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What role did gender play in the Scottish Enlightenment? Combining intellectual and cultural history, this book explores how men and women experienced the Scottish Enlightenment. It examines Scotland in a European context, investigating ideologies of gender and cultural practices among the urban elites of Scotland in the 18th century. The book provides an in-depth analysis of men's construction and performance of masculinity in intellectual clubs, taverns and through the violent ritual of the duel. Women are important actors in this story, and the book presents an analysis of women's contribution to Scottish Enlightenment culture, and it asks why there were no Scottish bluestockings.
Women are shown to have played an important and very visible role in society at the time. Fashionable "polite" society of this period emphasised mixed-gender sociability and encouraged the visible participation of elite women in a series of urban, often public settings. Using a variety of sources (both men's and women's correspondence, accounts, bills, memoirs and other family papers), this book investigates the ways in which polite social practices and expectations influenced the experience of elite femininity in Scotland in the eighteenth century. It explores women's education and upbringing; their reading practices; the meanings of the social spaces and activities in which they engaged and how this fed over into the realm of politics; and the fashion for tourism at home and abroad. It also asks how elite women used polite social spaces and practices to extend their mental horizons and to form a sense of belonging to a public at a time when Scotland was among the most intellectually vibrant societies in Europe.
When the Corps of Discovery left the vicinity of St. Louis in 1804 to explore the American West, they had only sketchy knowledge of the terrain that they were to cross--existing maps often contained large blank spaces and wild inaccuracies. William Clark painstakingly mapped every mile of the journey, drawing from both direct observation and from the reports of Indians and a few fur traders. On their return Lewis and Clark directed the execution of new maps detailing with remarkable accuracy the features of the country that they had traversed.
“Remember the Maine!” The war cry spread throughout the United States after the American battleship was blown up in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Americans, already sympathetic with Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain, demanded action. Brief and decisive, not too costly, the Spanish-American War made the United States a world power. David F. Trask’s War with Spain in 1898 is a cogent political and military history of that “splendid little war.” It describes the failure of diplomacy; the state of preparedness of both sides; the battles, including those of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders; the enlargement of conflict to rout the Spanish from Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and the misconceptions surrounding the war.
Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.
A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind. We often think of reason as a fixed entity, as a definitive body of facts that do not change over time. But during the Enlightenment, reason also was seen as a process, as a set of skills enacted on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these skills learned? Concentrating on Scottish students living during the long eighteenth century, this book argues that notebooks were paper machines and that notekeeping was a capability-building exercise that enabled young notekeepers to mobilize everyday handwritten and printed forms of material and visual me...
A new departure in Scottish and Irish migration studiesThe Scottish diasporic communities closest to home-those which are part of what we sometimes term the 'near Diaspora'-are those we know least about. Whilst an interest in the overseas Scottish diaspora has grown in recent years, Scots who chose to settle in other parts of the United Kingdom have been largely neglected. This book addresses this imbalance.Scots travelled freely around the industrial centres of northern Britain throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Belfast was one of the most important ports of call for thousands of Scots. The Scots played key roles in shaping Belfast society in the modern period: they...
Boxing was phenomenally popular in 18th and 19th century Britain. Aristocrats attended matches and patronized boxers, and the most important fights drew tens of thousands of spectators. Promoters of the sport claimed that it showcased the timeless and authentic ideal of English manhood--a rock of stability in changing times. Yet many of the best fighters of the era were Irish, Jewish or black. This history focuses on how boxers, journalists, politicians, pub owners and others used national, religious and racial identities to promote pugilism and its pure English pedigree, even as ethnic minorities won distinction in the sport, putting the diversity of the Empire on display.