British Colonies In America Research Articles

Plan z Albany i koncepcja brytyjskiej konstytucji imperialnej Benjamina Franklina

The Albany Plan of Union was a plan to create a unified federal government for the British colonies in America at the Albany Congress on July 10, 1754 in Albany, New York. One of its originators was Benjamin Franklin – a delegate from Pennsylvania. The plan called for a general government to be administered by a President-General, to be appointed and supported by the Crown, and a Grand Council to consist of delegates nominated by the colonial assemblies. Proposed powers included treaty-making, and raising army and naval forces and, most significantly, included the right of taxation. The plan was part of the implementation of Franklin’s concept of changing the way British rule in America and creating a federal British Empire. The plan was rejected by colonial assemblies and the Crown but it was a forerunner for the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution.

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

Robots, Slaves, and the Paradox of the Human Condition in Isaac Asimov’s Robot Stories

Slaves and robots have in common that they are intended to obey orders. Therefore I suggest taking a close look at some of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. Executing a program while detecting and overcoming problems and acting towards fulfillment of given instructions—all this makes a robot a perfect slave. In the same way as slave laws in the British Colonies in America were intended to keep slavery effective by confining slaves in their place, so are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics the formal condition for the workability of a robot holding society. Asimov’s androids reveal the implicit impossibility of both robots and slaves by establishing the command structure that would be needed to keep the system working and then disassembling this structure. The Three Laws, as they are meant to guarantee protection, command, and operation, cannot possibly work with separate master/slave subjects. They are a paradoxical juxtaposition. And consequently, slavery is logically impossible.

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott David Moltke-Hansen (bio) Americans had to invent their nationalism. As David Waldstreicher has indicated, nationalism was a new phenomenon at the end of the Revolution.1 Another closely related feeling, however, was already familiar. Like the Protestant Irish, colonists in British America early developed their attachment to British traditions, institutions, and the monarchy into a culture of patriotism. They had multiple reasons. They wished to be co-equal in self-government and standing with the English in England, and they wanted to claim the benefits of British commerce and military protection against both native populations and foreign invaders. By the late 1760s, they also sought to ally themselves with the colonial policies of the Whig Party in England. To these ends, as Colin Kidd has noted, Americans, like the Anglo-Irish and 18th-century Scots, asserted "a Gothic heritage of liberty, laws and institutions."2 American Revolutionaries, in turn, used that mythic claim to justify their appropriation of the patriot label for themselves in their defense of British institutions and traditions of self-government against the monarchy. They argued that they were acting out of love of the body politic—the patria. In this way, a culture of patriotism continued through the Revolution. But this culture's parades and celebrations were used to promote not loyalty to a distant king or common antecedents, but to a shared future and government and the putatively traditional principles on which these were founded. American patriotism united people despite their widely divergent ethnic, religious, and geographic antecedents, attachments, and interests. Americans were developing a nationalism of hope, ideological commitment, and Revolutionary pride, but not of ethnic identity—not yet. At the same time as the former colonists were transforming their British patriotism into American nationalism, Sir Walter Scott began writing books that promoted British nationalism at home. He had a receptive public. Many in Britain accepted the Gothic heritage evoked by Scott. Moreover, in the wake of the loss of British colonies in America and in the midst of the wars with Napoleonic France (then also starting to explore its "Gothic" roots), a growing number of Britons were eager to embrace any allegiance that would unite ever more closely the English and the Scots across their common border. For Scott and his readers, nationalism was an antidote to, rather than an expression of, ethnic particularism. It also transferred to the state the feelings of attachment, loyalty, and identity that in earlier times had adhered at different levels to monarchs and nobles, to ecclesiastical authorities, and to clans and tribes. In making his case, Scott deconstructed both English and Scottish ethnicity, arguing that lowland and highland Scots were historically different peoples and describing the English as a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples and cultures. The process of amalgamation, furthermore, was continuing both within Scotland and between the Scots and the English. Click for larger view View full resolution Sir Walter Scott Scott's example inspired American writers to think about how literature could be used to promote nationalism. None more closely followed the Scottish writer than William Gilmore Simms of Charleston, South Carolina. Joining the new Young America circle in the late 1830s, he began to flesh out a coherent and consistent set of ideas about the relationship between literature and nationalism. He did this as he wrote southern romances that emulated Scott's Scottish border romances. Gradually, in the face of growing sectional tensions, these vigorously developed and expounded commitments led him as well through American nationalism to southern nationalism. In the end, Simms decided, nationalism should not unite, but rather should separate divergent peoples if and when and as they became strong enough to govern themselves. Americans had developed sufficient strength by 1776, and white Southerners soon would be strong enough to seek independence in their turn. In making this case, Simms did not argue that Americans were essentially a distinct people from the beginning. Instead, he contended that they had developed into a distinct people over time. The same process was playing out for white Southerners. Ethnicities emerged historically through the joint processes of amalgamation and differentiation or speciation...

Short Communication Mezzotint Under Glass: A Historical Review of the Glass Print

Printmaking technology has made significant advances during the past four hundred years. Among early advances was the development of the mezzotint process in the mid-17th century, which gave prints a new and exciting look and feel. Because of the wide range of tonality it was capable of producing, the process enabled artists to produce a painterly appearance in their works on paper. Mezzotints became hugely popular and successful, and later gave rise to another phenomenon in art, the glass print, a decorative art form practiced by most anyone who wanted to liven up a mezzotint and display it in their home. Glass prints were also produced and sold commercially. The process was invented in England around 1700; trade in commercially produced glass prints extended to the British colonies in America in the early 18th century. To make a glass print, a mezzotint was adhered to a glass surface, face down. Then paper fiber was removed to reduce the support to a wafer-thin thickness, and varnish was applied to make the paper transparent. The surface was then ready for the artist to apply paint from behind. The rich tonality of the mezzotint enhanced the overall appearance of the image as paint was laid on the surface. Relatively few glass prints have survived, and they are not well known to print curators and conservators. Information is provided here to promote understanding that will lead to their long-term preservation.

The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History

Historians with feminist commitments have expressed reservations about men's history and men's studies. This unease has existed more or less from the first appearance of men's history as a specialised area of inquiry, and shows no signs of abating. The first part of this article explores the sources of this unease. It discusses several guiding premises of men's history and shows that they tend to lead to the occlusion of men's gendered power over women. Nonetheless, the scrutiny of the gender of men is the logical outgrowth of several decades of theoretical and empirical work on gender–witness the many historians of women and gender who have recently turned their attention to the systematic study of manliness and masculinity. With the help of examples drawn from the scholarship on the history of the British colonies in America and the early United States, the second part of this article enumerates several strategies for successfully highlighting men's gendered power in histories of manliness and masculinity.

An Empire Divided: the American Revolution and the British Caribbean

There were twenty-six, not thirteen British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the eleven colonies in the Caribbean -- Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Tortola, and Tobago -- were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most British colonists in North America lived less than two hundred miles inland and the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier. The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England. Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks, with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland. A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular in the British Caribbean; nevertheless, the white colonists cooperated with the British in defense of their islands. O'Shaughnessy decisively refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among theCaribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly divergent course from the former colonies to the north.

Seeing Through Language: Narrative, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver's The Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion

Seeing Through Language:Narrative, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver's The Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion Edward Larkin (bio) In recent years scholarship on revolutionary and early national American literature has devoted considerable attention to the role of representation. When reading early American novels, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, William Hill Brown's Modern Chivalry, and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, in the context of an emerging representative democracy, we have understood them at least in part as commentaries on the dangers of misrepresentation. When we read the early histories of the Revolution, however, our attention has focused elsewhere, on questions of political affiliation, personal relationships, or narrative structure instead of on the questions of representation that have occupied historians almost from the moment the 13 British colonies in North America decided to take up arms against the mother country. American historians of the early national era, such as David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren, and John Marshall, did not set out merely to record the events of the Revolution. They well understood their role in developing an understanding of the recent upheaval and shaping the nation's sense of self. To them, writing a history became an opportunity to interpret, a chance to represent and legitimate a particular view of the causes and lessons of the Revolution. That interpretive dimension is a large part of what made the American Revolution unique. It revolved emphatically around texts and the interpretation of them.1 One practical reason for this was the distance between the colonies and the mother country, but another, perhaps more compelling and suggestive, was that this was a time when most people believed in human reason and its ability to solve almost any problem, whether philosophical, scientific, or political. As Gordon Wood has so persuasively demonstrated, the late eighteenth century was also the era of [End Page 427] "conspiracy and the paranoid style." If this was a period when even the most sophisticated thinkers sought to explain important political, social, and economic events by "attributing [them] to the concerted designs of willful individuals" (Wood 411), one of the best means to identify those designs was through the printed explanations, arguments, and justifications offered in the rapidly expanding press.2 The public sphere, in other words, both reflected and expanded a fundamental belief in human reason. With the emergence of such a public came an increase in stature for the written word: texts—as the concrete extension of reason—were endowed with an increasing amount of power as they began to depend less and less on their authors' identity for their authority. The history of the American Revolution, consequently, became a crucial text since it, at least in the minds of the revolutionaries, promised to document the triumph of words and reason in politics. Just as the Encyclopedie in France would catalog all human knowledge, the history of the Revolution would serve as an instructive source on liberty and democracy, the apex of reason in the political world. Hence, the writing of the history of the Revolution was a crucial part of the Enlightenment project in the United States.3 No wonder, then, that so many histories, both for and against the Revolution, were written in the two decades after the British colonies in America declared independence. If the continuing influence of pro-independence history is more or less self-evident, the importance of those histories written by Americans who opposed independence may be more difficult to discern.4 However, they constituted a significant body of written work about the Revolution and bear discussion not only for their political import but for their literary interest as well.5 In the following pages I will argue for the significance of one such history, Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, A Tory View (1781),6 in which the former chief justice of Massachusetts constructs a highly literary and provocative counternarrative of the Revolution that raises questions both about the revolutionary leaders in his home state and about the notion of revolution itself. To Oliver, American revolutionary discourse, rather than expressing high-minded idealism, served the self-interested motives of a crafty and ambitious...

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S IMAGES OF THE BRITISH COLONIES IN AMERICA

Journal Article BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S IMAGES OF THE BRITISH COLONIES IN AMERICA Get access LESTER C. OLSON LESTER C. OLSON Department of Communication1117 Cathedral of LearningUniversity of PittsburghPittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 37, Issue 2, June 1990, Pages 211-a–211, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/37-2-211a Published: 01 June 1990

Benjamin Franklin's pictorial representations of the British colonies in America: A study in rhetorical iconology

This essay attempts to explain the underlying reasons for a fundamental shift in Benjamin Franklin's pictorial representations of the British colonies in America, by exploring the hypothesis the “Magna Britannia” was both a deliberative work directed to the British Parliament and an apologetic work directed to a conservative segment of the colonial public. Although the rhetorical tradition originates in the study of public speeches about civic matters, this analysis of “Magna Britannia” illustrates how concepts from the rhetorical tradition can illuminate pictorial persuasion, so contributing to a growing body of literature that explores the interdisciplineary value of the rhetorical tradition.

Reaction of British Colonies in America to the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake - A Comparison to the European Response

The Lisbon earthquake produced split reactions among some European naturalist-theologians such as Elie Bertrand and William Stukeley. As preachers, they referred to the wrath of God, as naturalists, they discussed natural causes of earthquakes. Bertrand gave a summary of current theories on earthquakes but remained skeptical and preferred to record related events in Switzerland. Stukeley proposed a theory according to which earthquakes were caused by electricity. John Michell, Woodwardian Professor at the University of Cambridge, referred only to natural causes, relying on the notion of subterraneous fires. He explained that, according to his observation of anticlines, combustible matter lied deeply buried and pent up in flat countries, whereas in mountains strata containing such material occurred close to the surface so that vapors could easily escape through the vents of volcanoes. The reaction to the Lisbon earthquake in newspaper articles, earthquake-sermons and pamphlets printed in the New World appears unanimous: earthquakes are caused by God, although he may act through natural causes. Benjamin Franklin did not formulate any theory and John Winthrop seemed unable to separate science from religion in his lecture on earthquakes, although he emphasized natural causes, as generally accepted in Europe. An anonymously published article on agitations of the sea and related earthquakes in November 1755 proposed an alternative to fire and vapors for countries without volcanic activity. The author, Dr. John Perkins, physician in Boston, proposed that earthquakes may be caused by settling of land in mountains. He argued that the upper parts of lands consist of harder and less pliable material than the lower parts which are yielding and water-soaked. Underground waters carry away parts of this lower substance and the resulting caverns collapse when the overlying heavier material sinks into the lower one. Displacement of this material may spread toward the ocean thus transmitting earthquakes of great intensity to the ocean basin; alternatively the spreading may be stopped by an obstacle and cause the rising of coastal areas. Perkins found alleged proofs of such raised areas in Pine-Plain and Hampstedt-Plain on Long Island. His contribution is important and should be included among the early earthquake theories presented in the British colonies of America.

Clio as Physicist and Machinist

For the historians of and technology in the United States, 1971 was an annus mirabilis. At the time, we did not realize it. An obvious great event of the previous year was the conference at Northwestern University on the nineteenth-century sciences in America whose proceedings appeared in the following year.1 For a number of us, the conference was a great surprise because so many cared enough to come to Evanston. Although 1971 was not like Newton's great year of 1665-1666 in witnessing overwhelming intellectual feats, it was a year in which the output of articles and books jumped considerably, including a number of works of very high quality in an impressive array of intellectual modes and on a wide range of topics.2 Important works had, of course, appeared earlier. In the previous year Raymond P. Steams published the culmination of a lifetime of research and an epitome of an older mode, Science in the British Colonies of America. A more modish work of 1970 was the undeservedly neglected Dollars for Research: Science and its Patrons in Nineteenth-Century America by Howard S. Miller. As early as 1966, A. Hunter Dupree, a pioneer practitioner, proclaimed that the field had found itself, arousing an antipathy among regular historians of that still lingers.3 But despite the appearance of fine articles and books, a sense of pessimism had spread, a feeling of lost momentum. As late as the Bicentennial, Brooke Hindle could write off the study of the pre-1789 period as a closed historiographic incident. Yet in that year Herbert Leventhal published his In the Shadow of the Enlightenment: Occultism and Renaissance Science in Eighteenth-Century America, clearly showing the influence of Keith Thomas's work on the decline of magic in England. Three years previously Joan Hoff-Wilson sounded a quite different note in her Dancing Dogs of the Colonial Period: Women Scientists, not only bringing a new gender into the story but calling for a rethinking of what science is. Two years after Hindle wrote, Neil Longley York presented a fresh interpretation of technology in Revolutionary America.4 The history of colonial and technology is alive and well. To return to 1971, in that year Daniel J. Kevles presented two articles on the World War I period that heralded his splendid treatment of that era in his later book, The Physicists, easily the most significant work on the history of

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data.

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data.

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776 A Survey of Census Data. By Robert V. Wells (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. xii + 342 pp. $18.50)

Journal Article The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776 A Survey of Census Data. By Robert V. Wells (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. xii + 342 pp. $18.50) Get access Harry S. Stout Harry S. Stout The University of Connecticut Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 10, Issue 3, Spring 1977, Pages 384–385, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/10.3.384 Published: 01 March 1977

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data

Household Size and Composition in the British Colonies in America, 1675-1775

Household Size and Composition in the British Colonies in America, 1675-1775 Between 1607 and 1776, the British empire in America underwent striking growth and diversification. Fron the first primitive settlement at Jamestown, the empire expanded until, by the time of the American Revolution, it encompassed over thirty colonies stretching from Newfoundland in the north to Barbados and Tobago in the south. Although almost three million persons living in these colonies by 1775 shared similar forms of government, different environments, economies, and societies produced important variations in the style of life from one colony to another.I Virtually all historians of the period would recognize as valid such sectional divisions as Canada, New England, the Middle Colonies, the South, and the West Indies. Indeed, some might argue that important social and economic differences existed within each of these regions.2 Clearly, the English possessed a complex assortment of colonies by I775. In view of this fact, it is of considerable interest to study the composition of families and households in the colonies. Did family size and household structure change as the colonial population grew out of its frontier stage ? Were there regional variations which set families in New England apart from those in Newfoundland or Jamaica? Given the remarkable stability in the size of English households during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that Laslett has described, these questions become all the more intriguing.3 Did the same stability carry over to