History Culture in Pre-Revolutionary British America

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Michael D. Hattem
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Structural Role ◽  
British North America ◽  
The Past ◽  
British America ◽  
Colonial Culture

This chapter gives an overview of the role of the past in British North America during the pre-revolutionary decades. It begins by offering a survey of historical thinking and access to historical knowledge in British America in the middle of the eighteenth century. Next, it examines the structural role played by the past in colonial culture and political, religious, and legal thought, showing the cultural and political importance of ideas such as “first principles,” custom, and precedent. It also explores the degree to which colonists relied on the British past for their imperial identities and on historical works and interpretations imported from Britain to shape those identities.

The role of horizontal thermal advection in regulating wintertime mean and extreme temperatures over interior North America during the past and future

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (9-10) ◽  
pp. 6125-6144
Author(s):  
Fuyao Wang ◽  
Stephen J. Vavrus ◽  
Jennifer A. Francis ◽  
Jonathan E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Extreme Temperatures ◽  
Thermal Advection ◽  
The Past

The Anatomy of a Crowd

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-92
Author(s):  
Thomas Humphrey
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
British North America ◽  
The Past

Over the past thirty years, historians of colonial British North America have turned their attention to crowd violence. Most crowds inflicted horrifying, ritualized violence on people and property. Crowds assaulted men and women who committed adultery or bigamy, or who beat their spouses too severely. And crowds attacked anyone who jeopardized people’s health with disease or who used their political and economic power to get rich at the expense of their neighbors. What becomes clear is that colonists adapted the rituals of rough music to various social, political, and economic grievances. Readers usually meet these people as they chased their targets, giving the impression that people formed crowds spontaneously. But some crowds acted more deliberately. In some cases, colonists resorted to violence only after determining what behavior upset them and then how best to address it. The question becomes, then, simply put, how did colonists learn the mobbing time had come?

Mortality on Convict Voyages to Australia, 1788–1868

1989 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-313
Author(s):  
John McDonald ◽  
Ralph Shlomowitz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Mortality Rates ◽  
Indentured Labor ◽  
East Indies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

During the past two decades, there has been an outpouring of research on the seaboard mortality associated with intercontinental migration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The focus of historical interest in this linkage between mortality and migration has been the Atlantic slave trade. We now have mortality rates on voyages from various regions in Africa to various destinations in the Americas, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century (see Curtin, 1968, 1969: 275-286; Klein and Engerman, 1976, 1979; Klein, 1978; Postma, 1979; Miller, 1981; Cohn and Jensen, 1982a, 1982b; Cohn, 1985; Eltis, 1984, 1987; Steckel and Jensen, 1986; Galenson, 1986). These slave studies have spawned renewed interest in the mortality associated with other seaborne populations, and mortality rates have been calculated on Dutch immigrant voyages to the East Indies during the eighteenth century, European convict and immigrant voyages to North America and European immigrant voyages to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Indian and Pacific Islander indentured labor voyages to Fiji and Queensland, Australia, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Riley, 1981; Eltis, 1983; Cohn, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988; Grubb, 1987; Ekirch, 1987; Morgan, 1985; Shlomowitz, 1986, 1987, 1989; McDonald and Shlomowitz, 1988, forthcoming).

The Naval Defence of British North America 1739–1763

1948 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 95-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. S. Graham
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
West Coast ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
The West ◽  
British North America ◽  
European Theatre

UNTIL the eighteenth century, British naval operations rarely strayed outside the strictly European theatre. Engagements in North American waters were isolated enterprises, having little connection with the decisive area of battle which lay off the west coast of Europe in the vicinity of the British Isles. This concentration of forces in home waters was deter-mined as much by structural, technical and hygienic deficiencies as by strategic doctrine. Disease and gales were always the worst enemies, and in the manner bf continental armies, the ships of the Royal Navy sought winter quarters in or after November. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, improvements in naval architecture and the technique of navigation, as well as methods of preserving food and protecting health (slight as they may appear to this age), enabled ships to keep at sea for longer periods, and at greater distances from their home ports.

Decorating houses: style, taste and the business of decoration

2018 ◽  
pp. 122-167
Author(s):  
Conor Lucey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Real Estate Markets ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
The Impact ◽  
House Building ◽  
Printed Sources

Reflecting on the separation of house building and house decorating in the historiography of the eighteenth-century town house, this chapter explores the role of the building artisan in determining the form and appearance of the urban domestic interior. Of particular importance here is the business of decoration: the impact of decorators, such as decorative plasterers and timber joiners, as speculative builders and property developers; and the standardization of interior decoration in the form of pre-fabricated ornament. Key topics include the dissemination of architectural tastes through the agency of immigrant artisan populations; the role of books and magazines in shaping vocabularies of decorative taste; and the creative adaptation from printed sources. Focusing on the artisan’s negotiation and interpretation of the neo-classical (or ‘Adam’) style, this chapter also considers how degrees of separation from the source of that ornamental language fostered distinct dialects in towns and cities across Britain, Ireland and North America. Collectively, the topics of chapter make a case for the artisan as a key agent of fashionable taste in elite real estate markets.

The Rhetoric of Empire in the Scottish Mission in North America, 1732–63

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Jamie J. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
Moral Improvement ◽  
The World ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
William Robertson ◽  
Shed Light

In 1755, William Robertson delivered a sermon before the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, entitled The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ's Appearance…. He addresses British imperial expansion and its prospects for civil and moral improvement, while denouncing the moral decay manifest in the growth of slavery and exploitation of natives. Through advocating a considered balance between submission to revealed religious principles and the exercise of reason, Robertson stresses the necessity of both for promoting virtue and preventing vice. The SSPCK, an organisation dedicated to spreading ‘reformed Christianity’ as a catalyst of cultural progress (and thus the growth of virtue) among rural Scots and Natives in North America, was responding to a perceived lack of government commitment to this very task. Empire provided the framework for mission, yet the government's secular agenda often outweighed religious commitments. This article makes use of SSPCK sermons from the eighteenth century to trace the attitudes of Scottish churchmen and missionaries towards the institutions and motives driving empire, in a period when they too were among its most prominent agents. This will shed light on the Scottish church's developing views on empire, evangelism, race, improvability and the role of government.

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