What Children Did Not Learn in School: The Intellectual Quickening of Young Americans in the Nineteenth Century

1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-61
Author(s):  
R. Laurence Moore
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Religious Tolerance ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry

Thomas Jefferson belonged to a generation of common-sense rationalists who hoped that religious tolerance in the United States would put an end to religious quarreling. Once freed to practice religion as they pleased, adult citizens, Jefferson thought, would recognize the moral advantages of nondogmatic creeds and treat religion as a philosophical inquiry based not on Scripture but on what was selfevidently true. Religion, a subject for mature minds who could weigh evidence, was not for infants. Young children, he said, were “at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries.” Children had to learn to think about religion gradually and to study it with a questioning mind only after they had attained adulthood.

“A Stalwart Motor of Revolutions”: An American Merchant in Pernambuco, 1817-1825

2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin A. Fitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
New Order ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old World ◽  
Republican Government

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.

American Anthropology and Africa

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. 20-34
Author(s):  
Daniel F. McCall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
European Countries ◽  
American Anthropologist ◽  
Indian History

Anthropologists in the United States came relatively late to a concern with Africa. It was through the study of American Indians that anthropology developed in this country. This orientation was specified long before the discipline was a recognized academic subject. Thomas Jefferson recommended the study of Indian customs and languages, and through this study a reconstruction of Indian history. Albert Gallatin in the 1830's began to give to this goal the vigor he also gave to public life. Many others, whose reputations are associated with other fields, were “intelligent dabblers” (e.g. Henry Thoreau; cf. Lawrence Willson, “Thoreau: Student of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist, LXI, no. 2 [April 1959]). The European-derived populations of the United States and of South Africa have comparable situations in that each has in its own back yard, so to speak, a number of “laboratories” for the study of societies and cultures other than their own. Anthropology in each country has developed in relation to these opportunities and challenges, but in South Africa it came at a very much later period. Americans were, in fact, among the catalysts of the development of anthropological thought in the nineteenth century, but they were scarcely cognizant of Africa. Insofar as African ethnography was developed in the nineteenth century, it was done by Europeans. The commercial, colonial, and missionary interest of European countries helped to direct the attention of anthropologists in those countries toward Africa, but also of course to Asia, Oceania, and elsewhere. In toto, Africa was less cultivated at that period than were other major areas.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

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