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Author: Paul Slack
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199645914
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
The idea of improvement - gradual and cumulative betterment - was something new in 17th century England. It became commonplace to assert that improvements in agriculture, industry, commerce, and social welfare would bring infinite prosperity and happiness. The word improvement was itself new, and since it had no equivalent in other languages, it gave the English a distinctive culture of improvement which they took with them to Ireland, Scotland, and America. Slack explains the political, intellectual, and economic circumstances which allowed notions of improvement to take root.
Author: Paul Slack
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199645914
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
The idea of improvement - gradual and cumulative betterment - was something new in 17th century England. It became commonplace to assert that improvements in agriculture, industry, commerce, and social welfare would bring infinite prosperity and happiness. The word improvement was itself new, and since it had no equivalent in other languages, it gave the English a distinctive culture of improvement which they took with them to Ireland, Scotland, and America. Slack explains the political, intellectual, and economic circumstances which allowed notions of improvement to take root.
Author: Alan Craig Houston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300152396
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
This fascinating book explores Benjamin Franklin’s social and political thought. Although Franklin is often considered “the first American,” his intellectual world was cosmopolitan. An active participant in eighteenth-century Atlantic debates over the modern commercial republic, Franklin combined abstract analyses with practical proposals. Houston treats Franklin as shrewd, creative, and engaged—a lively thinker who joined both learned controversies and political conflicts at home and abroad. Drawing on meticulous archival research, Houston examines such tantalizing themes as trade and commerce, voluntary associations and civic militias, population growth and immigration policy, political union and electoral institutions, freedom and slavery. In each case, he shows how Franklin urged the improvement of self and society. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, this book provides a compelling portrait of Franklin, a fresh perspective on American identity, and a vital account of what it means to be practical.
Author: Cornelia H. Dayton
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812206320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare. Robert Love's Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it. Historians Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston's streets to tell sojourners, "in His Majesty's Name," that they were warned to depart the town in fourteen days. This declaration meant not that newcomers literally had to leave, but that they could not claim legal settlement or rely on town poor relief. Warned youths and adults could reside, work, marry, or buy a house in the city. If they became needy, their relief was paid for by the province treasurer. Warning thus functioned as a registration system, encouraging the flow of labor and protecting town coffers. Between 1765 and 1774, Robert Love warned four thousand itinerants, including youthful migrant workers, demobilized British soldiers, recently exiled Acadians, and women following the redcoats who occupied Boston in 1768. Appointed warner at age sixty-eight owing to his unusual capacity for remembering faces, Love kept meticulous records of the sojourners he spoke to, including where they lodged and whether they were lame, ragged, drunk, impudent, homeless, or begging. Through these documents, Dayton and Salinger reconstruct the biographies of travelers, exploring why so many people were on the move throughout the British Atlantic and why they came to Boston. With a fresh interpretation of the role that warning played in Boston's civic structure and street life, Robert Love's Warnings reveals the complex legal, social, and political landscape of New England in the decade before the Revolution.
Author: Lynn Botelho
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040234968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
What did it mean to be old in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England? This eight-volume edition brings together selections from medical treatises, sermons, legal documents, parish records, almshouse accounts, private letters, diaries and ballads, to investigate cultural and medical understanding of old age in pre-industrial England.
Author: Paul Griffiths
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230523242
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
The English were punished in many different ways in the five centuries after 1500. This collection stretches from whipping to the gallows, and from the first houses of correction to penitentiaries. Punishment provides a striking way to examine the development of culture and society through time. These studies of penal practice explore violence, cruelty and shame, while offering challenging new perspectives on the timing of the decline of public punishment, the rise of imprisonment and reforms of the capital code.
Author: Carlos M. N. Eire
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300220685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 914
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Book Description
This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.
Author: Christopher Dyer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191518824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
This significant work by a prominent medievalist focuses on the period of transition between 1250 and 1550, when the wealth and power of the great lords was threatened and weakened, and when new social groups emerged and new methods of production were adopted. Professor Dyer examines both the commercial growth of the thirteenth century, and the restructuring of farming, trade, and industry in the fifteenth century. The subjects investigated include the balance between individuals and the collective interests of families and villages. The role of the aristocracy and in particular the gentry are scrutinized, and emphasis placed on the initiatives taken by peasants, traders, and craftsmen. The growth in consumption moved the economy in new directions after 1350, and this encouraged investment in productive enterprises. A commercial mentality persisted and grew, and producers, such as farmers, profited from the market. Many people lived on wages, but not enough of them to justify describing the sixteenth century economy as capitalist. The conclusions are supported by research in sources not much used before, such as wills, and non-written evidence, including buildings. Dyer argues for a reassessment of the whole period, and shows that many features of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries can be found before 1500.
Author: Helen O'Connell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199286469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
This is the first study of Irish improvement fiction, a neglected genre of nineteenth-century literary, social, and political history.Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement shows how the fiction of Mary Leadbeater, Charles Bardin, Martin Doyle, and William Carleton attempted to lure Irish peasants and landowners away from popular genres such as fantasy, romance, and 'radical' political tracts as well as 'high' literary and philosophical forms of enquiry. These writersattempted to cultivate a taste for the didactic tract, an assertively realist mode of representation. Accordingly, improvement fiction laboured to demonstrate the value of hard work, frugality, and sobriety in a rigorously realistic idiom, representing the contentment that inheres in a plain social order free ofexcess and embellishment. Improvement discourse defined itself in opposition to the perceived extremism of revolutionary politics and literary writing, seeking (but failing) to exemplify how both political discontent and unhappiness could be offset by a strict practicality and prosaic realism. This book demonstrates how improvement reveals itself to be a literary discourse, enmeshed in the very rhetorical abyss it sought to escape. In addition, the proudly liberal rhetoric of improvement isshown to be at one with the imperial discourse it worked to displace.Helen O'Connell argues that improvement discourse is embedded in the literary and cultural mainstream of modern Ireland and has hindered the development of intellectual and political debate throughout this period. These issues are examined in chapters exploring the career of William Carleton; peasant 'orality'; educational provision in the post-Union period; the Irish language; secret society violence; Young Ireland nationalism; and the Irish Revival.
Author: John Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351948318
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211
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Book Description
Despite much recent interest in the area of urban governance, little work has been done on the changing ethical standards of urban leaderships, 'governing' institutions or the policing of public life. Yet the issue of ethical standards in public life has become a central concern in contemporary public discourse; with issues of public probity, moral order and personal standards re-emerging as central features of political debate. This volume places these debates into their historical perspective by examining the linkages between processes of 'modernisation', urbanisation and the ethical standards of governance and public life. It considers how ethical debates arise as a result of differential access to positions of authority and from competition for public resources. The contributions are drawn from a wide range of scholarly and disciplinary backgrounds and provide a broad analysis of the phenomenon of corruption, assessing how debates about corruption arose, the narratives used to criticise established modes of public conduct and their consequences for urban leadership.
Author: Jonathan Healey
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843839563
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century: the first century of welfare. The English 'Old Poor Law' was the first national system of tax-funded social welfare in the world. It provided a safety net for hundreds of thousands of paupers at a time of very limited national wealth and productivity. The First Century of Welfare, which focusses on the poor, but developing, county of Lancashire, provides the first major regional study of poverty and its relief in the seventeenth century. Drawing on thousands of individual petitions for poor relief, presented by paupers themselves to magistrates, it peers into the social and economic world of England's marginal people. Taken together, these records present a vivid and sobering picture of the daily lives and struggles of the poor. We can see how their family life, their relations with their kin and their neighbours, and the dictates of contemporary gender norms conditioned their lives. We can also see how they experienced illness and physical and mental disability; and the ways in which real people's lives could be devastated by dearth, trade depression, and the destruction of the Civil Wars. But the picture is not just one of poor folk tossed by the tidesof fortune. It is also one of agency: about the strategies of economic survival the poor adopted, particularly in the context of a developing industrial economy, of the support they gained from their relatives and neighbours, andof their willingness to engage with England's developing system of social welfare to ensure that they and their families did not go hungry. In this book, an intensely human picture surfaces of what it was like to experience poverty at a time when the seeds of state social welfare were being planted. JONATHAN HEALEY is University Lecturer in English Local and Social History and Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.
