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"Rich in facts and anecdotes, this is the perfect introduction to 18th-century London and a wonderful companion for readers of Johnson and Boswell. . . . Schwartz starts with the sights, sound, and smells of the metropolis—a city of steeples, chimneys, coal smoke, and intolerable street noise—and surveys in succession Work and Money, Pastimes and Pleasures, Daily Routines and Domestic Life, Travel and Transportation, and Health and Hygiene and concludes with a gallery of street 'Londoners,' an independent and assertive lot, notably insolent to foreigners, especially those in French clothes."—Washington Post Book World

"Outstanding. . . . The author packs a remarkable quantity of detail into a small space, even including a discussion of price and wage figures that will be intelligible to Americans [today]. . . . His prose is lucid, graceful, lively. Generously illustrated, the book also includes an extensive bibliography."—Choice

"An excellent source for English Literature and history students studying this period or Samuel Johnson."—Booklist

Justin Pope’s ground-breaking work tells the story of an era of slave unrest that swept through the Atlantic World in the first half of the eighteenth century. Provinces along the eastern coast of North America and around the Caribbean Sea experienced more insurrections and conspiracy trials in the 1730s and 1740s than in any period before the Age of Revolution. The governor of Jamaica warned his king that slaves were spreading a “dangerous Spirit of Liberty” throughout the West Indies, concerns echoed by European colonists on the northern mainland. African-born slaves rose in rebellion and captured the Danish island of Saint John, and Maroons waged a successful war in Jamaica, events that became news in the wider Atlantic World. By the early 1740s, word of emancipation and widespread rebellion had taken hold in slave communities from the coast of South America to the harbors of New York City. Colonial authorities responded to rumors of slave plotting with brutal conspiracy trials, exhorting false confessions and executing hundreds of men and women in travesties of justice in need of retelling. Scholars have long noted this period of intensified slave unrest, not unlike the era of the Haitian Revolution, but no one has conducted a full-length study of this early tumult across empires. This book explains the causes behind this rash of insurrections, both real and imagined, and explores the consequences for the peoples of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Dangerous Spirit of Liberty's distinguishing feature is its focus on the role of communication in the development of a rebellious early eighteenth-century Atlantic. Most historians of slavery have presupposed that slave unrest was confined to small locales in the first half of the eighteenth century. In fact, slaves found ways to share news across provinces to great effect. Benefiting from research in the archives of Great Britain, Spain, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Antigua, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the mainland United States, the book reveals new evidence of slave communication networks and shows how people of African ancestry shared rumors of emancipation and rebellion in this period. Slaves laboring in colonial commerce and working aboard ships helped foster an increasingly restive Black community. Banished slaves, convicted conspirators accused of plotting insurrection, carried their experiences with them in exile to neighboring colonies. By reconstructing the path of news, the book reveals rumors and reports that particularly resonated among slaves in the early eighteenth century.
 

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, no task seemed more urgent to German Romantics than the creation of a new mythology. It would unite modern poets and grant them common ground, and bring philosophers and the Volk closer together. But what would a new mythology look like? Only one model sufficed, according to Friedrich Schlegel: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Through reading and juxtaposing canonical and obscure texts, Dante in Deutschland shows how Dante’s work shaped the development of German Romanticism; it argues, all the while, that the weight of Dante’s influence induced a Romantic preoccupation with authority: Who was authorized to create a mythology? This question—traced across texts by Schelling, Novalis, and Goethe—begets a Neo-Romantic fixation with Dantean authority in the mythic ventures of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Borchardt, and Stefan George. Only in Thomas Mann’s novels, DiMassa asserts, is the Romantics’ Dantean project ultimately demythologized.

WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Scholarly”!

Native women’s marital rights and roles in colonial Illinois society

Kaskaskia, Illinois, once the state’s capital, torn from the state by flood waters, and now largely forgotten, was once the home to a couple who helped transform the region in the 1720s from a frontier village to a civil society. In the heart of France’s North American empire, the village was a community of French-Canadian fur traders and Kaskaskia Indians who not only lived together but often intermarried. These Indigenous and French intermarriages were central to colonial Illinois society, and the coupling of Marguerite 8assecam8c8e (Dawn’s Light Woman) and Nicolas Franchomme, in particular, was critical to expanding the jurisdiction of French law.
 
While the story of Marguerite and Nicolas is unknown today, it is the story of how French customary law (Coutume de Paris) governed colonial marriage, how mixed Indian-French marriages stood at the very core of early colonial Illinois society, and how Illinois Indian women benefited, socially and legally, from being married to French men. All of this came about due to a lawsuit in which Nicolas successfully argued that his wife had legal claim to her first husband’s estate—a legal decision that created a precedent for society in the Illinois Country.
 
Within this narrative of a married couple and their legal fight—based on original French manuscripts and supported by the comprehensively annotated 1726 Illinois census—is also the story of the village of Kaskaskia during the 1720s, of the war between Fox Indians and French settlers, with their Indian allies, in Illinois, and of how the spread of plow agriculture dramatically transformed the Illinois Country’s economy from largely fur trade–based to expansively agricultural.

England’s famed Lake District—best known as the place of inspiration for the Wordsworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other Romantic-era writers—is the locus of this pioneering study, which implements and critiques a new approach to literary analysis in the digital age. Deploying innovative methods from literary studies, corpus linguistics, historical geography, and geographical information science, Deep Mapping the Literary Lake District combines close readings of a body of writing about the region from 1622-1900 with distant approaches to textual analysis. This path-breaking volume exemplifies interdisciplinarity, demonstrating how digital humanities methodologies and geospatial tools can enhance our appreciation of a region whose topography has been long recognized as fundamental to the shape of the poetry and prose produced within it.

Defects brings together essays on the emergence of the concept of monstrosity in the eighteenth century and the ways it paralleled the emergence of notions of sexual difference. Women, declared a mid-eighteenth-century vindication, have been regarded since Aristotle as deformed amphibious things, "neither more or less than Monsters" (Beauty's Triumph 1758). This alliance of monstrosity with misogyny, along with the definition of sexual difference as aberration, is the starting point for this volume's investigation of monstrosity's cultural work in the eighteenth century and its simultaneous mapping and troubling of the range of differences. This collection investigates the conceptual and geographical mapping of early modern and Enlightenment ideas of monstrosity onto a range of differences that contested established categories. The essays consider the representations and material dimensions of phenomena as diverse as femininity and disfigurement, the material imagination and monstrous birth, ugliness as an aesthetic category, deafness and theories of sign language, and the exotic, racialized deformed. Collectively, they demonstrate that the emergence of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of a category of the human that is imagined and deformed, monstrous, and ugly.

French-Indigenous families were a central force in shaping Detroit’s history. Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century examines the role of these kinship networks in Detroit’s development as a site of singular political and economic importance in the continental interior. Situated where Anishinaabe, Wendat, Myaamia, and later French communities were established and where the system of waterways linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico narrowed, Detroit’s location was its primary attribute. While the French state viewed Detroit as a decaying site of illegal activities, the influence of the French-Indigenous networks grew as members diverted imperial resources to bolster an alternative configuration of power relations that crossed Indigenous and Euro-American nations. Women furthered commerce by navigating a multitude of gender norms of their nations, allowing them to defy the state that sought to control them by holding them to European ideals of womanhood. By the mid-eighteenth century, French-Indigenous families had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor. These families would maintain that power as the British imperial presence splintered on the eve of the American Revolution.

Deviant and Useful Citizens explores the conditions of women and perceptions of the female body in the eighteenth century throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru, which until 1776 comprised modern-day Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Author Mariselle Meléndez introduces the reader to a female rebel, Micaela Bastidas, whose brutal punishment became a particularly harsh example of state response to women who challenged the system. She explores the cultural representation of women depicted as economically productive and vital to the health of the culture at large. The role of women in religious orders provides still another window into the vital need to sustain the image of women as loyal and devout—and to deal with women who refused to comply.

The book focuses on the different ways male authorities, as well as female subjects, conceived the female body as deeply connected to notions of what constituted a useful or deviant citizen within the Viceroyalty. Using eighteenth-century legal documents, illustrated chronicles, religious texts, and newspapers, Meléndez explores in depth the representation of the female body in periods of political, economic, and religious transformation to determine how it was conceived within certain contexts.

Deviant and Useful Citizens presents a highly complex society that relied on representations of utility and productivity to understand the female body, as it reveals the surprisingly large stake that colonial authorities had in defining the status of women during a crucial time in South American history.

This major new work of historical scholarship offers a groundbreaking reassessment of Scottish politics and society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century that is set to become a standard work on the subject. Neil Davidson argues that Scotland experienced a revolution during this period that has rarely been recognised in the existing historiography.

Davidson explores the political and economic changes of these years, revealing how social and economic power was transferred from one class to another. He describes how Scotland was transformed from a backward and feudal economy to a new centre of emergent capitalism. He traces the economic and social crisis that led to Scotland's incorporation into the Union in 1707, but argues that the Union did not lead to the transformation of Scottish society. The decisive period was instead the aftermath of the last Jacobite revolt in 1746, whose failure was integral to the survival and consolidation of British, and ultimately global capitalism.

'His opinions are bound to cause controversy and discussion ... a good thing as Scottish history desperately needs the airing and voicing of new approaches.'
John R Young, Albion.

‘What is so good about Neil Davidson’s brave study is that he brings a Marxist perspective to bear on Scottish history in very clear and readable prose. Quotations and statistics drawn from uncannily wide reading will make this book of great value even to those who disagree with it.’
Angus Calder, author of Revolutionary Empire and Revolving Culture: Notes from the Scottish Republic

Winner of the 2024 Society of the Cincinnati Prize from the American Revolution Institute

Winner of the 2023 American Revolution Round Table of Philadelphia book award

In this eye-opening account, Eli Merritt reveals the deep political divisions that almost tore the Union apart during the American Revolution. So fractious were the founders’ political fights that they feared the War of Independence might end in disunion and civil war.

Instead of disbanding into separate regional confederacies, the founders managed to unite for the sake of liberty and self-preservation. In so doing, they succeeded in holding the young nation together. To achieve this, they forged grueling compromises, in­cluding Declaration of Independence in 1776, the Mississippi-Fisheries Compromise of 1779, and the ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781.

In addition to bringing new insights to the history of the American Revolution, Disunion Among Ourselves has inevitable resonances with our present era of political hyperpolarization and serves as a touchstone for contemporary politics, reminding us that the founders overcame far tougher times than our own through commitment to ethical constitutional democracy and compromise.

 

The esteemed French philosopher Pierre Hadot’s final work, now available in English.
With a foreword by Arnold I. Davidson and Daniele Lorenzini.
 
In his final book, renowned philosopher Pierre Hadot explores Goethe’s relationship with ancient spiritual exercises—transformative acts of intellect, imagination, or will. Goethe sought both an intense experience of the present moment as well as a kind of cosmic consciousness, both of which are rooted in ancient philosophical practices. These practices shaped Goethe’s audacious contrast to the traditional maxim memento mori (Don’t forget that you will die) with the aim of transforming our ordinary consciousness. Ultimately, Hadot reveals how Goethe cultivated a deep love for life that brings to the forefront a new maxim: Don’t forget to live.

A “fifties girl” tells the fascinating story of her marriages to novelist Billy Lee Brammer and Congressman Bob Eckhardt, and how these relationships propelled her into the multifaceted life she led on her own terms.

Child of the Great Depression, teenage "Duchess of Palms" beauty queen, wife of an acclaimed novelist and later of a brilliant U.S. congressman, and ultimately a successful single working woman and mother, Nadine Eckhardt has lived a fascinating life. In this unique, funny, and honest memoir, she recounts her journey from being a "fifties girl" who lived through the men in her life to becoming a woman in her own right, working toward her own goals.

Eckhardt's first marriage to writer Billy Lee Brammer gave her entrée to liberal political and literary circles in Austin and Washington, where she and Brammer both worked for Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. She describes the heady excitement of LBJ's world—a milieu that Brammer vividly captured in his novel The Gay Place. She next recalls her second marriage to Bob Eckhardt, whom she helped get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as her growing involvement with the counterculture of social protest, sexual revolution, and drug use. Eckhardt honestly recounts how the changing times changed her perception of herself, recalling that "I didn't know how to achieve for myself, only for others, and I felt ripped off and empty." This painful realization opened the door to a new life for Eckhardt. Her memoir concludes with a joyful description of her multifaceted later life as a restaurateur, assistant to Molly Ivins, writer, and center of a wide circle of friends.