King John and the Historians

1961 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Warren Hollister
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Distinguished Scholar ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
King John

King John Lackland was surely one of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule England. The dramatic ambivalence of his personality, the passions that he stirred among his own contemporaries, the very magnitude of his failures, have made him an object of endless fascination to historians and biographers. Whose interests would not be piqued by the man who was recently described by a distinguished scholar as “cruel and ruthless, violent and passionate, greedy and self-indulgent, genial and repellant, arbitrary and judicious, clever and capable, original and inquisitive”?As one might expect, King John has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Nearly every historian who touches on any aspect of his reign feels compelled to offer his own judgment of John's puzzling character, his effectiveness, even his personal morality. The present century has seen, in addition to numerous specialized studies of various facets of John's reign, no less than three major biographies of that indefatigable but luckless king. The first of these, by Miss Kate Norgate, was published in 1902 and reflects the traditional viewpoint of the late nineteenth century. The second, Sidney Painter's work of 1949, stresses the monarch's relations with his baronial and administrative subordinates and presents a more genial and sophisticated interpretation of John himself. Hopes for a promised companion volume dealing with military and naval institutions and the development of the common law under John have been shattered by Painter's untimely death.

Crime and Punishment

2019 ◽  
pp. 551-590
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
State Level ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
Penal Codes ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter discusses the development of criminal law in the second half of the nineteenth century, covering the statute law of crimes, crime rates, insanity, punishment and correction, and victimless crimes. The formal criminal law in the late nineteenth century was by and large a matter of statute. The concept of the common-law crime had been wiped out in federal law. The concept also decayed on the state level. As of 1900, some states still technically recognized the possibility of a common-law crime. Other states, by statute, had specifically abolished the concept. Only acts listed in the penal code were crimes, and nothing else. In some states, the courts construed their penal codes as (silently) abolishing common-law crime. Where the concept survived, it was hardly ever used; the penal codes were as a practical matter complete and exclusive—the total catalog of crime.

Making a Space for Antisemitism: The Catholic Hierarchy and the Jews in the Early Twentieth Century

2003 ◽  
pp. 415-430
Author(s):  
Brian Porter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This chapter argues that as recently as the 1880s, Catholicism, as it existed in Poland at the time, was still somewhat resistant to expressions of antisemitism. Catholicism, in other words, was configured in such a way in the late nineteenth century as to make it hard for antisemites to express their views without moving to the very edges of the Catholic framework. Catholicism and antisemitism did overlap at the time, but the common ground was much more confined than it would later become. If one moves forward fifty years, to the 1930s, one sees a different picture: the discursive boundaries of Catholicism in Poland had shifted to such a degree that antisemitism became not only possible, but also difficult to avoid. The upshot of this argument is that Catholicism in Poland is not antisemitic in any sort of essential way, and that religion did not directly generate the forms of hatred that would become so deadly and virulent in the early twentieth century. None the less, Catholicism did become amenable to antisemitism in Poland, so much so that the Church in Poland between the wars was one of the country's leading sources of prejudice and animosity.

A Theater of Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.

The Rediscovery of Babylonia: European Travellers and the Development of Knowledge on Lower Mesopotamia, Sixteenth to Early Nineteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Ooghe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation

Since the creation of its first disciplinary histories in the late nineteenth century, Near Eastern archaeology has perceived its origins largely in terms of individual breakthroughs, following the common precepts of a pre-Annales historiography. The founding figures mentioned in the works of Rogers, Hilprecht, Budge or Parrot were either great explorers, great scholars or, most importantly, great excavators. From Della Valle's first tentative explorations at Babylon in 1616 to the major excavations at Nineveh and Babylon three centuries later, Near Eastern archaeology saw itself as the fruit of individual discovery. ‘Real’ archaeology was furthermore perceived as a natural rather than a human science and subsequently taken to have originated in nineteenth-century positivism; earlier accounts were hinted at in only the briefest fashion.

The Chartists and the Constitution: Revisiting British Popular Constitutionalism

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common ◽  
Fundamental Law ◽  
English Law ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Popular Constitutionalism

AbstractDespite having a powerful influence on the historiography of radicalism and nineteenth-century politics for the past several decades, the language of the constitution has not recently received scholarly attention. In Chartist and radical historiography, the constitution is usually treated as a narrative of national political development. This article extends the horizons of Chartist constitutionalism by exploring its similarities with American constitutionalism. By doing so, it also opens up questions regarding the ideas of the movement. Like the Americans sixty years before, the Chartists were confronted by a parliament that they believed had superseded its constitutional authority. This perception was informed by a belief that the constitution rested on the authority of the fixed principles of fundamental law, which they argued placed limits beyond which Parliament had no power to reach. As a result, the Chartists imagined that the British constitution functioned like a written constitution. To support this claim, they drew on a sophisticated interpretation of English law that argued that the common law was closely related to natural law.

Rum, Romanism, and Evangelism: Protestants and Catholics in Late-Nineteenth-Century Boston

1999 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bendroth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
The North ◽  
Thursday Morning ◽  
Evangelical Protestants ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

On the morning of Wednesday, May 20,1885, Boston police arrested three Protestant clergymen for preaching on the Common. News of the outrage traveled quickly, and within hours the city's evangelical Protestants were in an uproar. When the preachers—A. J. Gordon, pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church; H. L. Hastings, editor of a locally popular evangelical periodical, the Christian; and W. H. Davis, superintendent of a mission in the North End—appeared at the Municipal Criminal Courthouse on Thursday morning, a crowd reported to be between four thousand and five thousand, “principally of the middle-class, well-dressed and well behaved,” thronged the steps of the building. “[I]t was clearly evident,” Hastings later wrote, “that something unusual was going on in the police court of the city of Boston.”

Firearm “Rights” in Canada: Law and History in the Debates over Gun Control

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (01) ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
R. Blake Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article explains why and how some Canadians have asserted a right to possess firearms from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It demonstrates that several late-nineteenth-century politicians asserted a right to arms for self-defence purposes based on the English Bill of Rights. This “right” was forgotten until opponents of gun control dusted it off in the late twentieth century. Firearm owners began to assert such a right based upon the English Bill of Rights, William Blackstone, and the English common law. Their claims remained judicially untested until recent cases finally undermined such arguments.

From Reconstruction to Reform: Modernization and the Interest Group State, 1875–1900

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Chamberlain ◽  
Alixandra B. Yanus ◽  
Nicholas Pyeatt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Voluntary Associations ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
State Level ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The rise of voluntary associations in the late nineteenth century has received significant scholarly attention over the last few decades. Some studies argue that modernization facilitates group formation, but other analyses (e.g., Crowley and Skocpol 2001; Gamm and Putnam 1999) find little support for the argument that modernization caused group formation. Here, we extend this debate to the study of the strength of state-level, voluntary associations with clear political objectives. Using state-level dues paid to national organizations as a measure of group strength, we find evidence that more modernized states typically had the strongest state-level organizations in the 1880s and 1890s. These empirical findings lend support to the modernization thesis but also suggest that group formation and strength may be explained by different processes.

Adjudication and interpretation in the common law: a century of change

Legal Studies ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Birks
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Success Story ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
First Time

This paper is concerned with one hundred and ten years of legal history. It is a success story. Yet it has, not an unhappy ending, for the end is in the future, but an unhappy present. Markers put down in 1883 and 1983 define the century. The change in question is the modernization of the literature of common law and hence of all the machinery of its interpretative development. Having been kept in shape first by the forms of action and then by a hardening of the doctrine of precedent, in the late nineteenth century the growing mass of case law urgently required to be more rationally ordered and explained. It began to find in the universities the means of achieving that improvement. Analysis, definition and classification, the familiar tools of the university, were brought to bear for the first time on the raw materials of the common law.

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