Written in the 1750s (and never before published) by the Scottish physician Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding members of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, the History is a mock-heroic narrative of ten years in the life of an 18th century social club. It is a political satire representing the gamut of 18th century wit--pseudo- learned essays and digressions, bombastic letters and speeches, doggerel verse, riddles and conundrums, scatological humor and polite smut. Editor Micklus (American literature, SUNY Binghamton) provides introductory and explanatory discussion.
"Irrelevant erudition, happy insult, and plain silliness... In parts it is remarkably funny, and filled with wonderful lampooning and absurd event. The crude illustrations, done with pen-and-wash, are full of jollity and life."--Times Literary Supplement. When in 1745 Dr. Alexander Hamilton (no relation to Washington's treasury secretary) founded the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, he hoped to bring part of the culture of his native Edinburgh to this "barbarous and desolate corner of the world." For the next eleven years Hamilton scrupulously recorded the often tumultuous meetings of a club whose only sacrosanct bylaw was that no serious question could be given a serious answer. The result was a voluminous account rich with colorful detail and brimming with good humor, literary parody, tongue-in-cheek cultural criticism, and pointed political satire. First published in 1990 in a three-volume edition that won widespread critical acclaim, this remarkable literary and cultural document is now available in an abridged paperback version that retains the wit, flavor, and charm of the original. Students of early American history and literature as well as general readers interested in the period will now find accessible one of British America's true literary achievements, a work that brings the golden age of the colonial Chesapeake wonderfully to life. "Begin in the middle of the Book & read backwards, then forwards & skip about; I think now & then you will find something that will set you aroaring."--James Carroll, donating manuscript of "Record of the Tuesday Club" to a member of the Baltimore Library Company, May 4, 1824
To be associated with the Tuesday Club of Annapolis was to reach the apogee of mid-eighteenth-century, upper Chesapeake male society. Founded by Dr. Alexander Hamilton, the club engaged in a range of self-conscious, stylized activities that, when viewed as "social performance," says Wilson Somerville, sharpen our understanding of the flux of cultural forces within British America and the place of such colonial groups in an emergent, transatlantic "bourgeois public sphere." Using a combination of literary, historical, and sociological approaches, Somerville first examines the aesthetic dimensions of club performance and then its social and political aspects as he places the club in five major contexts: as a group with a self-consciously dramatic deportment, as a literary guild that regulated themes and rhetorical forms, as a media station in an international knowledge network, as an institution that defined an ideal of sociability in relation to the Chesapeake household, and as a mock state within which members wielded authority. The club, says Somerville, provided a semi-private sphere of interaction that was distinct from members' daily social order. Through the club, members tried to understand, negotiate, and mitigate the tensions of their lives arising from contradictions between brotherhood and empire, autonomy and sociability, the provincial and the metropolitan, the public and the private, and the solemn and the frivolous. To appreciate the extent to which members made sense of their world through the club, says Somerville, one must attend not only to the various modes of written, oral, and musical expression members employed, but also to the pageantry and theatrics, the self mockery and role-playing that marked their activities, and even to club regalia and its seating arrangements. Drawing on a wide range of period resources, The Tuesday Club of Annapolis will diversify our approaches to the literature and culture of the colonies and further reveal the limits of nationalist and regionalist outlooks to their study.
Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.
The Scottish Enlightenment was a period of intellectual and scientific progress, in a country previously considered to be marginal to the European intellectual scene. Yet the enlightenment was not about politeness or civic humanism, but something more basic - the making of an improved society which could compete in every way in a rapidly changing world. David Hume, writing in 1752, commented that 'industry, knowledge and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain'. Collectively this volume of essays embraces many of the topics which Hume included under 'industry, knowledge and humanity': from the European Enlightenment and the Scots relation to it, to Scottish social history and its relation to religion, science and medicine. Overarching themes of what it meant to be enlightened in the eighteenth century are considered alongside more specific studies of notable figures of the period, such as Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll, and David Hume, and the training and number of Scottish medical students. Together, the volume provides an opportunity to step back and reconsider the Scottish Enlightenment in its broader context and to consider what new directions this field of study might take.
