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The responses of British people to the French Revolution has recently received considerable attention from historians. British commentators often expressed a sense of the novelty and scale of European wars which followed, yet their views on this conflict have not yet attracted such thorough examination. This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the attitudes of various groups of British people to the conflict during the 1790’s: the Government, their supporters and their opponents inside and outside Parliament, women, churchmen, and the broad mass of British public opinion. It presents the debate in England and Scotland provoked by the war both as the sequel to the French Revolution and as a distinct debate in itself. Emma Vincent Macleod argues that contemporaries saw this conflict as one of the first since the wars of religion to be significantly shaped by ideological hostility rather than solely by a struggle over strategic interests.
This study challenges the conventional polarities used to describe British politics of the 1790s; Pitt versus Fox, Burke versus Paine, Church versus Dissent, ruling class versus working class, Jacobin versus anti-Jacobin. Such polarities were sedulously promoted by Pitt's wartime government, which applied 'Jacobin' shamelessly to all its critics and opponents, and thus foreshadowed the McCarthyite tactic of guilt by association. The author seeks to make the less strident but more persuasive contemporary voices again audible. He takes seriously those who questioned the necessity for Burke's crusade to destroy the French republic, and who deplored Britain's alliance with the partitioners of Poland.
His formal schooling abruptly cut off at age eleven, George Washington saw his boyhood dream of joining the British army evaporate and recognized that even his aspiration to rise in colonial Virginian agricultural society would be difficult. Throughout his life he faced challenges for which he lacked the academic foundations shared by his more highly educated contemporaries. Yet Washington’s legacy is clearly not one of failure. Breaking new ground in Washington scholarship and American revolutionary history, Adrienne M. Harrison investigates the first president’s dedicated process of self-directed learning through reading, a facet of his character and leadership long neglected by historians and biographers. In A Powerful Mind, Harrison shows that Washington rose to meet these trials through a committed campaign of highly focused reading, educating himself on exactly what he needed to do and how best to do it. In contrast to other famous figures of the revolution—Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin—Washington did not relish learning for its own sake, viewing self-education instead as a tool for shaping himself into the person he wanted to be. His two highest-profile and highest-risk endeavors—commander in chief of the Continental Army and president of the fledgling United States—are a testament to the success of his strategy.
Analysing parliamentary references to the people, this book provides a more nuanced interpretation of eighteenth-century re-evaluations of democracy. It shows how interaction between parliamentarians and the public sphere in different political cultures produced more modern conceptions of the legitimacy of political power.