Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
David Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Private Benefits ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Electoral Defeat

In the great nineteenth-century British world cycle of gold rushes, individualist wealth seeking became associated with democratic politics, and views about the public rather than private benefits of gold became increasingly the preserve of conservatives. In Georgia, governor George Gilmer declared in 1830 that the gold diggers were “appropriating riches to themselves, which of right equally belong to every other citizen of the state,” but he soon suffered electoral defeat. In 1850s California and Australia, individual miners were rapidly associated with a democratic and egalitarian future, even with the public good. This helps explain the oddly uncontested decisions to allow mining on public—and, in many places, private—land and use of public resources such as timber and water. This chapter is by David Goodman.

Learned Societies, Institutions, Associations, and Clubs

2020 ◽  
pp. 208-226
Author(s):  
Jeremy Dibble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter considers the ways in which music became the focus of organized bodies during the nineteenth century. One of the most significant outcomes of the French Revolution was the establishment of state institutions, and music was not immune from the secular mindset of utilité publique. State-financed “learned societies” and institutions, fueled by impulses of education, the public good, and most of all, a sense of prestige, became a national imperative, and music was an important part of the state-sponsored matrix. In a technologically innovative century which encouraged epistemological revolution, the need to share knowledge at all levels of society was inexorable. This is reflected in the proliferation of these “learned societies,” and how the need for differing organizational fora emerged throughout the century; the second part of this chapter focuses on how the concept of the “society” developed, with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century invention of musicology.

The Legal Framework for Foundations in the Habsburg Monarchy from 1750 to 1918

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-172
Author(s):  
Gabriele Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The State ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Regulation And Supervision ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The Law

Foundations, as permanent funds established by a certain legal act, can serve manifold purposes, but often pursue charitable goals. As such, they play an important role for the public good. Therefore, states always had an interest in fostering foundations by providing a pertinent legal framework. In Austria, this topic has not yet been the focus of scholarship. Through this study some light is shed on the implementation of the law on foundations in the Habsburg Monarchy. It focuses on the role of the state and its legal system regarding the regulation and supervision of foundations from 1750 to 1918. This period is characterized by the sovereigns’ endeavor to regulate the position of foundations via extensive legislation. In particular, a system of oversight for foundations was created in order to guarantee the attainment of their charitable goals. In fact, this system prevailed until the end of the 20thcentury.

Compensated Motherhood and the State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Rymph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Foster Parents ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Child Welfare Professionals ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Proper Balance

This chapter examines the role of foster parents as workers, an idea rooted in the nineteenth century role of the “boarding mother.” Child Welfare professionals, foster parents, and the public struggled over the proper balance between paying adequate board to foster parents while ensuring that desire to nurture a child remained the paramount motivation. By the 1960s, foster parents began organizing themselves, culminating in the formation of the National Foster Parents Association in 1971.

The Atomic Theory of Society

1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-637
Author(s):  
William Orton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The State ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Atomic Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”

Jean Grier and Mary Bownes, Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), vi+218pp. ISBN: 9780748699575

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Giving ◽  
Inherited Wealth ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Significant Support ◽  
Private Philanthropy

This chapter reviews the book Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh (2014), by Jean Grier and Mary Bownes. The book offers an account of ‘private giving’, focusing primarily on recent gifts and drawing on the case of the University of Edinburgh. It shows that Scottish universities lacked the inherited wealth of Oxford and Cambridge. In the nineteenth century they received significant support from the state, but from the 1860s also made serious efforts to appeal to private donors and build up endowments. There is a chapter devoted to ‘research and scholarship’, which illustrates some of the problems of relying on private philanthropy. Another chapter deals with ‘bursaries, scholarships, and prizes’—once a favourite field for individual legacies and donations, and for the Carnegie Trust.

Sale of Office

2021 ◽  
pp. 341-373
Author(s):  
Mark Knights
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Personal Property ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

The chapter charts a shift in attitudes to the sale of office, from the Jacobean period, when it seems to have been relatively commonplace, to the early nineteenth century, when the practice was formally banned for most offices (except those in the army). This reflected a shift away from the idea of office as personal property towards office as a public duty, and away from the idea of office as generating informal, personal profit beyond the public, formal remuneration decided by the state or corporation. But the shift was a protracted and messy one, with an ongoing contest between different ways of thinking about venality. For some it was a pragmatic issue, often related to customary norms, that did not imperil the morality or the smooth running of the state; for others, it represented an immoral pursuit of self-interest and avarice that posed a dangerous threat to the polity.

scholarly journals Strikes and Strike-Breaking in North-East England, 1815–44: The Attitude of The Local Press

1977 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-240
Author(s):  
Maurice Milne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The State ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
The Public ◽  
North East ◽  
Public Expression ◽  
Advantageous Position ◽  
Significant Factors

The effectiveness of the strike weapon in early-nineteenth-century England depended in some measure upon the response of public opinion. Obviously the state of trade and the relative cohesion and determination of masters and men were more significant factors, but the attitude of non-participants could not be discounted. The readiness of civil and military authorities to intervene, the reaction of the general public to requests for contributions to relief funds, the willingness of politicians to contemplate changes in the laws concerning combination: all these were influenced by the state of public opinion. It would be an oversimplification to regard “public opinion” and “newspaper opinion” as synonymous. The platform, the pulpit, the placard and the popular song were other means of public expression, not that they necessarily provided a complete or reliable guide to the public mind. Nevertheless the newspaper, particularly in the nineteenth century, was in an advantageous position to influence the response of the public to current controversies.

The Federal Posse Comitatus Doctrine: Slavery, Compulsion, and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gautham Rao
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Law Enforcement Officers ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nineteenth Century America

In antebellum America, as in pre-industrial England, it was commonplace to witness civilians accompanying sheriffs and justices, scouring the countryside in search of scoundrels, scalawags, and other law-breakers. These civilians were the posse comitatus, or uncompensated, temporarily deputized citizens assisting law enforcement officers. At its core, the posse comitatus was a compulsory institution. Prior to the advent of centralized police forces, sheriffs and others compelled citizens to serve “in the name of the state” to execute arrests, level public nuisances, and keep the peace, “upon pain of fine and imprisonment.” Despite its coercive character, though, the posse was widely understood as one among many compulsory duties that protected the “public welfare.” Americans heeded the call to serve in local posses, explained jurist Edward Livingston, because of communal “ties of property, of family, of love of country and of liberty.” Such civic obligations, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, illustrated why Americans had such a pressing “interest in … arresting the guilty man.” At once coercive and communitarian, lamented Henry David Thoreau, the posse comitatus exemplified how those that “serve the state … with their bodies,” were “commonly esteemed good citizens.”

scholarly journals Slavery, the State, and Islam

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-106
Author(s):  
Mourad Laabdi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Freed Slaves ◽  
New Religion

Slavery, the State, and Islam is Fagan’s English rendering of Mohammed Ennaji’s2007 work Le Sujet et le Mamelouk: Esclavage, Pouvoir et Religion dansle Monde Arab, a historical study of the economics of power in the relationshipamong slavery, Islam, and monarchy. Ennaji investigates the structure and natureof the “bond of authority” as it manifests itself in servitude between theking and subject, master and slave, God and believers. The bulk of his primaryhistorical material belongs to the first few centuries of Islam. However his intention,as he notes in the introduction, is to also make sense of contemporarymodes of power that govern the scene of authority in the individuals’ proximityto the state and, in some instances, to one another.The opening chapter tells an anecdote of a nineteenth-century Moroccanofficial who was stripped of his title as Local Governor (in Arabic, Qaid), declareddead to the public, and kept as a slave in the sultan’s palace. Ennajichallenges the official narrative and weaves novel threads of the story to showthe degree to which the bond of authority between the sultan and his servantsdepends upon uninterrupted flat obedience.The second chapter questions the issue of slavery during Islam’s earlyyears. The author claims that the new religion made little practical changes tothis institution and, in certain cases, made slaves even more abjectly submissiveto their masters. Ennaji particularly details Islam’s termination of the statusesof sa’b (a sā’ib is a slave who has attained full unconditional freedom) andṭalq (repudiation) and its admission of mawlā (freed slaves must remain loyalto their ex-master). He also elaborates on the non-provision of part of the publicfunds to free more slaves, as well as the practice of depriving freed slaves ofthe spoils of war and discouraging people from marrying them.In the third chapter, Ennaji undertakes the king-subject relation in lightof the notion of servitude. He probes the sociolinguistic roots of several conceptualizations,including ‘ibādah, ra’īyah, and ṭā‘ah (translated successivelyas adoration, people, and obedience). He also examines the semiotics of variousexpressions of servitude and presents a prolonged discussion of the differentuses of the hand in this context. Ennaji contends that the transition toIslam barely changed anything in the structure of authority and the masterslaverelationship. As he puts it, with the advent of Islam there was “a reorganizationof the authoritarian space that reshuffled the division of powerbetween the king and the divine authority” (p. 82). This redistribution of poweris elaborated in the fourth chapter, where the author draws on concepts used ...

scholarly journals Abandoning Copyright

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Perzanowski ◽  
David Fagundes
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Practical Significance ◽  
Copyright Holder ◽  
Private Benefits ◽  
The Public ◽  
Major Fault ◽  
Reliable Mechanism ◽  
Public Costs

For nearly two hundred years, U.S. copyright law has assumed that owners may voluntarily abandon their rights in a work. But scholars have largely ignored copyright abandonment, and the case law is fragmented and inconsistent. As a result, abandonment remains poorly theorized, owners can avail themselves of no reliable mechanism to abandon their works, and the practice remains rare. This Article seeks to bring copyright abandonment out of the shadows, showing that it is a doctrine rich in conceptual, normative, and practical significance. Unlike abandonment of real and chattel property, which imposes significant public costs in exchange for discrete private benefits, copyright abandonment is potentially costly for rights holders but broadly beneficial for society. Nonetheless, rights holders—ranging from lauded filmmakers and photographers to leading museums and everyday creators—make the counterintuitive choice to abandon valuable works. This Article analyzes two previously untapped resources to better understand copyright abandonment. First, we survey four decades U.S. Copyright Office records, demonstrating both the motivations for abandonment and the infrequency of the practice. Second, we examine every state and federal copyright abandonment case, a corpus of nearly 300 decisions. By distilling this body of law, this Article distinguishes abandonment from a set of related doctrines and reveals the major fault lines in judicial application of the abandonment standard. Finally, we highlight the potential of abandonment to further copyright’s constitutional aims by suggesting a series of reforms designed to better align copyright holder incentives with the public good.

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