bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Lawrence H. Gipson and the First British Empire: an Evaluation
Authors: Lower A. R. M. 
Published: February 2004

North Americans are today living through a period of historic commemorations: the centennial of the Civil War, the centennial in 1967 of the Dominion of Canada, and a striking series of bicentennials, few years which lack their events to remember or to celebrate. Two hundred years ago this year the Treaty of Paris was signed. It and the events of which it was the culmination and the outcome changed the course of history, for they determined that England, not France, was to give her language and culture to that large part of the lands beyond the seas over which the fighting had taken place. No period has been more closely examined. The examination has gone on for the two centuries intervening, and will go on. In 1959 there appeared several new books on Wolfe and the taking of Quebec: by 2059 no doubt there will be still others. Why not? In those years a world was changing hands.Gipson's huge work is the latest full dress account of the period, and so wide is its scope that it has been in the making for over thirty years.The British Empire before the American Revolutionhas now reached its tenth volume. Two more are planned: one to cover the period 1770-75, one to include comments on other accounts and bibliographical material. Since Volume X actually reaches only to 1766, it may be that the author will, if spared, add three. The undertaking has built up into a massive historical structure.
Castlereagh and the Peace of Europe
Authors: Graubard Stephen R. 
Published: February 2004

This paper is concerned with two different sorts of problems. It is an attempt to explain and interpret the diplomatic and political concepts which guided Castlereagh and his fellow-negotiators at Vienna; it also raises questions about certain conventional interpretations of the nature of Castlereagh's own accomplishment. The credit generally accorded Castlereagh for his work at Vienna derives largely from the acceptance of conclusions reached by the late Sir Charles Webster. Since Webster's analysis reversed an earlier adverse judgment on Castlereagh, it must not be thought that the purpose of this study is to reassert the old view. Quite the contrary; the intention, very simply, is to ask whether Webster and those who have followed him have not neglected to ask certain sorts of questions about the Napoleonic era, most particularly about the climate of opinion which prevailed at that time. While twentieth-century historians have succeeded in rescuing Castlereagh from his critics, it is just possible that they have tended to think of his accomplishment in terms more appropriate to this century than to the early nineteenth. As a result, they may praise him for qualities which are less remarkable than they imagine, while failing to appreciate his unique capacities, which were not so much intellectual as diplomatic.This should not be taken to imply that a fundamental revision of the main outlines of this period is in prospect. The debt owed Sir Charles Webster by those who have followed him in the study of early nineteenth-century European diplomacy is not likely soon to be redeemed. Had Webster's sole accomplishment been to create order in an area where something like chaos had previously existed, this would have been reason enough to perpetuate his memory. By his imaginative and meticulous methods, however, he achieved considerably more than this; he restored a reputation which had too long remained in question and showed conclusively that certain traditional judgments about the Vienna accords reflected a thinly veiled political bias. Webster succeeded in doing what Lord Robert Cecil, the later Lord Salisbury, attempted in 1862 in the Quarterly Review, where he expatiated on the unusual qualities of the man who served as British Foreign Secretary in the tumultuous decade 1812 to 1822.
The Evangelical Inheritance
Authors: Meacham Standish 
Published: February 2004

Evangelicals and Evangelicalism seem unable to remain for long either in or out of favor. The line of periodic assessments which began by moving upward from the tart jibes of Sydney Smith to James Stephen's measured rehabilitation, took a plunge with the Hammond's indignant assault, and has continued to trace lesser fluctuations for the past thirty years. E. M. Howse, in Saints in Politics, attacked the Hammonds for lack of balance and attempted a rehabilitation. In the process, however, he lost his own balance and fell over backwards. Now Ford K. Brown's Fathers of the Victorians implies that one can again disparage the Evangelicals. Their legacy to the century, Brown suggests, was a negative and stifling one.This matter of the legacy makes the question of interpretation and reinterpretation important. Historians of nineteenth-century England agree that Evangelicalism contributed much to the temper of the age. Yet there agreement ceases. Brown, for example, thinks that the legacy, never a rich one, was ill-spent by the likes of Charlotte Brönte's sour-souled Mr. Brocklehurst. Noel Annan, rather, finds it husbanded and flourishing in the sensitive conscience of Leslie Stephen. Both may be right. If so, merely further proof of the strength and complexity of the Evangelical inheritance; further indication, therefore, of the need for its careful examination.The legacy cannot be examined apart from its source: the Evangelical faith itself. Without an understanding of that faith, one cannot know that while Zachary Macaulay was an Evangelical, Granville Sharp was not; without that understanding the true difference between the Evangelical morality of Henry Thornton and the humanitarian morality of Henry Brougham will go undetected.
Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870-1910
Authors: Foulke Robert D. 
Published: February 2004

By its beauty and grace the sailing ship invites that nostalgic sentimentality often bestowed upon relics of the past. Visitors who notice the inscription on the Cutty Sark at Greenwich are asked to share this veneration: “Here to commemorate an era the Cutty Sark has been preserved as a tribute to the ships and men of the merchant navy in the days of sail. They mark our passage as a race of men/ Earth will not see such ships as these again.” The image of the “glorious” last days of sail is largely the creation of retired seamen-writers. In an unfinished essay written just before his death in 1924, Joseph Conrad summarizes the era of the sailing ship with typical nostalgia:The last days of sailing ships were short if one thinks of the countless ages since the first sail of leather or rudely woven rushes was displayed to the wind. Stretching the period both ways to the utmost, it lasted from 1850 to 1910. Just sixty years. Two generations. The winking of an eye. Hardly the time to drop a prophetic tear. For the pathos of that era lies in the fact that when the sailing ships and the art of sailing them reached their perfection, they were already doomed. It was a swift doom, but it is consoling to know that there was no decadence.“Doom” without “decadence” — like the death of a beautiful woman in her prime — is the seaman-writer's usual elegy for the sailing ship.
History and Historical Criticism: Recent Work of Richardson and Sayles
Authors: Schuyler Robert Livingston 
Published: February 2004

The collaboration of Richardson and Sayles in the investigation of early English parliamentary history has long been justly celebrated. A full generation has passed since the publication of the first of those studies of theirs which have done so much to widen and deepen knowledge about medieval parliaments and have made their names, usually coupled, household words with students of medieval English constitutional history. The authors were influenced, no doubt, by some earlier historians, and the statement that they built on foundations laid by Maitland and McIlwain is not incorrect. In the volume, however, which is here under special consideration,The Governance of Mediaeval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta, they do not undertake,quahistorians as distinguished from historical critics, to come this side of the reign of King John, when parliaments had not as yet assumed their later form and functions.IWhy, it seems not inappropriate to ask, was this latest joint product of their historical activities written; to what class or classes of readers was it particularly addressed? It was evidently not designed as a manual of the type that students of English constitutional history have long been familiar with; for one thing, its chronological scope is limited to about two centuries, fromc. 1000 to 1215; and much of the book would be unintelligible to beginning students of the subject. An apologia, which serves as a Preface, and a preliminary chapter suggest answers to the questions that have just been asked.
Regal Power and the Rule of Law: a Tudor Paradox
Authors: Dunham William Huse 
Published: February 2004

Tudor statesmen, in their statutes and debates, and Tudor jurists, in reports and treatises, recorded their awareness of an antithesis between regal power and political law. Political action and juridical argument made them increasingly sensitive to an oppugnancy between executive authority and constitutional control. Medieval men of law, too, had noted this inconsonance in England's polity. Sir John Fortescue, while Henry VI's Chancellorin-exile in 1468, faced the dilemma; but he resolved it only verbally. He wrote: “regal power is restrained by political law.” Then he added, “such is the law of the Kingdom” of England. So facile a formula as Fortescue's might make nice theory, yet it was one easier to prescribe than to apply to a live monarch.The pragmatic Tudors, however, succeeded in surmounting the antithesis between political law and regal power, paradoxically, by augmenting both. To solve immediate political crises and to enhance the effectiveness of government, Privy Councilors and parliamentarians passed act after act that increased the King's prerogatives. At the same time, moreover, these very statutes afforced, by implication, the principles of political, or public, law. Kings and queens, judges and councilors, Lords and Commons during the sixteenth century formulated a concept of the rule of law and made it transcendant. By the 1590's they had accorded the rule of law statutory, judicial, and regal recognition. For the Tudor time-being, this principle served to balance regal power and political law and to give to this antinomy a congruity.
The Independents Reconsidered
Authors: Underdown David 
Published: February 2004

It seems impossible to begin an article these days without invoking, either as saint or devil, the shade of Sir Lewis Namier. Those who inhabit regions remote from the classic years around 1760 are absolved from acquiring more than a general understanding of the reversionary interest, the Court and Treasury party, and the rest of the Namierite stock in trade. Yet the merits and limitations of the methodology must concern and fascinate scholars who reassess the traditional interpretations of other periods of English history. They should not, as the Master of Peterhouse has warned, swallow the Namier method whole. But used with due caution, it may offer valuable insights for other centuries besides the eighteenth. The rigorous compilation and analysis of biographical data, the penetration of ideological smokescreens to the deeper motives behind them, the ruthless discarding of outworn shibboleths like “party,” the careful use of sociological criteria: at their best the Namierites have much to offer historians of other periods. Sir John Neale has applied the method, with modifications, to the reign of Elizabeth I, Norman Gash has carried it into the age of Peel, while the authentic members of the school proceed with their task of cleaning up the eighteenth century.The winds of Namierite change have begun to blow only fitfully, however, in the seventeenth century. One reason for this, perhaps, is that historians of the Stuart period have generally been absorbed in destroying each other on the gentry battlefield, or attempting in more constructive ways to solve the politico-economic problems of the “Century of Revolution”; there has been less effort applied to the details of parliamentary affairs.
“Sir Lewis Namier Considered” Considered
Authors: Walcott Robert 
Published: February 2004

The purpose of this paper is not to reconsider Sir Lewis Namier either as a person or as a historian. Since his death in 1960 there has been a spate of critiques, ranging from sound discussions of his historical method appearing in this and in two sister journals to the treatment by a Hindu journalist of Namier and other contemporary British historians which appeared in the New Yorker magazine under a title provided by the epigraph to Sir Lewis's most famous work. Whether his work should properly be interpreted in terms of his “continental conservatism” as Sir Edward Carr suggests, or whether Namier's influence on British historiography on balance has been pernicious (as one L.S.E. don believes), are not questions with which this discussion will be concerned. Its function is much narrower; to examine a recent contribution to these pages, the article by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., entitled “Sir Lewis Namier Considered.”In this essay Mansfield purports to explain just how Namier interpreted the early years of George III and exactly what his line of argument was in reaching his conclusions. Inevitably the question is raised: “Was there actual danger of tyranny in the political philosophy of the youthful George III?” This is an important question to which a number of distinguished historians have turned their attention; but Mansfield does not use the methods of the historian — whether sympathetic to Namier like Richard Pares, or admittedly hostile like the Master of Peterhouse. Mansfield is not a historian but a political scientist, and he writes that he is not proposing to question Namier's investigations of political facts.
Sir Lewis Namier Again Considered
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C. 
Published: February 2004

Walcott's critique raises three general issues: whether Sir Lewis Namier thought that the foremost task of an historian is the destruction of legends; whether he tried to write the whole truth about the eighteenth century; and whether anyone can properly be designated a professional historian or professional political scientist. Some of Walcott's particular criticisms can be answered in the discussion of these three issues.The first issue is whether Namier thought that the foremost task of an historian is the destruction of legends. At the beginning of his critique, Walcott doubts it, but does not deny it. Yet at the end of his critique, he summarizes “what Namier did do” as the removal of certain misconceptions about eighteenth-century politics; these misconceptions Namier called “legends,” according to Walcott. The misconceptions consist in analyzing eighteenth century politics in nineteenth-century terms, but they are not confined to nineteenth-century historians. They are held by twentieth-century historians as well, in fact, by all historians of the ante-Namier period, as Walcott calls it. Namier shows how much contempt he has for these historians and their legends in a sentence which cannot be considered innocuous. Namier says: “… I hardly remember having come across any contemporary materials, or any book reproducing such materials, which did not contribute something to my information.” Since “contemporary” means “eighteenth-century” here, Namier says by implication that no later ante-Namier historian has contributed to his information, unless he has reproduced eighteenth-century materials.
The Irish Church and the Reform Ministries
Authors: Condon Mary D. 
Published: February 2004

The Whig ministries of 1830-34 were faced with problems in regard to foreign affairs and parliamentary reform that were almost certain to reveal differences of philosophy within the Cabinets, yet it was on the Irish issues, more particularly that of the Episcopal Reformed Church of Ireland, that the ministries divided and broke. It is generally known that questions concerning the revenues of the Irish Church drove Stanley, the future Conservative Prime Minister, out of the Whig Party, enabled the House of Lords to rally after the Reform Bill and block measures passed by the Commons, and gave William IV an opportunity to dismiss a ministry which still retained the confidence of the lower house and replace it by a Government of his own choice. There is less knowledge, however, of the specific issues behind these events, and of the peculiarities of the Irish Church which hampered an easy solution of its problems. A study of both will serve to illuminate the conflict of parties and of personalities in the first five years of the reform age.From the utilitarian point of view, the temporalities of the Church were absurdly large. Containing only 852,064 members — less than there were in the see of Durham alone — it had a total of twenty-two bishops, including four archbishops. Many holders of benefices had no religious duties, nor, indeed, even a church in which to perform the one service required by their appointment; where parish duties were necessary, they were frequently discharged by a curate who received only a small fraction of the income of the incumbent.
Greene and Stanlis on Dr. Johnson and the Natural Law: a Medieval Postscript
Authors: Oakley Francis 
Published: February 2004

“And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night.”Matthew ArnoldPerhaps it is somewhat less than fair that to one whose interests lie in earlier centuries than theirs, the recent exchanges between Donald J. Greene and Peter J. Stanlis should have called irresistibly to mind the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Unfair, indeed, admittedly unfair, but not wholly without its moral. The strife has been ferocious and the crash of opposed artillery truly deafening. But the smoke remains dense, the objectives obscured, and so many of the projectiles hurled have spent their force on phantom targets. And why is this so? In part, no doubt, because of disagreements about the very nature of Dr. Johnson's views — but a medievalist would be presumptuous indeed to contemplate even the most tentative of interventions on this score. More germane to his interests, however, and surely no less fundamental to the impasse, is the dangerously impoverished historical landscape against which these views have been measured.This comes out very clearly in Stanlis's abuse of the label “Calvinist” — for which Greene correctly upbraids him. It comes out, too, in Greene's reliance on that shopworn tag “Augustinian,” with which Stanlis is rightfully uneasy — though, conceivably, for the wrong reasons. But it comes out most clearly of all in the assumption, common, it seems, to both parties, that it is safe and meaningful to speak of the Scholastic conception of natural law.
“The Expense of Many A Vanished Sight”
Authors: Kaufmann R. J. 
Published: February 2004

“In normal times the guillotine, luckily, is not at the disposal of historians.”Paul ValéryHistory is a humanly necessary mode of knowing. Every poised epoch is knit together by the imaginative language it uses to expropriate an organized past from whose qualitative contours it then silently, habitually infers its own nature. History as a fact of communal psychology thus maintains a many-layered referential manifold. This referential manifold must have some kind of emotional legibility and be formally intelligible if it is to serve to subordinate the threatening welter of the no longer relevant. A great deal of meritorious historical research and writing is merely propaedeutic or precritical to the maintenance of this self-validating mirror of each poised epoch. When the mirror no longer throws back usefully intelligible images it must be renewed by honest appraisal of the imaginative syntheses of prior epochs. Such enquiry nowadays tends to bewilderment and to the tenebrous by reason of the richness of the available record. In these latter days the historian is a modifier of pre-established images, his fundamental renovations of vision are few. The mirror stands there; it is bequeathed to us; we need it; it is a strenuous, intellectual task to preserve it at a working level of provocative clarity.Therefore it is especially desirable that higher historiography escape gossip-mongering about the defenseless dead, or that other form of intrusive projection of current frustrations upon past behaviour, the romanticizing of energy potentials of other eras.
The Mob and the Revolution of 1688
Authors: Sachse William L. 
Published: February 2004

Among the major political upheavals which have been called revolutions, the English Revolution of 1688 is generally recognized as extraordinary. Long accepted among moderate Englishmen as “glorious,” a revolution to end revolutions, in more radical quarters it has not been regarded as constituting a true revolution. Contemporary Russian opinion, for example, refuses to bestow upon it this accolade, regarding it as a mere coup d'état. Its conservatism, its legalism, its bloodlessness, the absence of zeal to be found among its protagonists: all contribute to this point of view. That these are characteristics of the Glorious Revolution cannot be denied. More precisely, they characterize the actions of the leaders of the Revolution — of the councillors and legislators and soldiers whose names are known. Of popular opinion and aspiration much less is known, and it is probable that little can be discovered in the surviving evidence. But they can be assessed, to some degree, by following the actions of the mob — or, more accurately, the mobs — as they erupted in London and other parts of the Kingdom.Mob disturbances, like the plague, were more or less endemic in Stuart England. Roger North, in his Examen, asserts that “the Rabble first changed their Title, and were called the mob” in the gatherings of the Green Ribbon Club. Regardless of when the term was first used, seventeenth-century Englishmen were well acquainted with various manifestations of mob activity. England's growing urban population augmented the mob, and before Shaftesbury, Pym had demonstrated that he was aware of the existence of this popular force and of the uses to which it could be put.