Comte De Research Articles

As proletárias saint-simonianas e sua herança. Entre ocultação e (re)descoberta de seus itinerários e escritos

As proletárias saint-simonianas, tal como se autodenominavam, são autoras de uma parte importante do legado de Saint-Simon (Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint Simon, 1760-1825) e do saint-simonismo. No entanto, seu legado sofreu uma verdadeira indiferença ou mesmo supressão durante o século XIX, em particular os escritos de Clare Demar, demonizada como “mulher livre”, "mulher monstro”, “venenosa”. O primeiro estudo consagrado às mulheres saint-simonianas, em especial às proletárias saint-simonianas que criram o periódico La femme libre (1832-1834) foi publicado em 1926, pela socióloga Marguerite Thibert. Sua obra, ainda atual, se intituta Le féminisme dans le socialisme français de 1830 à 1850. Neste artigo nos desbruçaremos sobre seus escritos, em particular aos de Claire Demar e Suzanne Voilquin. Buscaremos abordar a diversidade interna das “proletárias”, apresentar seus escritos e propor uma leitura focada na modernidade do ponto de vista de um feminismo que interdita qualquer abordagem linear da história do feminismo.

The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages

The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages

Life in the sloth lane

George-Louis Leclerc, the Comte De Buffon, was the most famous naturalist on the planet in the middle of the 18th century, and he didn't think much of the New World. He proclaimed the Americas degenerate, a sodden, miserable land filled with weak and inferior species. But Buffon reserved his most biting contempt for one creature in particular. He wrote of their too short and badly terminated legs, of their slowness, stupidity and even habitual sadness. These sloths, he continued, are the lowest term of existence in the order of animals with flesh and blood. One more defect would have made their existence impossible. Part of the reason sloths are such extreme energy savers is their diet. They are arboreal folivores, meaning they live in trees and eat leaves. Sloths have adopted a different strategy: they nibble a bit here and there, making sure to keep their stomachs full. And they don't rush digestion.

The kickstart of the age of the Earth race: revisiting the experiment of the Comte de Buffon at school

In this work, the first experiment ever done to determine the age of the Earth is revisited. The benefits of its application at primary and secondary school levels are presented and discussed. In particular, emphasis is placed on the advantage of facing students with the challenges that scientists have had to overcome during the past three centuries to reach our present knowledge in contrast to the mere transmission of the latest facts.

‘Les suites des suites’: Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and the News

ABSTRACTTaking as its subject Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-46), this article explores what the literary critic Alfred Nettement dubbed the newspaper’s ‘influence contagieuse’ under the July Monarchy, and considers the impact of journalism on this ever-popular roman-feuilleton. Reading Dumas’s text alongside the writings of nineteenth-century critics, the article traces the ways in which Monte-Cristo reflects on the pressures and rhythms of serial publication – not simply as a consequence of its structure but as a thematic concern crucial to particular strands of its meandering narrative. The problem of endings is central here, with Monte-Cristo emblematic of the ways in which the possibility of closure is repeatedly deferred in the roman-feuilleton – replaced, instead, by a series of suites.

Toward a Revolutionary Model of Music Pedagogy

Established in 1795 in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Paris Conservatoire emerged from a training school for National Guard musicians. Aligned with the French Republic’s broader educational reforms, the Conservatoire was marked by its secularization, standardized curriculum, military-style discipline, and hierarchical organization. Among its most ambitious achievements was the publication of new instruction treatises from 1799 to 1814. Covering elementary theory, solfège, harmony, and all the major instruments, these methods articulated the Conservatoire’s pedagogy and circulated widely in nineteenth-century Europe. Hugot and Wunderlich’s Méthode de flûte (1804) exemplifies the Conservatoire’s approach, making a distinct break from methods published only a few years earlier: abstract technical drills predominate, evenness of tone quality in all key areas is emphasized, and the instruction of improvisation is curtailed. Airs, brunettes, and other pieces typical of ancien régime tutors are replaced with exercises demanding repetitive practicing. Meticulous instructions for the mastery of the flute’s four-key mechanism bear a striking resemblance to rifle-handling directions in contemporary military training and combat manuals by Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, Comte de Guibert, and others. The Conservatoire instruction manuals serve not only as guidebooks to historical fingerings and period performance style; they also can be read as social and political texts. Meant to advance a more rational music pedagogy, these treatises show the extent to which the military model permeated everyday life in post-revolutionary France. Further, they demonstrate a new conception of musical training beyond personal development toward the creation of professional musicians serving a patriotic, republican function. The treatise thus becomes what Michel Foucault calls a “simple instrument,” disciplining musicians’ bodies for the political goals of the state.

Effects of different deficit irrigation on sugar accumulation of pineapple during development

The potted pineapple cultivar ‘Comte de paris’ was used to study the influence of deficit irrigation on fruit sugar accumulation in greenhouse during the fruit enlargement period. The study included a control (normal irrigation) and two treatment groups, moderate deficit (50% of the control irrigation) and severe deficit (25% of the control irrigation). The results indicated that the deficit irrigation significantly decreased the sucrose accumulation. The sucrose content in the fruits of moderate deficit irrigation was the lowest. During the mature period, the deficit irrigation decreased the sucrose phosophate synthase activity(SPS) an increased the sucrose synthase (SS) and neutral invertase (NI). The moderate deficit irrigation significantly improved the acid invertase activity(AI). However, it was inhibited by the severe deficit irrigation. In general, the moderate treatment reduced the SPS activity and enhanced the NI and AI activities, while the severe treatment decreased the SPS and AI activities.

La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle éd. par Francesco Spandri

Reviews 269 principe échappe le plus souvent à l’auteur lui-même” (65). This endeavor inevitably bears the mark of an author’s point of view and, according to Bourdieu, encompasses the entire history of the field of literature (67). As for the reception of literary works, a sociological approach seeks to go beyond a quantitative approach by providing an appreciation of the various modes of appropriation and interpretation to which works are subjected over time. Needless to say, a “sociologie de la lecture” proves eminently daunting in its realization. Moreover, it is a task whose complexity has only grown as a result of the international circulation of literature and literary theory. New fields, such as the sociology of translation and the sociology of transnational modes of appropriation are emerging. In concluding her concise, dense, and most valuable survey Sapiro notes that“si de nombreuses pistes de recherche ont été ouvertes, il reste beaucoup à faire” (108), thus stating what has become both obvious and challenging in the area of her investigations. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Spandri, Francesco, éd. La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2981-1. Pp. 400. 49 a. This important collection, comprised of an introduction and eighteen essays, sees the novelistic imaginary and monetary logic as intertwining worlds, producing a reflection on money in its triple nature of formal principle, thematic network, and cultural object.Adhesion to economic theories and Marxist criticism can only provide an approximation of what the truth of money in literature might be. We must return to the inaugural moments of the novel’s constitution, the eighteenth century, and reexamine texts like Le paysan parvenu and Manon Lescaut, in order to discover the avenues later explored by novelists in the century of the industrial revolution and triumphant capitalism.After Spandri’s historical introduction, five essays treat matters of form. Pierluigi Pellini analyses economic topoi in the Rougon-Macquart, in comparison with models in Balzac and Dickens. Jean-Joseph Goux, Éric Bordas, and Susi Pietri study Balzac, the first establishing links between the omniscience of money and the omniscient narrator, the next examining the various registers of the financial lexicon, and the latter looking at how various contemporaries like Henry James and Hugo von Hoffmannsthal understood the Comédie humaine. Christophe Reffait asks what representations of states of matter in Jules Verne’s tales have to say about money and its circulation. The next section treats financial themes and contains two more essays on Balzac, Fabrice Wilhelm analyzing the unique figure of the prodigal father, and Paolo Tortonese studying the intricate relationships between interest, self-love, and motivation. Yves Ansel shows how attitudes about money and privilege in Stendhal betray certain aristocratic prejudices, François Vanoosthuyse demonstrates the consolatory function of the popular novel in his essay on ideological issues in the Comte de Monte-Cristo, and Agnese Silvestri shows how, in George Sand, the future is open to those who use their wealth to prepare a more equal future. Luca Pietromarchi asks the extent to which the Flaubertian description of human relations obeys the dynamics of commerce and finance. Karen Haddad and Pierre Glaudes examine the abstract nature of money, the former seeing it as something that vanishes in Dostoyevsky, the latter understanding it as a source of deep spiritual anxiety in Léon Bloy. Valerio Cordiner studies the realistic fresco of industrials and bankers of the Third Republic in the virtuosic writings of Maurice Barrès. The final section sees money as a cultural object.Annamaria Lessara examines the paradoxical relationships between bourgeois ideology and dandyism in Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Baudelaire.Maria Luisa Maniscalco analyses the contribution that Alexis de Tocqueville made in creating the sub-discipline of the sociology of money. Carole ChristenLecuyer uses the example of savings banks, founded in 1818, to show how propaganda literature and novels employed pedagogies of money to resolve social questions. Finally, François Vatin demonstrates how the works of Eugène Buret (1811–43), known as a social investigator of poverty, cannot be disassociated from his literary Romanticism. This motley, enjoyable collection provides an invaluable...

An Analysis of Octave Ségur’s Translation of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) into French

The Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849) became very famous in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century thanks to her pedagogical works, regionalist and feminocentric novels, whose translations were eagerly awaited on the Continent. This paper analyses a hitherto totally unexplored field of research within Edgeworth studies: the French translation of Edgeworth’s most important English society novel, Belinda (1801), from the point of view of gender and translation studies. For this purpose, we will take into account the particular context of the work, its main features in English and French, and the particular procedures adopted by the French translator to transform Edgeworth’s tale into moral fiction for women. Octave-Henri Gabriel, comte de Ségur, adapts Belinda to the taste of French readers by sacrificing both the macrostructural and microstructural features of the source text. Despite the success of the book in France, Bélinde (1802) is not comparable to the author’s original idea, as the textual history of Belinda reveals. Edgeworth’s book deals with controversial issues at that time and features her most memorable female character, which is distorted in the French text. Ultimately, this paper confirms that the publication of Ségur’s translation has consequences on the transmission of Edgeworth’s oeuvre in other European literatures and on her image as a feminist writer.

Earth will freeze if we don't step in

The Comte de Buffon's lively writing transformed our ideas of Earth's fauna and fired the public imagination. But his insights on climate were impressively wide of the mark, find Mat Zalasiewicz and Jan Zalasiewicz

Theorizing epigenesis in a time of preexistence: From the end of the seventeenth century to the 1720s.

According to a classic periodization in the history of science, biological thought as it emerged in France from the last decades of the seventeenth century to the 1740s was strongly committed to the doctrine of the preexistence of germs. Nicolas Malebranche's role in disseminating this paradigm, particularly in the milieu of the Académie Royale des Sciences during the years when Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle was its secretary, has been studied in detail, especially by Jacques Roger. However, much less has been said about the authors who argued against this doctrine prior to the appearance of the relevant pieces by Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and Denis Diderot. I aim to examine a series of French medical treatises and clandestine manuscripts that outlined a mechanist theory of epigenesis, between the end of the seventeenth century and the 1720s, to bring to light the strategies-often quite original-that allowed them to achieve this result. One interesting case is the heterodox readers of Malebranche, which use some of his own arguments (notably on the physiology of brain traces and the laws of nature) both against preexistence and to support epigenesis. I inquire into the historical worth of the positions defended by these authors as well as into the connections existing between the history of epigenesis and that of materialism in the early modern era.

Le poison et l'antidote: Mandeville et la connexion Suisse

The article explores how the Fable of the Bees was received in French-speaking Switzerland and provides a broad outline of its reception by Swiss intellectuals throughout the eighteenth century. The editorial history of the French translation of the Fable of the Bees shows that Swiss reformed intellectuals played a major role in popularizing and focusing the attention of the French public on Mandeville’s work. This translation was at the center of an important debate in Switzerland during the 1740s, as shown by the minutes of the Societe du comte de la Lippe (1744), an intellectual society in Lausanne whose members were politicians and academics. The negative judgement on this work expressed in these conferences is echoed in some correspondence that stressed the necessity to draft a response to the work. The Lettre Critique sur la Fable des Abeilles (1746) by Jacques-Francois Deluc, a Genevan friend of Rousseau, seems to respond to these expectations; it is a refutation of the book condemning it as immoral and pernicious. Rousseau’s views on Mandeville are then reread in the light of this wider Swiss reception of the author of the Fable, focusing particularly on his moral and economic theories. Finally, the last reactions to the Fable are analyzed in a manuscript (probably written in the 1780s) by the Genevan jurist Etienne Dumont. Overall, the article presents new elements in the French reception of Mandeville and highlights the role of the Swiss Enlightenment in spreading the Fable of the Bees, thereby increasing its fame and developing the debate revolving around it.

Arrows of surrealist desire: re-reading J. G. Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company

J. G. Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) has not received as much critical attention as the books by Ballard that preceded or came after it, perhaps because it is even less easy than his other fiction to categorize, entering a world of the fantastic and erotic as opposed to the more familiar science fiction, dystopic, and urban terrains mapped by the author. In the scholarship on the novel the central protagonist ‘Blake’ has been connected with some justification to the figure of William Blake, yet this article shows how that identification can only be fully understood by recognizing the role played by pre-Surrealist writing and Surrealist art as the means towards forging Blake’s character and behaviour. Using both Surrealist theoretical texts and those by and on the Comte de Lautréamont, it is argued that The Unlimited Dream Company creates a mythic figure and a world that are motivated by desire as the Surrealists understood that term. This article enhances and elaborates that reading by demonstrating that in order to give the freest possible rein to the idea of a world given over to desire, Ballard harnessed the art of Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst and, in doing so, achieved the aim of Surrealism to create a new myth.

British hospitality for an unfortunate prince: the Duc de Bordeaux's visit to Britain as an early test of the entente cordiale, 1843–4

ABSTRACTIn the summer of 1843, Anglo-French relations thawed in the wake of the British and French royal families' meeting at the Château d'Eu in Normandy. Members of both governments began to speak of the good understanding, or entente cordiale, between them, and much of the existing historiography points out that by 1844, what proved to be a fragile arrangement was under some pressure. However, mere months after the Eu visit, another royal visit threatened the entente, that of King Louis Philippe's exiled great-nephew, the Bourbon pretender Henri, Duc de Bordeaux (later known as the Comte de Chambord), to Britain. Owing to Britain's tradition of allowing entry to foreigners, Bordeaux was able to enter Britain freely, whilst the British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen, argued that his visit would have little political consequence. Rather, Bordeaux and his suite intended to make political demonstrations. These activities and Aberdeen's willingness to believe professions to the contrary deeply offended the French government. Aberdeen was eventually forced to admonish Bordeaux and his suite. Although the dispute was amicably resolved, it almost fatally undermined the entente soon after its inception.

Comparisons and correlations of phenolic profiles and anti-oxidant activities of seventeen varieties of pineapple.

Major phenolic, β-carotene, and ascorbic acid (AA) contents in 17 pineapple varieties were quantified and compared. Anti-oxidant activities were evaluated using 2,2-Diphenyl-l-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH), 2,2'-Azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid) (ABTS), ferric reducing anti-oxidant power (FRAP), and metal chelating capacity (MCC) assays. MD-2 exhibited the highest AA and total phenolic (TP) contents and DPPH and ABTS assay results, but was lower in β-carotene contents. Ripley had the highest total flavonoid (TF) content with a low AA content. Comte de Pairs exhibited the highest MCC and the lowest FRAP values. TP contents and both DPPH and ABTS activities, FRAP values and both AA contents and DPPH activities, and TF contents and ABTS activities were positively correlated. MD-2 exhibited the greatest diversity of phenolics and highest anti-oxidant activities in all assays. Information included herein can be useful for development of pineapple-based food products containing high levels of health promoting anti-oxidants.

Pierre Menard the Sur-realist

Abstract Jorge Luis Borges openly rejected surrealism as “snobbish chitchat,” and most scholars have taken such statements of his at face value. Research into the surrealist magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as Victoria Ocampo's papers at Harvard's Houghton Library, show just the opposite. This article uses archival and published sources to trace the literary network that brought Pierre Menard from the surrealists to the pages of Sur, in order to reveal Borges' intimate connection to the surrealists from whom he always sought to distance himself. This connection crystallizes in the ambiguous figure of the Comte de Lautréamont, apostle of plagiarism as artistic method, who himself was the subject of a graphological analysis by the real Dr. Pierre Menard, published in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in the very month that Borges published his seminal story in Sur.

Literary Plagiarism and Scientific Originality in the “Trans-Atlantic Wilderness” of Goldsmith, Aikin, and Barbauld

This essay enhances our understanding of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “The Deserted Village” (1770) by attending to other works in his oeuvre, especially his History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774). Goldsmith’s natural history particularly drew ideas from the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who famously portrayed Europe as a location of original biological forms, and the western hemisphere as departing from those origins, investing humans with the ability to alter themselves by altering their environment. Tracing similarities between calls for poetic novelty through scientific description in the works of Goldsmith and John Aikin, this essay displays how conceptions of biological, racial, and literary originality and degeneration also affected Anna Barbauld’s later repetition of Goldsmith’s themes in her poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812).

Cartas apologéticas that Cracked the Espelho crítico: Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus and Enlightenment Proto-feminism in Portugal

IN January of 1761 the Lisbon editorial house Antonio Vicente da Silva published an anonymous work titled Espelho critico, no qual claramente se vem alguns defeitos das mulheres, fabricado na loja da verdade pelo Irmao Amador do Dezengano, que pode servir de estimulo para a reforma dos mesmos Defeitos. (1) The folheto de cordel purported to be a broadside assault on the feminine sex, focusing on the plentiful shameful female attributes. Less than three months later, Dona Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus responded strongly to the accusations of Amador do Dezengano, the pseudonymous author of Espelho critico, with two public letters in folheto that defended the feminine sex against the misogynist. (2) Her Primeira (and subsequently, Segunda) carta apologetica em favor e defensa das mulheres, escrita por Dona Gertrudes Margarida de Jesus, ao Irmao Amador do Dezengano, com a qual destroe toda a fabrica do seu espelho critico, was approved by the Santo Oficio's censors and published on March 4, 1761. In this article, I analyze Jesus's two Cartas in response to Dezengano's Espelho critico not only as a challenge to the unequal educational status quo for women in the period, but more importantly as an early proto-feminist manifesto. As I will demonstrate, her cartas distorted the male gaze in the mirror and provided Portuguese women with a public document that reflected and celebrated their actual and potential intellectual value in Enlightenment Portuguese society. I borrow the term proto-feminism from political scientists Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser, who viewed American philosopher Hannah Mather Crocker's advocacy as a conceptual precursor to modern feminism (265), to explore what historian Karen Offen has called feminist concerns in the European Enlightenment (27), particularly relating to women's education and freedom. Little is known about Jesus's biography except that she was a nun, although she was certainly not the first Portuguese woman to write about her mistreatment by men. Most notably, the much-debated Lettres Portuguaises (Cartas portuguesas), originally attributed to Mariana Alcoforado but perhaps written by the Frenchman Comte de Guilleragues in 1669, decried the mistreatment of a disillusioned Portuguese woman by her French suitor, the Marquis de Chantilly. However, Jesus was unique in that, unlike Alcoforado's traditional epistolary lament, her Cartas stood out as an intellectualized defense of women that counterattacked using the same classical rhetorical tools and sources as the misogynist Dezengano. Moreover, Jesus borrowed the apologia trope, which had a long tradition as a defense or justification (Torres Feijo 226), but instead used it as an advocacy tool to demonstrate women's intellectual capacity, despite not having access to the same formal education as men. To understand better the debate spurred by Espelho critico and the ensuing Cartas, we must also consider the reform-minded socio-historical context of Enlightenment Portugal. Before the Dezengano/Jesus polemic of 1761, enlightened ideas had been slow to arrive in Portugal from Northern Europe. However, beginning with the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed most of the city's infrastructure, the literal rebuilding of the Portuguese capital made the small, peripheral European country ripe for social and political reforms driven by Enlightenment ideals from abroad. As Estela Vieira argues, in the earthquake's aftermath, [w]hile the epistemological distance turned the catastrophic events into cultural topoi of critical and political relevance, the universal aspirations of Enlightenment discourse eclipsed regional forms of coping and creating (115; original emphasis). Consequently, the destruction and almost complete reconstruction of Portugal sped up European Enlightenment trends in Portuguese society. Without a doubt the most influential figure of the post-earthquake period, even more than King Jose I, was the future Marquas de Pombal, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, King Jose's prime minister, who was named Count of Oeiras in 1759. …

An Interesting and Odd Present: Transporting American Bison across the Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century

An Interesting and Odd Present:Transporting American Bison across the Atlantic in the Eighteenth Century Bradley Folsom (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution An illustration of an American bison from Francisco López de Gómara, Historia general de las Indias y todo lo acaescido en ellas dende que se ganaron hasta agora y La conquista de Mexico, y de la Nueva España (1553). This illustration is first known European rendering of the iconic grazer of the North American Great Plains. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. In the 1870s, long-time San Antonio resident Antonio Menchaca dictated his memoirs for publication, hoping to preserve the Tejano legacy in Texas.1 In addition to featuring important events from the author’s life, the memoirs include local legends Menchaca had learned growing up in Texas. One such story, entitled, “The First Buffaloes Ever sent to Europe are sent from San Antonio,” details what Menchaca believed to be the first time an American bison—more commonly known as buffalo—crossed the Atlantic Ocean. According to Menchaca, in 1760, a hunter named Carbreo captured buffalo from the large herds surrounding San Antonio and “took them over to Spain,” where he presented the animals as a gift to the king. Upon receiving the animals, the monarch was apparently so “pleased with the interesting and odd present,” he “asked Carbreo to name the reward he desired.” The modest hunter, having spent his savings undertaking the voyage, requested only that the king pay for his voyage back to Texas. The king did so and, in spite of Carbreo’s protests, gave the hunter a pension and a promotion to the rank of lieutenant. Upon returning to San Antonio, Carbreo gave up hunting, became an “industrious citizen,” and the tale of the first buffalo crossing became a local legend.2 [End Page 1] To a large extent, Menchaca’s tale is accurate, but he left out important details and his names and dates are inaccurate—understandable errors considering that the author was writing almost a century after the event took place and likely relied on stories he had heard as a child to reconstruct the tale. Just as Menchaca claimed, in the mid-eighteenth century a hunter from Texas captured American bison from the Southern Plains and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean to be presented to the king of Spain. The king did indeed reward the hunter’s efforts with a promotion and a monetary reward. However, the hunter was not named Cabreo, the Atlantic crossing took place twenty years after the given date, and the motivation for making the voyage went beyond an altruistic desire to please the king. In addition, Menchaca never explained how the hunter managed to keep his animals alive for the transatlantic crossing and, through no fault of his own, was mistaken in his claim that the first American buffalo to cross the Atlantic Ocean came from Texas.3 In the eighteenth century, leaders in France, Spain, Britain, and the United States tried to transport living American bison over long distances to study, to exhibit as curiosity items, and to domesticate for monetary gain. Among those seeking or receiving buffalo in the eighteenth century were Pennsylvania proprietor and son of William Penn, Thomas Penn; the king of England, George II; French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; United States presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; and the king of Spain, Carlos III. Many of these men assumed they could succeed where Indians and prior generations of Euro-Americans had failed in taming and breeding buffalo for their wool, milk, meat, and labor as beasts of burden. Scientific advancements of the Enlightenment, a burgeoning naturalist movement, and improvements in animal husbandry inspired this optimism.4 Unlike the many other animals studied by naturalists or paraded before European courts in the eighteenth century, the American bison’s resistance to capture, confinement, domestication, and forced herding frustrated most who sought to transport the creatures away from their natural habitats to distant locations in the United States and Europe. As the men sent to capture buffalo quickly learned, the notoriously ornery...

The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front ed. by James J. Gigantino II

Reviewed by: The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front ed. by James J. Gigantino II Mark Edward Lender (bio) KEY WORDS American Revolution, Revolutionary War, New Jersey, Patriots, Tories, Slavery, Homefront The American Revolution in New Jersey: Where the Battlefront Meets the Home Front. Edited by James J. Gigantino II. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Pp. 209. Paper, $29.95.) The Revolutionary experience of the small state of New Jersey was in many ways a microcosm of the larger struggle for American independence. The colony saw more combat than any other province, its civilians struggled to survive seven years of fiercely contested civil war, and its Revolutionary government labored under enormous difficulties to establish an effective polity. These subjects, as well as the efforts of New Jersey loyalists, women, blacks, and others to find their ways in the midst of military and social upheaval, remain an active focus for scholarship. Among the latest contributions in this regard are the nine original essays in The American Revolution in New Jersey, edited by James J. Gigantino II. As a rule I dislike reviewing essay collections: Without a firm editorial hand contributions tend to be of uneven quality, overlap in subject matter, or drift off the stated focus of the collection. This volume, however, avoids these pitfalls and is well worth reading. The essays, all by different authors, deal with the intersections of military and domestic affairs; the goal, as editor Gigantino puts it, is to allow “a fuller understanding of the personal impact of the American Revolution on the lives of the colonists.” That is, the essayists use a local focus to draw wider conclusions (either directly or implicitly) on the nature of the Revolution and its [End Page 821] meaning for those who lived through it and built on its aftermath. Contributors explore “how ordinary New Jerseyans dealt with Patriot, Loyalist, British, Hessian and French soldiers in their own backyards” and resulting connections with “the larger global conflict” (5). Within this context, the authors address the social implications of militia service, war-related production and labor, the changing roles of women, questions of political loyalty, the dilemmas of slavery in a war fought in the name of liberty, and the nature of the Revolution itself. Some of these essays are gems. Robert Selig, whose previous scholarship has offered revealing insights on the Franco–American alliance, turns his attention to the French army in New Jersey. The French arrival in 1781 amounted to yet another invasion as thousands of troops under the Comte de Rochambeau marched into the state. Selig rightly points out the ambivalence of residents toward the mostly Catholic French; they had been feared enemies during the French and Indian War. But the French were disciplined and injected thousands of dollars in hard cash into New Jersey’s war-ravaged economy. That fact alone was enough to make new friends of old foes. Michael S. Adelberg, whose work in quantifying the physical and economic costs of political loyalties already is the best in the literature (of any state), once again proves a master of micro-analysis. Despite a vicious civil war, property-holding among Monmouth County residents remained generally at pre-war levels, allowing Adelberg to make some interesting speculations on the nature of “revolution” in the New Jersey context. If there were no massive losses or additions of property, then how radical was the Revolution in social terms? This is a fine piece of scholarship. So is Todd W. Braisted’s hard look at the fighting around Fort Lee in 1781, which offers a graphic view of the bitterness of the patriot–Tory struggle and the social impact on the region as the fighting impinged on civilian life. Most of the essays demonstrate a firm command of the pertinent primary sources and secondary scholarship on the Revolution, and several do so particularly well. For example, drawing on the pioneering work of T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution (Oxford, UK, 2004), Donald Sherbolm skillfully ties the loyalism of a successful Hunterdon County farming family (the Voughts) to its “assimilation into the British Atlantic culture” (168). Sherbolm then traces the plight...