Improper Pursuits
Improper Pursuits

Author: Carola Hicks

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2014-08-19

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 1466878649

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With these words to Boswell, Samuel Johnson dismissed Lady Di Beauclerk, the wife of one of his closest friends, a woman of the highest rank, the daughter of a duke, who had forsaken her reputation, her place in society, her children, and her role as lady-in-waiting to the Queen for love. Born Lady Diana Spencer in 1735, the eldest child of the third Duke of Marlborough, she was expected rigidly to follow a traditional path through life: educated in the fashion considered suitable for a girl, and married to a man of the appropriate rank for a duke's daughter. But finding herself in a desperately unhappy marriage to Viscount Bolingbroke, Lady Di overturned convention. She left her husband, maintained a secret relationship with her lover, Topham Beauclerk, hid the birth of an illegitimate child, and eventually helped to support herself by painting. Lady Di Beauclerk was a highly gifted artist who was able to use her scandalous reputation as an adulteress, aristocratic woman to further her career as a painter and designer. She painted portraits, illustrated plays and books, provided designs for Wedgwood's innovative pottery, and decorated rooms with murals. Championed by her close friend Horace Walpole, whose letters illuminate all aspects of her life, she was able to establish herself as an admired artist at a time when women struggled to forge careers. Carola Hicks provides an enthralling account of eighteenth-century society, in which Lady Di encountered many of the most eminent artistic, literary, and political figures of the day. Improper Pursuits is an absorbing study of a singular life.

Solon the Thinker
Solon the Thinker

Author: John David Lewis

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1472521145

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In Solon the Thinker, John Lewis presents the hypothesis that Solon saw Athens as a self-governing, self-supporting system akin to the early Greek conceptions of the cosmos. Solon's polis functions not through divine intervention but by its own internal energy, which is founded on the intellectual health of its people, depends upon their acceptance of justice and moderation as orderly norms of life, and leads to the rejection of tyranny and slavery in favour of freedom. But Solon's naturalistic views are limited; in his own life each person is subject to the arbitrary foibles of moira, the inscrutable fate that governs human life, and that brings us to an unknowable but inevitable death. Solon represents both the new rational, scientific spirit that was sweeping the Aegean - and a return to the fatalism that permeated Greek intellectual life. This first paperback edition contains a new appendix of translations of the fragments of Solon by the author.

Social Structure of Revolutionary America
Social Structure of Revolutionary America

Author: Jackson Turner Main

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-12-08

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1400879043

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Professor Main's conviction is that an understanding of political history in Colonial America depends on a knowledge of the country’s underlying social structure. To provide this he examines different types of societies in revolutionary America between 1763 and 1788: frontier, subsistence farm, commercial farm, urban. He studies in detail the nature of land ownership, distribution of property and income, relations between income levels and culture, and the extent of social mobility. Thousands of probate and. tax records are examined to provide an analysis of the economic class structure of a new nation. Traditional historical techniques are combined with a conceptual framework from sociology relating to class structure, stratification, and mobility. Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

On My Honour
On My Honour

Author: Tammy M. Proctor

Publisher: American Philosophical Society

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780871699220

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Arising in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements came into existence in Britain in an era of social and political unrest and were initially the center of intense controversy. Through the years, Guiding and Scouting broke down class, race, and gender distinctions and helped youth cope with an emerging mass culture and allowed boys and girls to stretch gender and generational boundaries. Using official documents, logbooks, diaries, and oral histories, Tammy Proctor explores the formation of the Scouts and Guides and their transformation during and after World War I. The interwar period marked a departure for the two organizations as they emerged as large multinational organizations that targeted not only adolesents, but also smaller children and young adults.