Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

Imperial Russia, is was said, had two capital cities because it had two identities: St. Petersburg was Russia's "window to Europe," whereas Moscow preserved the nation's proud historical traditions. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by exploring how the tsarist regime actually tried to turn Moscow into a bridgehead of Europe in the heartland of Russia. Moscow in the eighteenth century was widely scorned as backward and "Asiatic." The tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their state's internal security and their effort to make Russia European. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to construct a new Moscow, with European buildings and institutions, a Westernized "middle estate," and a new cultural image as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I? How were the lives of the inhabitants changed? Did a "middle estate" come into being? How similar was Moscow's modernization to that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon? Lastly, how were Moscow and its people imagined by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

Enlightened Nationalism provides the first synthesis in English of Prussian political culture from the Napoleonic era to the Revolution of 1848. Matthew Levinger challenges the conventional notion that Prussia lagged behind Western Europe in its political development, demonstrating that Prussian leaders embraced a distinctive program of political modernization in response to their country's defeat by Napoleon in 1806-1807. Building on the eighteenth-century tradition of enlightened absolutism, Prussian leaders attempted to unite a rationalized monarchy with a politically active "nation," thus mobilizing the populace to resist the French oppressors. The new culture of "enlightened nationalism" influenced the political theory and program of both liberals and conservatives in nineteenth-century Prussia. The book has important implications for understanding both subsequent German history and the history of nationalism in general. The author shows that the so-called authoritarian tendencies in Prussia's political culture resulted from its distinctive response to the challenges of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, rather than from the persistence of premodern cultural or socioeconomic patterns. Likewise, by showing how nationalist activists drew on the cultural legacy of the Enlightenment, Levinger demonstrates that German nationalism cannot be understood as a uniquely pathological political phenomenon. Inspired by recent work exploring the role of discourse in historical change, the book analyzes how the word "nation" functioned in day-to-day debates and how this limited and shaped political options. Enlightened nationalism produced a mixed legacy: it promoted the reform of the education system, popular participation in local self-government, and administrative rationalization. But it also resulted in exaggerated fears of political dissent, reinforcing the authority of the monarchical state and inhibiting the formation of a vibrant system of parliamentary rule.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of Atlantic History, the study of the transnational interconnections between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, particularly in the early modern and colonial period. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Scotland and England produced such well-known figures as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Locke. Ireland’s contribution to this revolution in Western thought has received much less attention. Offering a corrective to the view that Ireland was intellectually stagnant during this period, The Irish Enlightenment considers a range of artists, writers, and philosophers who were full participants in the pan-European experiment that forged the modern world. Michael Brown explores the ideas and innovations percolating in political pamphlets, economic and religious tracts, and literary works. John Toland, Francis Hutcheson, Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Maria Edgeworth, and other luminaries, he shows, participated in a lively debate about the capacity of humans to create a just society. In a nation recovering from confessional warfare, religious questions loomed large. How should the state be organized to allow contending Christian communities to worship freely? Was the public confession of faith compatible with civil society? In a society shaped by opposing religious beliefs, who is enlightened and who is intolerant? The Irish Enlightenment opened up the possibility of a tolerant society, but it was short-lived. Divisions concerning methodological commitments to empiricism and rationalism resulted in an increasingly antagonistic conflict over questions of religious inclusion. This fracturing of the Irish Enlightenment eventually destroyed the possibility of civilized, rational discussion of confessional differences. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ireland again entered a dark period of civil unrest whose effects were still evident in the late twentieth century.

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters tells nothing less than the story of how the modern, Western view of the world was born. Cultural and intellectual historian Anthony Pagden explains how, and why, the ideal of a universal, global, and cosmopolitan society became such a central part of the Western imagination in the ferment of the Enlightenment - and how these ideas have done battle with an inward-looking, tradition-oriented view of the world ever since. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient creed; but in its modern form it was a creature of the Enlightenment attempt to create a new 'science of man', based upon a vision of humanity made up of autonomous individuals, free from all the constraints imposed by custom, prejudice, and religion. As Pagden shows, this 'new science' was based not simply on 'cold, calculating reason', as its critics claimed, but on the argument that all humans are linked by what in the Enlightenment were called 'sympathetic' attachments. The conclusion was that despite the many tribes and nations into which humanity was divided there was only one 'human nature', and that the final destiny of the species could only be the creation of one universal, cosmopolitan society. This new 'human science' provided the philosophical grounding of the modern world. It has been the inspiration behind the League of Nations, the United Nations and the European Union. Without it, international law, global justice, and human rights legislation would be unthinkable. As Anthony Pagden argues passionately and persuasively in this book, it is a legacy well worth preserving - and one that might yet come to inherit the earth.

Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a color-blind society. Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of color could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else. Essential reading for anyone disturbed by America's ongoing failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows conclusively that "separate but equal" represented far more than a southern backlash against emancipation-it was a founding principle of our nation.

An exploration of current scholarly thinking about the wide and surprisingly complex range of historical problems associated with the study of Ancien Régime Europe

This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.