scholarly journals Huigen (Siegfried), Knowledge and Colonialism : Eighteenth-Century Travellers in South Africa. Leiden : Brill, Atlantic World Series, 18, 2009, 320 p., 2009, xii-273 p., ill. – ISBN 978-90-04-17743-7

2010 ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Nicolas Brucker
Author(s):  
Paul B. Wood

Although the rise of Scottish common sense philosophy was one of the most important intellectual developments of the Enlightenment, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the reception of Scottish common sense philosophy in the Atlantic world during the second half of the eighteenth century. This chapter focuses on the British context in the period 1764–93, and examines published responses to James Oswald, James Beattie, and, especially, Thomas Reid. The chapter contextualizes the polemics of Joseph Priestley against the three Scots and argues that it was Joseph Berington rather than Priestley who was the first critic to claim that the appeal to common sense was the defining feature of “the Scotch school” of philosophy. It also shows that Reid was widely acknowledged to be the founder and most accomplished exponent of the “school”, whereas Beattie and Oswald were typically dismissed as being derivative thinkers.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Valle

The article deals with correspondence in natural history in the eighteenth century between England and North America. The corpus discussed consists of correspondence between John Bartram and Peter Collinson, and between Alexander Garden and John Ellis. The approach used in the study is qualitative and rhetorical; the main point considered is how the letters construct scientific centre and periphery in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. A central concept is the “colonial exchange”, whereby “raw materials” from the colonies — in this case plant and animal specimens, along with proposed identifications and names — are exchanged for “finished products”, in this case codified scientific knowledge contained in publications.


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