Family Mobility

Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman

In many parts of North America in the eighteenth century, as many as 40% of the people in a given area would move over the course of a decade, heading for frontier areas or cities where their prospects were better. Highly mobile farm families though common but are hard to trace because few names were unique. It is hard to know if a name in a new town’s records is the same person as the name in a former town. Lincoln family genealogy is useful in illustrating how moving families fared. Lincoln’s first American ancestors arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1637 and by the end of the century began to migrate, first to the Middle Colonies and later to Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. They were motivated by the need for additional land for their offspring. For the most part they succeeded, although President Lincoln’s grandfather Abraham did not. He was killed by Indians, and his son Thomas, Lincoln’s father, never flourished despite multiple moves. President Lincoln gave up on farming and chose to make his living as a postmaster, lawyer, and politician.

Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-520
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

AbstractFrom the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.


2003 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary H. Dunham ◽  
Debra L. Gold ◽  
Jeffrey L. Hantman

Recent excavation and analysis of the remaining section of the endangered Rapidan Mound site (44OR1) in the central Virginia Piedmont provide new insights into a unique complex of burial mounds in the Virginia interior. Known since Thomas Jefferson's eighteenth-century description, the mounds are both earth and stone and accretional earthen mounds. Thirteen are recorded, all dating to the late prehistoric and early contact era (ca. A.D. 900-1700). Typically containing few artifacts, the accretional mounds are unusual in North America in the numbers of individuals interred, more than one thousand in at least two cases, and in the nature of the secondary, collective burial ritual that built up the mounds over centuries. Following a review of the characteristics of the mound complex, we focus on the Rapidan Mound and the analysis of the collective, secondary burial features in the mound. Precise provenience information and bioarchaeological analyses of two large and intact collective burial features provide new information on health and diet, and several lines of evidence for demographic reconstruction. Finally, we discuss the mortuary ritual conducted at the mounds within the cultural and historical context of the region.


1972 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 309
Author(s):  
Douglas Edward Leach ◽  
Carl Ortwin Sauer

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Valle

The article deals with correspondence in natural history in the eighteenth century between England and North America. The corpus discussed consists of correspondence between John Bartram and Peter Collinson, and between Alexander Garden and John Ellis. The approach used in the study is qualitative and rhetorical; the main point considered is how the letters construct scientific centre and periphery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. A central concept is the “colonial exchange”, whereby “raw materials” from the colonies — in this case plant and animal specimens, along with proposed identifications and names — are exchanged for “finished products”, in this case codified scientific knowledge contained in publications.


2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 274-276
Author(s):  
LUCA LÉVI SALA

In October 2014 scholars from Europe and North America took part in a conference dedicated to two important figures active during the eighteenth century as composers and virtuosos of the violin, to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of their death: Pietro Antonio Locatelli (Bergamo, 1695–Amsterdam, 1764) and Jean-Marie Leclair l’aîné (Lyon 1697–Paris, 1764). The event was organized by the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca) in partnership with the Fondazione MIA of Bergamo and the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française in Venice, and also with the collaboration of the Edizione Nazionale Italiana delle Opere Complete di Locatelli. Accommodated in the magnificent Sala Locatelli of the Fondazione MIA, the conference was subdivided into six sessions. First came ‘Pietro Antonio Locatelli and His Legacy’, with speakers Paola Palermo (Bergamo), Christoph Riedo (Universität Freiburg, Switzerland) and Ewa Chamczyk (Uniwersytet Warszawski), followed by ‘French Routes’, featuring Étienne Jardin (Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de Musique Romantique Française), Candida Felici (Conservatorio di Musica di Cosenza) and Paola Besutti (Università di Teramo). The third session, ‘Pierre-Marie-François de Sales Baillot’, was held to mark the bicentenary of Baillot's foundation of his séances de musique de chambre (chamber music concerts).


2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.


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