The Amateur and the Professional
The Amateur and the Professional

Author: P. J. A. Levine

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-02-13

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780521530507

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book highlights the growing divide in nineteenth-century intellectual circles between amateur and professional interest, and explores the institutional means whereby professional ascendancy was achieved in the broad field of studies of the past. It is concerned with how antiquarian 'gentlemen of leisure', pursuing their interests through local archaeological societies, were, by the end of the century, relegated to the sidelines of the now university-based discipline of history. At the same time it explores the theological as well as technical barriers which arrested the development of archaeology in this period. This is a notable contribution to the intellectual history of Victorian England, attending not simply to the ideas perpetrated by these communities of scholarship but to their social status, relating such social consideration to a more traditional intellectual history to create a new social history of ideas.

The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900
The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900

Author: Michael J. Crowe

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-05-04

Total Pages: 724

ISBN-13: 0486145018

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Detailed, scholarly study examines the ideas that developed between 1750 and 1900 regarding the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, including those of Kant, Herschel, Voltaire, Lowell, many others. 16 illustrations.

Clio's Battles
Clio's Battles

Author: Jeremy Black

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0253016878

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A survey of the variety of readings we have of the past and of how those readings are used in the present day to validate, discredit, unite, or divide. To write history is to consider how to explicate the past, to weigh the myriad possible approaches to the past, and to come to terms with how the past can be and has been used. In this book, prize-winning historian Jeremy Black considers both popular and academic approaches to the past. His focus is on the interaction between the presentation of the past and current circumstances, on how history is used to validate one view of the present or to discredit another, and on readings of the past that unite and those that divide. Black opens with an account that underscores the differences and developments in traditions of writing history from the ancient world to the present. Subsequent chapters take up more recent decades, notably the post–Cold War period, discussing how different perspectives can fuel discussions of the past by individuals interested in shaping public opinion or public perceptions of the past. Black then turns to the possible future uses of the then past as a way to gain perspective on how we use the past today. Clio’s Battles is an ambitious account of the engagement with the past across world history and of the clash over the content and interpretation of history and its implications for the present and future. “Remarkable both for its geographical scope and historical scale, and for its command of scholarship on a breathtaking range of subjects. I can’t imagine another historian who could attempt such an ambitious work or pull it off with such aplomb.” —William Gibson, Oxford Brookes University “Refreshing . . . Black eschews “Eurocentricism” and includes considerable material on other areas of the world that one does not usually find in such a work. Typical of Black’s writing, there is much to learn in the numerous small asides throughout the text. Taken together these form an impressive whole.” —Spencer C. Tucker, VMI

Enlightened Oxford
Enlightened Oxford

Author: Nigel Aston

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-02-19

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 0199246831

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660-1828
Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660-1828

Author: Jeremy Gregory

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2000-04-20

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 0191543136

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This wide-ranging and original book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the Church of England in the long eighteenth century. It explores the nature of the Restoration ecclesiastical regime, the character of the clerical profession, the quality of the clergy's pastoral work, and the question of Church reform through a detailed study of the diocese of the archbishops of Canterbury. In so doing the book covers the political, social, economic, cultural, intellectual and pastoral functions of the Church and, by adopting a broad chronological span, it allows the problems and difficulties often ascribed to the eighteenth-century Church to be viewed as emerging from the seventeenth century and as continuing well into the nineteenth century. Moreover, the author argues that some of the traditional periodizations and characterisations of conventional religious history need modification. Much of the evidence presented here indicates that clergy in the one hundred and seventy years after 1660 were preoccupied with difficulties which had concerned their forebears and would concern their successors. In many ways, clergy in the diocese of Canterbury between 1660 and 1828 continued the work of seventeenth-century clergy, particularly in following through, and in some instances instigating, the pastoral and professional aims of the Reformation, as well as participating in processes relating to Church reform, and further anticipating some of the deals of the Evangelical and Oxford Movements. Reluctance to recognise this has led historians to neglect the strengths of the Church between the Restoration and the 1830s, which, it is argued, should not be judged primarily for its failure to attain the ideals of these other movements, but as an institution possessing its own coherent and positive rationale.