Success ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Revivals ◽  
George Whitefield ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
Important Shift

In 1738, the English evangelist George Whitefield traveled to the new colony of Georgia intending to establish “a house for fatherless children.” Inspired by both August Hermann Francke, the German Pietist who had great success educating and maintaining poor orphans in Halle, and by charity schools established in Great Britain, Whitefield's orphan house and charity school, named Bethesda, opened its doors early in 1740. For years, Whitefield devoted himself tirelessly to ensuring the success of the Bethesda school, preaching throughout Britain and North America on its behalf. Whitefield's preaching tour on behalf of his beloved Bethesda is well known for its role in catalyzing the religious revivals known collectively as the Great Awakening. The tour also marked an important shift in the history of education in America. News of the establishment of the orphanage at Bethesda coincided with new efforts to school the poor throughout the colonies. Drawing on both the British and German models of charity schooling that were highly influential for Whitefield, eighteenth-century Americans began or increased commitments to charity schooling for poor children. But the European models were not adopted wholesale. Instead, local administrators of the schooling experiments deviated from these models in a striking way. In America, elites offered some children the opportunity for extensive charity instruction, but not necessarily children at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This article will argue that the execution of these charity schooling programs was contingent upon local social conditions, specifically what appears to have been local elites' desire to maintain a certain social order and ensure a continued supply of cheap labor.

Where are the Women in the History of Aging?

1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Chary Feinson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Aging Process ◽  
White Men ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poor White ◽  
Female Slaves

Many Historians of the social aging process have focused primarily on the experiences of aging white men. A prime example is provided in the seminal work of David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978). In tracing the reversal in societal attitudes toward the aged, from gerontocratic to gerontophobic, Fischer argues that the authority of the elders in the eighteenth century was very great (1978: 220). Clearly, he was not referring to women for, as Fischer himself acknowledges, “no one would claim that colonial females exerted much political power.” And obviously, he was not including black male and female slaves or poor white men. Nor does his general theme of exultation apply to aging colonial widows who were treated with a contempt which deepened all the more by their womanhood. Some were actually driven away by their neighbors, who feared an increase in the poor rates. The legal records of the colonies contain many instances of poor widows who were … forced to wander from one town to another (Fischer, 1978: 63).

On a Horse

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 809-819
Author(s):  
Carolyn Steedman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Cereal Crop ◽  
High Court ◽  
Class Society ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Labor Power ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face

Labor was an analytic category in the long english eighteenth century, but was work equally so? Is there any point in discovering a difference between the two? Lawyers and high-court judges, philosophers, physiologists, and prelates worked hard at the business of defining labor, over many years. Their formulations provided the legal and conceptual underpinnings of a new form of society born of the era of revolutions (political, philosophical, industrial; American, Atlantic, French). Here was a template for social knowledge in an emerging class society. Society was divided into propertied and propertyless; the propertyless were compelled by material need to put their labor at the disposal of the propertied. The labor of the poor was a country's natural resource, like its soil and seas and mines; it fell to the propertied to deploy this resource for the national benefit. British philosophers and physicists analyzed labor as a form of energy, often drawing an analogy between it and another great resource of the nation, its horses. Working men and women and horses were bound together in the deep structure of political thinking about labor and the social order. For eighteenth-century theorists, legislators, and farmers, the horse was the immanent measure of labor power and labor time. A horse was a measure of labor itself. There were perhaps a million horses in England and Wales in the late eighteenth century, about half of them workhorses in farming. The contribution of their dung to cereal-crop yield is attested to by economic and agricultural historians (Wrigley, Continuity 35–46; Gerhold; Turner). Horses were one reason the nation was, by and large, able to feed an increased population out of its own natural resources and sources of labor power, unlike other European countries in the period 1660–1820 (Wrigley, Poverty 44–67). The importance of the horse to agricultural productivity seems assured, though some contemporary economists, in the face of harvest failures in the 1790s and ongoing crises of dearth, complained of too many horses and of the vast amount of grain and labor spent in foddering and caring for them (Crafts; Brooke 1–34).

scholarly journals The Plague of the Blue Locusts

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Storch ◽  
F. Engels
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Collective Mind ◽  
The Social ◽  
Significant Extension ◽  
Peripheral Areas ◽  
Urban Disorder

The implantation of a modern police in the industrial districts of Northern England resulted from a new consensus among the propertied classes that it was necessary to create a professional, bureaucratically organized lever of urban discipline and permanently introduce it into the heart of working-class communities. The coming of the new police represented a significant extension into hitherto geographically peripheral areas of both the moral and political authority of the state. This was to be accomplished by the creation of a powerful and quite modern device – a bureaucracy of official morality. By 1840 it came to be “an axiom in police that you guard St. James by watching St. Giles”. This was a novel attitude. Eighteenth-century governments and the upper classes in general were surely apprehensive of the movements of the lower orders, but did not consider it either useful or necessary to watch St Giles all the time. One could learn what one needed to know about what was on the collective mind of St Giles when it rioted; one might even use or manipulate its riots in useful ways as the reform movement of 1830–32 did with great success. Previous to the nineteenth century urban disorder was not necessarily perceived as subversive of the social order. “Provided that the ruler did his duty, the populace was prepared to defend him with enthusiasm. But if he did not, it rioted until he did. This mechanism was perfectly understood by both sides, and caused no political problems beyond a little occasional destruction of property […]. Since the riots were not directed against the social system, public order could remain surprisingly lax by modern standards.”

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Whyman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literate Society

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and at its centre was Hutton. England’s second city is described in the mid-eighteenth century, and Hutton is used as a lens to explore the book’s themes: the importance of a literate society shared by non-elites; the social category of ‘rough diamonds’; how individuals responded to economic change; political participation in industrial towns; shifts in the modes of authorship; and an analysis of social change. The strategy of using microhistory, biography, and the history of the book is discussed, and exciting new sources are introduced. The discovery that self-education allowed unschooled people to participate in literate society renders visible people who were assumed to be illiterate. This suggests that eighteenth-century literacy was greater than statistics based on formal schooling indicate.

Characters Before Copyright

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Birkhold
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Moral Rights ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Consumer Habits ◽  
Archival Work

How did authors control the literary fates of fictional characters before the existence of copyright? Could a second author do anything with another author’s character? Situated between the decline of the privilege system and the rise of copyright, literary borrowing in eighteenth-century Germany has long been considered unregulated. This book tells a different story. Characters before Copyright documents the surprisingly widespread eighteenth-century practice of writing fan fiction—literary works written by readers who appropriate preexisting characters invented by other authors—and reconstructs the contemporaneous debate about the literary phenomenon. Like fan fiction today, these texts took the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. Analyzing the evolving reading, writing, and consumer habits of late-eighteenth-century Germany, Characters before Copyright identifies the social, economic, and aesthetic changes that fostered the rapid rise of fan fiction after 1750. Based on archival work and an ethnographic approach borrowed from legal anthropology, this book then uncovers the unwritten customary norms that governed the production of these works. Characters before Copyright thus reinterprets the eighteenth-century “literary commons,” arguing that what may appear to have been the free circulation of characters was actually circumscribed by an exacting set of rules and conditions. These norms translated into a unique type of literature that gave rise to remarkable forms of collaborative authorship and originality. Characters before Copyright provides a new perspective on the eighteenth-century book trade and the rise of intellectual property, reevaluating the concept of literary property, the history of moral rights, and the tradition of free culture.

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 Eighteenth-Century Social Order in Surat: A Reply and an Excursus on the Riots of 1788 and 1795

1991 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The Social

The Banias of eighteenth-century Surat, whom Michelguglielmo Torri earlier treated with indifference if not innocence, have invited his wrath since they were brought into focus by the publication of my essay on the Banias and the Surat riot of 1795. In his ‘rejoinder’ to my article, he seeks to wish away their existence altogether (to him there was no specific Bania community, the term merely signifying traders of all communities engaged in the profession of brokerage), and seeks to provide what he regards as an ‘alternative’ explanation of the Muslim–Bania riot of 1795. the Muslim-Bania riot of 1795. It shall be my purpose in this reply to show that his alternative explanation is neither an alternative nor even an explanation, and is based on a basic confusion in his mind about the Banias as well as the principal sources of tension in the social structure of Surat. I shall treat two main subjects in this reply to his misdirected criticisms. First, I shall present some original indigenous material as well as European documentation to further clarify the identity, position and role of the Banias, whom Irfan Habib in a recent article has identified as the most important trading group in the trading world of seventeenth and eighteenth-century India. It is also my purpose to show how the social order of Surat operated under stress by presenting some archival material, the existence of which Torri seems to be completely unaware of, on the Parsi-Muslim riot of 1788.

Making a Difference: Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikael Alm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
Making A Difference ◽  
Primary Means

This article focuses on the seventy-three essays that were submitted to the Swedish Royal Patriotic Society in 1773, in response to a competition for the best essay on the advantages and disadvantages of a national dress. When presenting their thoughts on the design and realization of a national dress, the authors came to reflect on deeper issues of social order and sartorial culture, describing their views on society and its constituent parts, as well as the trappings of visual appearances. Clothes were an intricate part of the visual culture surrounding early modern social hierarchies; differentiation between groups and individuals were readily visualized through dress. Focusing on the three primary means for visual differentiation identified in the essays — colour, fabrics and forms — this article explores the governing notions of hierarchies in regards to sartorial appearance, and the sartorial practices for making the social order legible in late eighteenth-century Sweden.

scholarly journals QUESTÕES FUNDAMENTAIS DE TEOLOGIA DA LIBERTAÇÃO

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 245
Author(s):  
Francisco De Aquino Júnior
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Resumo: Ao considerar o que confere nova atualidade à Teologia da Libertação (TdL), o autor destaca o conflito teórico silencioso entre os teólogos da libertação, que perpassa a história desse movimento teológico; o projeto do papa Francisco de “uma Igreja pobre para os pobres” que reatualiza as intuições que estão na base da TdL; a participação dos crentes de diferentes tradições nas lutas por justiça no mundo e que torna urgente o desenvolvimento de teologias da libertação. A partir deste contexto ele se propõe a tratar de algumas questões que dizem respeito aos fundamentos epistemológicos da TdL: espiritualidade e eclesialidade, interesse e orientação práxicos e lugar social. É ressaltado também a complexidade práxico-teórica do que se convencionou chamar de TdL. De acordo com o autor, dessas questões acima mencionadas, o lugar social da teologia é, deveras, o aspecto mais conflitivo, embora seja o mais bíblico, mais profético e mais eficaz da TdL. Enfim, são indicados alguns desafios atuais para a TdL, desafios concernentes a seu estatuto teórico-teológico.Abstract: Considering what confers new relevance to the Liberation Theology (TdL), this text emphasizes: the silent theoretical conflict between liberation theologians, which runs through the history of this theological movement; Pope Francis’s project of “a poor Church for the poor”, which renews the intuitions that are on the basis of TdL; and participation of believers from different traditions in struggles for justice in the world, which makes it urgent to develop liberation theologies. Based on this context, the author proposes to address some topics that concern the epistemological foundations of TdL: spirituality and ecclesiality, praxis interest and orientation, and social place. The praxis-theoretical complexity of the so called TdL is also highlighted. According to the author, from these issues mentioned above, the social place of theology is, indeed, the most conflictive aspect, although it is the most biblical, prophetic and effective of TdL. Finally, some current challenges to TdL, related to its theoretical and theological status, are presented.

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