Bewigged, muscular and for his day unusually tall, adorned in soiled, rumpled clothes, beset by involuntary tics, opinionated, powered in his conversation by a prodigious memory and intellect, Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was in his life a literary and social icon as no other age has produced. “Johnsonianissimus,” as Boswell called him, became in the hands of his first biographers the rationalist epitome and sage of Enlightenment. These clichés—though they contain elements of truth—distort the complexity of the public and private Johnson. Peter Martin portrays a Johnson wracked by recriminations, self-doubt, and depression—a man whose religious faith seems only to have deepened his fears. His essays, scholarship, biography, journalism, travel writing, sermons, fables, as well as other forms of prose and poetry in which he probed himself and the world around him, Martin shows, constituted rational triumphs against despair and depression. It is precisely the combination of enormous intelligence and frank personal weakness that makes Johnson’s writing so compelling.

Benefiting from recent critical scholarship that has explored new attitudes toward Johnson, Martin’s biography gives us a human and sympathetic portrait of Dr. Johnson. Johnson’s criticism of colonial expansion, his advocacy for the abolition of slavery, his encouragement of women writers, his treatment of his female friends as equals, and his concern for the underprivileged and poor make him a very “modern” figure. The Johnson that emerges from this enthralling biography, published for the tercentenary of Johnson’s birth, is still the foremost figure of his age but a more rebellious, unpredictable, flawed, and sympathetic figure than has been previously known.

The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms.
 
In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.

A bold rethinking of the Haitian Revolution reveals the roots of the only successful slave uprising in the modern world.

Unearthing the progenitors of the Haitian Revolution has been a historical project of two hundred years. In A Secret among the Blacks, John D. Garrigus introduces two dozen Black men and women and their communities whose decades of resistance to deadly environmental and political threats preceded and shaped the 1791 revolt.

In the twenty-five miles surrounding the revolt’s first fires, enslaved people of diverse origins lived in a crucible of forces that arose from the French colonial project. When a combination of drought, trade blockade, and deadly anthrax bacteria caused waves of death among the enslaved in the 1750s, poison investigations spiraled across plantations. Planters accused, tortured, and killed enslaved healers, survivors, and community leaders for deaths the French regime had caused. Facing inquisition, exploitation, starvation, and disease, enslaved people devised resistance strategies that they practiced for decades. Enslaved men and women organized labor stoppages and allied with free Blacks to force the French into negotiations. They sought enforcement of freedom promises and legal protection from abuse. Some killed their abusers.

Through remarkable archival discoveries and creative interpretations of the worlds endured by the enslaved, A Secret among the Blacks reveals the range of complex, long-term political visions pursued by enslaved people who organized across plantations located in the seedbed of the Haitian Revolution. When the call to rebellion came, these men and women were prepared to answer.

Arai Hakuseki, advisor to the sixth and seventh Tokugawa shogun, played an important role in politics between 1709 and 1716, during an era of large changes in the bakufu. He participated in major policy decisions on currency, foreign trade, and local administration, while simultaneously trying to enhance the shogun's authority both within the bakufu and as a national ruler. The following shogun retained Hakuseki's fiscal and trade policies, but promptly reversed those measures designed to make the shogun a king-like figure.

Nakai examines these successes and failures against the background of the time, especially the bifurcated and ambiguous distribution of authority between the Tokugawa shogun and the tenno in Kyoto. She also traces the influence of Confucian political theory on Hakuseki's program and on his defense of that program in the face of criticism. Nakai draws upon Hakuseki's autobiography anddiary and the reportorial letters of a contemporary for Hakuseki's political activities, and on Hakuseki's historical works and memorials for the theoretical basis for his programs, rooted in Confucianism.

Illustrative and lively translations from Hakuseki enrich the book, helping to portray a multi-faceted personality who managed to blend practical politics and Confucian idealism within the complicated and dynamic environment of the early-eighteenth-century bakufu.

Confronting the rifts created by our common conceptual vocabulary for North American colonial studies 

How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience. 

Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, Matt Cohen traces how these five concepts of cross-cultural relations emerged from, and continue to evolve within, colonial dynamics. Through a series of revealing archival explorations, he argues the need for a new vocabulary for the analysis of past interactions drawn from the intellectual and spiritual domains of the colonized, and for a historiographical practice oriented less toward the illusion of complete understanding and scholarly authority and more toward the beliefs and experiences of descendant communities. 

The Silence of the Miskito Prince argues for new ways of framing scholarly conversations that use past interactions as a site for thinking about intercultural relations today. By investigating the colonial histories of these terms that were assumed to promote inclusion, Cohen offers both a reflection on how we got here and a model of scholarly humility that holds us to our better or worse pasts.

This second collection of primary sources in English translation ranges across a gamut of places and moments in the early modern Spanish Pacific. It may be used in conjunction with Volume 1 or on its own. While its focus continues to be on the encounters and entanglements that arose in the Spanish Pacific, it more strongly emphasizes the challenges faced by secular and ecclesiastical authorities in their attempts to control a distant colony and reshape its culture, from the complex forms of identify formation in the diverse world of the colonial Philippines to the complexities of inter-imperial rivalry in East and Southeast Asia as a whole. As with Volume 1, each document is introduced by a specialist in the field and includes a list of suggestions for further reading. An introductory essay surveys current work in the field of early modern Spanish Pacific studies and provides a lengthy bibliography.

This sparkling account of the great age of Whiggery during the reigns of George I and II is distinguished by its attention to social history. The author deftly explains how the political transformation which brought an end to the “rage of party” under Queen Anne and ushered in the “strife of faction” under the Hanoverians was related to social and economic conditions. This major political change brought stability to England and—by important, though incremental shifts in mobility, religion, agriculture, industry, and literacy—slowly transformed English society.

W. A. Speck argues that in 1714 England was ruled by rival elites called Tory and Whig and that by 1760 they had fused to form a ruling class. This union became possible as divisive issues faded and economic and political interests were shared. Whiggery itself, however, split apart for lesser reasons. “Country” Whigs were restorationists on moral and religious grounds while “Court” Whigs—neither Saints, nor Spartans, nor Reformers—created the mechanisms to realize the promise of the Glorious Revolution of 1689: mixed monarchy, property and liberty, and Protestantism.

Stability and Strife is the most up-to-date book in English eighteenth-century history in its methods—the use of social science data and literary sources—and in its sophisticated topical and narrative approaches to this fascinating era.

In this lively and original book, the distinguished Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki tells the story of a century-long Polish dispute over the merits and demerits of the Western model of liberal progress and industrial civilization. 

As in several countries of Europe, also in Poland, intellectuals--conservatives, liberals, and (later) socialists--quarrelled about whether such a model would suit and benefit their nation, or whether it would spell the ruin of its distinctive cultural features.

This heated debate revolved around several pairs of opposing ideas: native cultures v. cosmopolitan civilization; natural v. artificial ways of economic development; Christian morals v. capitalist laissez-faire; traditional customs v. mobile society; romanticism v. scientism, and so on. It is these various aspects of the main issue which the author analyzes and links together here. He describes how difficult and painful the process of modernization was in a nation deprived of its political independence and cultural autonomy.