Corrections to The Enlightenment and the Book

As promised in my post of 24 October (An Author Thanks His Collaborative Readers), I am listing here corrections of typos and other errors in The Enlightenment and the Book. Many of these corrections involve mistakes in transcribing manuscript letters from William Strahan to William Creech, originally done from a microfilm copy that was often difficult to read. Some of the corrections made here will be discussed, with proper acknowledgment where appropriate, in the preface to the paperback edition that is scheduled to appear in June 2010. In the meantime, I encourage readers who find other errors to share them in comments to this post. 
p. xxv, line 21: read “$4.44” for “$4.55”
p. xxv, line 30: read “£105” for “£94” and read “$192” for “$142”
p. xxv, line 31: read “£85” for £76”
p. xxvi, line 4: read “£6.40” for “£6”

p. 12, line 8: read “in one of the earlier books” for “in what was perhaps the first book” (Note: The first book to use the term “the Enlightenment” in its title was apparently John Grier Hibben’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, which was published in 1910.)
p. 110, line 21: read “formerly” for “formally”
p. 114, line 3: read “from the shelf for Adam Smith. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo reads” for “from the shelf for James Burnett, Lord Monboddo. Adam Ferguson reads” (Likewise, on the cover of the book, the figure second from the left is Adam Smith, not Lord Monboddo, and the figure on the far right is Lord Monboddo, not Adam Ferguson.)
p. 167, lines 30–31: read “occurred in 1760, when the first volume of the first edition” for “occurred in 1763, when the first volume of a “new” (i.e., second) edition”
p. 219, line 24: read “coalition of publishers” for “coalition of four publishers” and read “Kincaid & Creech” for “Creech”
p. 220, note 57, line 3: read “edition” for “addition”
p. 272, line 2: read “290” for “291”
p. 305, note 104: read “no. 61” for “no. 6”
p. 338, line 26: read “Consequence;” for “Consequence,”
p. 340, line 19, and p. 341, line 7: read “13 November” for “10 November”
p. 341, caption to Fig. 5.4, line 11: read “Kincaid & Creech” for “Creech”
p. 342, first display quotation, line 1: read “al” for “all” and “particular, the Bookselling” for “particular Bookselling”
p. 342, second display quotation, line 2: read “Written Agreement” for “Written Agreement” and read “approve of it;” for “approve of it,”
p. 342, second display quotation, line 3: read “leaving undertakings” for “leaving the undertakings” and read “your own” for “your now”
p. 342, third display quotation, line 3: read “in writing” for “in writing”
p. 343, line 12: read “can interfere,” for “can interfere”
p. 344, display quotation, line 6: read “Tenor” for “Terms”
p. 344, display quotation, line 7: read “Evil” for “End”
p. 345, line 3: read “I know” for “I know”
p. 345, line 12: read “extravagant” for “extravagent”
p. 345, line 13: read “in very just Colours” for “in just Colours”
p. 345, display quote, line 5: read “Incidents” for “Incidentals”
p. 345, line 33: read “Dealings” for “dealings”
p. 346, line 5: read “Authors” for “Authours”
p. 347, note 36, line 2: read “during the eighteenth century except the Characteristics.” for “during the eighteenth century.”
p. 348, line 28: read “Sketches of the History of Man” for “Sketches of the History of Mankind”
p. 349, line 22: read “materially” for “naturally”
p. 349, line 32: read “if the Book” for “if this Book”
p. 350, line 30: read “Dependance” for “Dependence”
p. 352, lines 16–17: read “buying Gold too dear” for “buying Gold too dear”; read “shall, in future” for “shall in future”; read “cautious [?]” for “cautious”
p. 352, line 28: read “Tenor” for “Terms”
p. 367, line 7: read “no” for “not”
p. 375, display quotation, line 1: read “Some few years ago” for “Some years ago”
p. 387, line 31: read “George Robinson (1736–1801) expanded” for “George Robinson expanded”
p. 388, line 13: read “b. 1763” for “d. 1763”
p. 409, first display quotation, line 4: read “securely” for “surely”
p. 409, second display quotation, line 4: read “come up by yourself” for “come up by yourself”
p. 412, line 26: read “with twice[?] the number” for “with the number”
p. 413, line 28: read “the Appearance of a” for “the Appearance of”
p. 413, line 29: read “Behaviour” for “Behavior”
p. 414, first display quotation, line 2: read “out of his Depth” for “out of Depth”
p. 414, line 11: read “In a postscript,” for “Toward the end of the letter,”
p. 414, second display quotation, line 3: read “how much more we are in advance for the several Books we are concerned in” for “how much more we are concerned in”
p. 543, line 18: read “Passy” for “Passey”
p. 626, no. 49: read “A Complete History of England, Deduced” for “A Complete History of England Deduced,”
pp. 641 and 643, nos. 119, 128, and 129: read “Strahan and Cadell” for “Strahan & Cadell”
p. 646, no. 152: read “Mount Ararat” for “Mount Ararati”
p. 661, no. 217: read “Guild” for “Gould”
p. 664, no. 236: Pringle’s title should be followed by an asterisk, indicating a posthumous publication
p. 684, no. 347: This entry should be eliminated from table 2 because its author was a different William Thomson from the one listed in table 1.
p. 695: insert “Corbet: William Corbet (no. 289)” between “Company of Booksellers” and “Corcoran”
p. 727, entry for Barker: read “Nicolas” for “Nicholas”
p. 792–93 (index): Insert an entry for “M’Allister, Randal, 496, 498” after the entry for “Mayhew, Robert” on p. 792. The entry for “M’Euen” appears out of place on p. 793; it should be relocated after the entry for “McDougall, Warren” on p. 792, followed by the following two new entries:
M’Kenzie, William, 471–72
M’Kenzie, Mrs. William. See Hallhead, Sarah.
An entry for “M’Lehose, Agnes, 132, 233” should be inserted after the entry for “McLaws, William” on p. 792.
p. 814: “Woodhouse, William, 512, 527–28” should be a separate index entry after the entry for “women” rather than a subentry under “women” as it currently is.

Richard B. Sher

summary of chapter 6 of richard sher’s enlightenment and the book

As Dave mentioned in his blog entry concerning chapter 3 of Sher’s book, chapter 6 on William Creech is more descriptive than argumentative. Sher’s thesis for the chapter is fairly straightforward. He contends that Creech’s relationship to the London publishers Strahan and Cadell was not deferential and slavish, as some of Creech’s critics would have it, but rather a partnership that allowed Creech to forward the agenda of the Enlightenment. Sher goes on to argue that the Edinburgh publisher Archibald Constable, one of Creech’s major critics, had his own agenda in downplaying Creech’s contribution and touting his own accomplishments. Namely, Constable was somewhat ashamed of his humble beginnings, and anxious about his own legacy. He was right to be anxious in that Constable is perhaps best known for the spectacular failure of his business in 1826.

As is hinted at above, issues of class come into play when discussing rivalries between publishers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike Constable, according to Constable, Creech “had all the advantages of a privileged education, extensive connections with eminent booksellers [such as Kincaid, Strahan, and Cadell] who greased his path to the top, and much experience in London and on the Continent” (435). Creech was mistrusted by some because it was thought that he put on airs, and pretended to a distinction that he had not earned. Or as Sher puts it, Creech was “sometimes resented by booksellers and men of letters alike for blurring the distinction between them” (404). Of course, a major component of Sher’s thesis is that such distinctions were regularly blurred in the eighteenth century, as the patron was replaced by the publishing entrepreneur and many ad hoc relationships between authors and publishers were established and then replaced by something else, another temporary fix, until new factors arose to call forth new arrangements. But it is exactly this instability that makes print culture in this period so interesting. It certainly gives us something to think and write about as we make our attempts to publish our own print projects!

There are a lot of “juicy bits” in the chapter in terms of behind-the-scenes maneuvering between publishers. First we have Strahan conniving with Creech to get Alexander Kincaid to dump John Bell in favor of Creech (which, eventually, Kincaid did, making Creech’s career). Then we have Creech secretly siding with his London colleagues when the issue of perpetual copyright was debated around the time of the Donaldson decision in 1774. Strahan and Cadell, and the rest of the publishers in London, supported perpetual copyright which Scots publishers like John Bell and John Murray were dead-set against, since it undermined their profits based on reprints. Sher also spends some time discussing Creech’s conflicted relationship with Sir John Sinclair, editor of the massive The Statistical Account of Scotland (21 thick quarto volumes), published between 1791 and 1799. Sinclair believed that Creech mishandled the publication and cheated him out of profits, but Sher does an admirable job defending Creech, explaining that Sinclair had a poor understanding of the publishing business (Sher makes the same answer to similar charges about Creech’s publication of Robert Burns: he just didn’t get it).

Though Sher seems to relish these conflicts for their color, he does eventually bring it back to the Enlightenment. The Statistical Account is important not for the conflict between editor and publisher, but because it was a landmark and touchstone of the Scottish Enlightenment, according to Sher. As Sher puts it, “the success of The Statistical Account was to be measured not by financial profits but by the service it did as a source of enlightenment about the nature of late-eighteenth-century Scottish society” (425). It is Creech’s service to Enlightenment values that is important to Sher, as it should be. In that cause, in putting out The Statistical Account, Creech actually lost a good deal of his own money.

The same cause often led Creech to go against the wishes and business sense of his London partners, Strahan and Cadell. According to Sher, Creech was “a publisher who was willing to take substantial financial risks for the sake of scientific learning and enlightened principles, whether or not there was a likelihood of profit, and whether or not he had the support of his principal London partners” (427-28). This is the bulk of his argument against those who claim Creech was too beholden to his English partners. Creech was willing to confound Strahan and Cadell, and lose money, if the Enlightenment agenda could be better served.

The rest of the chapter takes up Constable’s campaign against Creech in a memoir published in 1821. He was not alone in his animosity towards Creech. John Bell was Constable’s main source of aspersions against Creech. J. G. Lockhart (in 1819, with the input of Sir Walter Scott) also basically argued that Creech was a preening non-entity, a characterization which is reproduced by other writers in the nineteenth century, such as Henry Cockburn in 1840. Sher does a good job showing how anti-Creech sentiment was part of a larger effort to highlight the importance and centrality of Edinburgh print culture in the nineteenth century, circa the Edinburgh Review, at the expense of the efforts of publishers like Creech in the eighteenth century. I will say however that Sher gets a little too ad hominem himself when he refers to Constable as a man with illusions of grandeur and not the innovator he claimed to be, and subtly seems to argue that eighteenth-century Edinburgh was superior, in regards to publishing, than nineteenth-century Edinburgh, when in fact these two phases were equally important, with one building upon the accomplishments of the other.

In the end, Sher makes a strong case for “The Achievement of William Creech” (the title of the chapter). Contrary to the accounts of his critics, Creech vigorously encouraged new authors, helped build up Edinburgh as a publishing hub, and cooperated with his London mentors only to further an Enlightenment agenda which acknowledged the importance of Scotland to the Enlightenment. Creech was truly “an Enlightenment publishing entrepreneur of the first order,” not averse to making money, but more interested in serving the advancement of learning and social melioration represented by the Enlightenment (440).

Joseph Byrne

getting there

Have no fear.  We’ll kick off the reading of Richard Sher’s Enlightenment and the Book this evening, with Eleanor’s lead-off essay on the introduction, and we’ll continue according to schedule for the rest of the week.

Best,

DM

Legacy of What?

Voltaire, Father of the Enlightenment

 

Last night I saw the play Legacy of Light, which I had previously mentioned on the blog. It follows the story of Voltaire and Emilie du Châtelet as she struggles to finish her work upon discovering a pregnancy (not by Voltaire) that she suspects will lead to her death.  The play parallels her story with that of 21^st-century Olivia, an astrophysicist married to Peter, a schoolteacher.  Olivia, a middle-aged cancer survivor, wants to have a baby after many years devoted mainly to her work, so the couple hires Millie, a young girl who wants to be a fashion designer, to bear a child for them.

 

Emilie du Châtelet, mother of three children

I was tempted to see this play by past good experiences with Arena Stage (South Pacific, Damn Yankees) and the possibility of an engaging story of an eighteenth-century women scientist and the “father of the Enlightenment” (a phrase used to describe to Voltaire about 47 times), as well as the play’s claims to a feminist, or at least nonsexist, perspective.  Alas, it pretty much struck out on both counts.  The most distracting element was the playwright’s embarrassing misreading of Voltaire.  Both du Châtelet and Voltaire chirp throughout the play that they live in the “best of all possible worlds.”  When Emilie dies, Voltaire repeats this line with a bit of sarcasm, but this is the only glimmer of recognition of the profound irony of those words.  The play explains du Châtelet’s complex personal life (married, but also living with Voltaire and sleeping with a younger poet as well) in one line: “We’re French!” 

 

 

The modern plot digs a little deeper into the characters but also disappoints by suggesting that Olivia will not become truly valuable until she becomes a mommy.  Olivia conceives the idea for a child in the midst of a car crash.  As the baby grows inside Millie, however, Olivia becomes more and more reluctant to compromise her pursuit of science and face motherhood.  She becomes fearful of how the baby will change her life to the point of backing out of the adoption, a possibility she announces hysterically after climbing up a tree (where she meets Voltaire, the father of the Enlightenment) to hide from Millie.

 

Millie’s plot offers the greatest complexity.  Grieving over the recent loss of their mother, Millie and her brother struggle to keep their family home out of foreclosure.  Millie tells Olivia and Peter that she wants to have their baby to earn money to go to fashion design school, assuming that her true motive (avoiding homelessness) would come across as unworthy.  There is more potential here for the analysis of middle-class values around family, education, reproduction, and bloodlines than the play takes advantage of, but it is nevertheless a poignant plot. The play also creates an ominous sadness around Millie’s apparent attachment to the unborn child.  At the same time, even Millie’s intricacy felt a bit manipulative as it was pitted against Olivia’s resistance to maternity that must be broken down before the end of the evening and the sense that du Châtelet’s legacy, unlike that of Voltaire (father of the Enlightenment) ultimately must rest with her offspring rather than her science.

CFP: SEDUCTION AND SENTIMENT IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1600-1800/ (essay collection)

Hi everyone, Toni Bowers and I are editing a collection of essays, and I wanted to share the CFP. If you have any questions, please drop me a line — and please also share this call with others who might be interested. Thanks much, Tita

 

CFP: Seduction and Sentiment in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 

(essay collection edited by Toni Bowers and Tita Chico)

 

What relations pertained between seduction plots, sentimental narratives, and the economic, social, credal, and political imperatives of the Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? What could “seduction” and “sentiment” mean in relation to one another? When, how, and why were the two positioned in relation to each other, as versions of one another, or as antonyms?

 

This collection of essays considers how new exigencies that emerged in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world reconfigured old and shaped possible new relations between seduction and sentiment.

 

The editors seek abstracts for essays to be completed by December 1,2009. Email 500-word abstracts to Toni Bowers (tbowers [at ] english.upenn.edu) and Tita Chico (tchico [at] umd.edu) by May 1, 2009.

 

**Please cross-post**

Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello @ Brazos Bookstore, 11/12/08

[photo of the Campeachy Chair built for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello by John Hemmings (for this chair and its background, cf. Morgan's review, below)]

One of the highlights of my week was attending a talk by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed about her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton, 2008).  (Here’s a local review and author interview, and here’s Edmund Morgan’s review essay, “Jefferson’s Concubine,” from the NYRB.)

I had publicized the event on the course-blog for my Swift and Literary studies students, since it was an 18c topic and I thought they could use this episode to talk about history, genealogy, and commodification.  And indeed the students who made it there enjoyed the talk and made all those connections, and then some.

For my own purposes, though, the talk, and AGR’s work more generally made me think about the role of biography in humanistic inquiry, since it seems to play an underanalyzed role in disciplines like history and literature and political theory.  And to some extent, her story was a story of how a scholar discovers the story she wants to tell and learns how to tell it from long periods of immersion in the archives.  I suppose this is a very traditional disciplinary tale, until we see who is telling it and the kind of tale she is telling.

AGR was frank about how, growing up in Conroe, TX, she first read about Jefferson in her grade school classes and had trouble reconciling her admiration for his love of books with her wariness towards him as a slaveowner.  This puzzlement was replaced by more sustained scholarly interest when she first read such books as Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black and Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.  But Jefferson remained a problem and a puzzle to her because of the profoundly mixed character he displays in his relations with blacks.

Much, much later, AGR found herself personally confronting the doubleness of Jefferson and the “open secrets” of his domestic arrangements while reading his farm book, the accounts of expenses and events related to Monticello, which is now kept in the Massachussetts Historical Society.  These very prosaic records contain much of the information we possess about the Hemingses, who surely must be one of the best documented families of enslaved people from this period.  AGR described to us the steadily accumulating anger and impatience she felt at Jefferson’s neat handwriting and precise notations in those account-books, when he was also the person who could direct those lives with such unquestioned power and authority.  And she wryly noted that because Jefferson never practiced double-entry book-keeping, he never settled his accounts or totaled up his debts, with the result that he died with over $100,000 in debt.

I appreciated AGR’s candid account of her approach to history-writing, because she talked about it as a “search for commonalties” and a continual “challenge to one’s empathy,” especially when the events described challenge our own sense of right and wrong.  At the same time, she readily acknowledged the “weirdness” of slave-era Virginia plantation families, where a half-sister could own another half-sister and her family, and take them along as possessions to her newly acquired estates, as Jefferson’s wife did with Sally Hemings upon her marriage.

Listening to AGR talk about the ambiguously enlightened figure of Jefferson, I was reminded of another plantation diarist from roughly this period, the Jamaican overseer Thomas Thistlewood.  Thistlewood, a figure who lacked Jefferson’s would-be aristocratic or intellectual qualities, kept extensive diaries throughout his time in Jamaica, recording not just his expenses and debts, but the tortures and rapes he imposed upon his slaves, together with scientific observations in horticulture and meteorology.  Trevor Burnard’s important Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire is a really interesting take on the historical, social and political forces that gave Thistlewood the power to act as he did.  But Burnard is as puzzled by his subject as AGR is by hers, when he sees that curious, unannounced mixture of Enlightenment and brutality combined in a single character.

DM

UPDATE: Congratulations to Annette Gordon-Reed for winning the National Book Award for Non-Fiction.  See here for an announcement and author interview.

fired up, ready to go

to the polls this morning.  I’ll be back with more regular postings shortly.  In the meantime, why don’t you watch this video of Barack Obama in one of my old haunts, Manassas, Virginia?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Obama drawing a crowd of 90,000 in a place whose main claim to fame when I was growing up was Civil War battlegrounds.  Never could have imagined this while I was there.

Happy election day.

Best,

DM

Postscript: Wow, that didn’t take long.  My neighbor, who is an Obama volunteer, told me last night that 44% of our precinct had already voted early, and it showed at 9am.  Hopefully more will turn up, though Texas seems to be having fewer voting problems than other states.  Nonetheless, here’s a nice Seth Godin post on this election’s lessons for marketers.  And finally, the all-important Luke Skywalker endorsement for Obama.

Post-Postscript: Oh, OK.  I’ll throw in the Sly and the Family Stone song that was going through my head the whole of election day . . . .

j. liedl on hubris and hermeneutics

Via Sharon’s EMN, I found a very nice post by jliedl about teaching a graduate methods course, and how this experience has opened up a whole new line of reflection about her own work.  She says:

This year, I’m struck by the issue of hermeneutics in historical interpretation — essentially, the belief that one has to see the past (or whatever culture one is studying) on its own terms; to understand the text (written document, image, series of actions) in the context of its creation).

So far so good. But one interesting effect of teaching this kind of course is that you lose some of your certainty about your discipline’s major assumptions and practices, because you are repeatedly exposed to good but “undisciplinary” questions about its subject-matter.   And you often find yourself lacking good, persuasive explanations for what you would like to explain in authoritative terms.  And this sense of unease with accepted explanations is precisely what you need to move your research and teaching into new areas.

Jliedl, for example, seems very concerned that she has no good answers to students who complain that her demand to read the past in “its” terms and not their own is too uncompromising to be of any use.  Whose terms do they use, where can they find them, and how should they use them?

Jliedl appropriately moves them away from the scary and rather abstract possibility of some “true understanding,” and towards a more productive form of question: “park your smug superiority at the door and get down to asking why and how people thought the way they thought in order to have done these things!”  And posing this question, which makes the past a topic of inquiry, makes it possible for students to move past a seemingly impossible demand to learn something new.  As she says,

That [question of "why and how people thought the way they thought"] opens up a whole different can of worms: charges of hubris and complaints of the impossibility of the task at hand. Who are we to think we can really understand this historical culture? Students complain that they lack the time and tools (background knowledge of the Bible, say, or languages) to truly interpret the past.

What interests me here is that students who were perfectly willing to judge the past wholesale (“Yes, women were hopelessly subordinated under sixteenth century law and custom”, and on the basis of very little knowledge of the period, suddenly become much more reticent and fearful when it comes to the project of learning more about the past.  Their sense of the “hubris” involved in understanding the past, then, is partly a defensive rationalization–do we really want to learn more?–and partly an acknowledgment of just how hard a job like this really is. But how do we lead those who are not fully professionalized, either as grad students or as undergraduates, into activities that resemble our disciplinary practices?

In one sense, I think it’s worth cultivating their sense of the largeness of the task, but not simply because it’s pedagogically useful: that sense of risk should accompany any large-scale attempt to reconstruct and explain the past, but I believe that beginners are much more likely to feel it than the practitioners, who would usually benefit from a bit more self-doubt about their own efforts of understanding, because this kind of reflection can lead to better teaching.

This was confirmed to me by a book I’ve been reading that describes the difficulties of teaching writing within conventional disciplinary frameworks.  The author, Beaufort, quotes David Russell to the effect that:

A discipline uses writing as a tool for pursuing some object.  Writing is not the object of its activity.  Thus, writing tends to become transparent, automatic, and beneath the level of conscious activity  for those who are thoroughly socialized into it . . . As a result, experts may have great difficulty explaining these operations to neophytes (15).

And Beaufort cites Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge, without realizing that she has explained the classic conundrum of the big-name celebrischolar who offers shockingly bad teaching to generations of students hoping to take advantage of his reputation.

As this example suggests, perhaps the most fundamental challenge of teaching derives not from any mastery of content but from “making  . . . tacit knowledge conscious,” as Beaufort phrases it.   And this kind of teaching can only come about through showing students how to find things out for themselves, even if it’s an incremental process.  And jliedl seems to be doing exactly that in her methods class.

Accordingly, jliedl wants to teach her grad students (but should it only be grad students?) how to strike out on their own, forget the intimidation of the fields that need to be mastered, and dive right into the questions that interest them.

I [she says] want to encourage them to explore a little bit more and to venture a few interpretations of their own when they read, say, some of the justifications offered in Wyatt’s Rebellion or selections out of John Bunyan’s Memoirs without making the demands so unreasonable or the task so overwhelming that they do nothing at all. I’m just not sure that I’ve struck the proper balance. At least not so far!

And these, to me, seem just the right questions to get her students going.

DM

some eighteenth-century blogs

Since I haven’t added much value to the blog lately I thought that I’d offer up to Long 18th readers some of the newer 18th c-ish blogs that have popped up in the last few months.  Some of these are intermittent, but worth checking out, anyway.

• Jenny Davidson’s Light Reading.  This blog is in a different category than the rest, because Davidson is a Columbia English prof who publishes fiction as well as 18c criticism, and she often uses the blog as a way to talk about what she reads and thinks about when not in the classroom.  But well worth following.
• The Scriblerus Memoirs.  A grad student blog, by someone who is thinking a great deal about encyclopedias, media, and 18c literature.
• A Chapter upon Chapters.  (What is it about Sterne and bloggers?  I’m seeing a pattern here, and probably falling into it myself.)  Grad student blog.  A brand-new blog, with an interesting post about McKeon’s takedown of Wahrman’s book.
• The Blake Archive’s (un)official blog, The Cynic Sang.  I only learned about this when Rachel Lee, one of the contributors, turned up here, but there’s some interesting Blake stuff here that people might want to lookat.
• Edward Vallance’s eponymous blog promises “radicalism, history and occasional pop culture references,” and delivers.  There’s an interesting thread about the relative evil of Oliver Cromwell that I found all the more compelling when I found two historians pummelling each other in the comments section about the civilian casualties in Drogheda.  Lots of interesting political history/commentary here, from someone who’s just published a narrative history of the Glorious Revolution.

In general, I get the impression that there are 18c folks out there blogging, but we don’t have as many continuously running blogs or discusssions as, say, the people doing medieval or early modern (if Sharon’s EMN or Cliopatria’s blogrolls are any indicator).  I’d also say that the credibility of print authorship and reputation, unsurprisingly, still have a lot of effect on one’s position in the blogiverse (look at Davidson or Vallance, for example).  But I also wonder whether the inherently mixed, anti-specialist tendencies in the blogging world will affect our notions of scholarly reputation, when the print books used as the basis for academic tenure have such limited distribution.

On a different note, since a number of courseblogs are linking to the Long 18th, I was also wondering if those doing 18c courseblogs would be interested in comparing courseblogs and how they’re using their blogs for instruction?  Let me know if you think this would be an interesting idea.

Best,

DM

UPDATE: Adela at Twofold, an 18c blog that had escaped my notice, takes up the interesting question of why grad students do or do not blog their scholarship, and points out another 18c blog of interest, Ink and Incapability, that I had not seen before.  So please check both these out, and spread the love as only an 18c specialist knows how um, visit their blogs and express your appreciation as vociferously as you can.

two upcoming events in the bloggish world

• For those interested in higher education pedagogy, the philosophy blog In Socrates’ Wake will be launching its group reading of James Lang’s On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching beginning Oct. 1.  For those interested in a sample, here’s Lang’s preface, T of C, and first chapter, which is about constructing the syllabus.
• As Scott Eric Kaufman has announced, the Valve has a number of book events coming up, including a reading of Jenny Davidson’s very interesting new title, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century.  Anyone familiar with Davidson’s blog knows that she is a writer with a really astonishing range of interests, so this seems very promising.

DM