Thursday, December 7, 2017

Alicia on Catherine Macaulay

Catherine Macaulay (Alicia Shupe)



Catharine Macaulay
 by Robert Edge Pine circa 1775 (npg.org.uk)


Lived 1731-1791, and was England’s first female historian. Like many other women in the Enlightenment, Macaulay was educated at home under the tutelage of her governess. However, her curiosity eventually surpassed that abilities of her tutor, and she took to her father’s library to continue her own education. Her father’s volumes on the history of the Greeks and Romans are credited with sparking her interest in history, patriotism, and freedom. Macaulay began writing her histories with the encouragement of her first husband, George Macaulay, in 1760. The first volume of A History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line was published in 1763, and the next three volumes appeared in 1765, ’67, and ’68. Volume five was delayed until 1771 as Macaulay’s publication method changed. Volumes six and seven did not appear until 1781 and 1783 respectively. At that time, they were released under a slightly different title: A History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution.

In addition to her historical volumes, Macaulay also published Loose remarks on certain positions to be found in Mr. Hobbes’s Philosophical Rudiments of Government and Society in 1767 as a response to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes. In 1777, while travelling to France, she wrote A History of England, from the Revolution to the present time, in a series of letters to the Reverend Doctor Wilson. Rev. Wilson had become a close friend of Macaulay’s and had even adopted her daughter after her husband passed away in 1766; however, the friendship ended abruptly in 1778 with Wilson’s disapproval of her second husband, William Graham, who was twenty-six years Macaulay’s junior. Macaulay’s last works to be published were her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth in 1783, and her Letters on Education and response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France each of which were published in 1790, just one year before her death.

Macaulay’s Letters on Education has been acknowledged as a major influence on Mary Wollstonecraft having been published only five years before Wollstonecraft’s own Vindication on the Rights of Woman. Catherine Gardner writes in her essay “Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education: Odd but Equal” that “…although the germ for the radical social reforms of the Vindication can be traced back to [Macaulay’s] Letters…” her feminism is not truly realized without Wollstonecraft’s emphasis as Macaulay was “less radical in her view of the conditions necessary for social reform.” (119). It is, perhaps, the effect of this muted radical feminism which has obscured Macaulay’s contributions behind those of the more famous Wollstonecraft.


Sources:

Britannica.com
Gardner, Catherine. “Catharine Macaulay's ‘Letters on Education’: Odd but Equal.” Hypatia, vol. 13, no. 1, 1998, pp. 118–137. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3810609.
Plato.stanford.edu


Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Rachel on the Gordon Riots



The Gordon Riots (Rachel Vachon)

Information sources:


Images:


Outline:

Political climate of the time

            Economic crisis: cost of living was too high
            Fighting a losing war with the United States
            Dissatisfaction with the Justice system and prisons

What sparked the outrage

            Catholic Relief Act was passed in 1778
            Protestant Association blocked the Act in Scotland
            Lord George Gordon decides to petition the Act in England as well

Who is Lord George Gordon?

            29-year-old former naval lieutenant
Widely considered to have been a little crazy
Harrassed the House of Commons for months about the Act

Friday, June 2, 1780

            Gathered at St. Georges Fields then marched on to London; 60,00 - 120,00 people
            The House decided not to vote on the matter and refused Gordon’s petition
            Widespread violence followed; destruction of a Roman Catholic chapel

A week of terror

            Sunday up through Monday; mass-houses were looted and destroyed, church property was set on fire in alleyways, Catholic schools and homes were invaded and ransacked; riotors began to attack lawmakers and police officers as well
Tuesday; foot soldiers arrive in England, but rioting continues; anger shifts from Catholics to any and all signs of State power; burning of Newgate Gaol
‘Black Wednesday’; The King announces that the military has the right to “shoot and kill without the need of magistrates”; Carnage ensued - anywhere from 200 - 300 rioters were shot dead in the streets
Thursday; all shops shut down as rioting continued, but began to wane
By Friday, the riots were considered to be over, but the city of London was left in absolute ruin; “destroyed ten times more property than was destroyed in Paris during the entire French Revolution”

The aftermath

            London remained under military occupation for months
            Lord George Gordon was tried for treason, but was found not guilty and acquitted
            Many of the rioters who were arrested were forced to serve as foot soldiers for the military in Africa