The influence of Lord Kames (Henry Home) on some of the founders of the United States

The jurist, judge, philosopher and legal historian Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1782) was one of the principal representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment. He also shaped considerably the thinking of some of the founders of the United States, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson. Franklin exchanged ideas with Kames about art and American affairs. For Adams, Kames was an authority on law and legal history, with a singularly critical stance towards the traditional feudal system. For Jefferson, Kames was an authoritative writer on law and a principal influence in the shaping of Jefferson’s own moral philosophy. Wilson made Kames a role model for young lawyers in a new American spirit. Kames’s thought has influenced these four founders of the United States more substantively than has commonly been assumed

The origins of early modern experimental philosophy

This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts to articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s

The contexts and contours of British economic literature, 1660-1760

This article explores some of the main bibliographical dimensions of economic literature at a time when there was much interest in economic matters but no discipline of economics. By looking at what was published in the round much economic literature is shown to be short, ephemeral, unacknowledged, polemical, and legistlatively orientated. This fluidity is underscored by the uncertainties about what constituted key works of economic literature and by the failure of attempts to make sense of that literature through dictionaries and histories. Economic literature in the period was, consequently, more unstable and uncertain than has often been acknowledged. It cannot, therefore, be simply characterized as either 'mercantilist' or nascent 'political economy'

Exhibiting Berthe Morisot after the Advent of Feminist Art History

Feminist art historians reassessed French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a period in which her work coincidentally received steady exposure in major museum exhibitions. This thesis examines how the feminist art historical project intersects with exhibitions that give prominence to Morisot’s work. Critical reviews by Morisot scholars argue that more frequent display of the artist’s work has not correlated to nuanced interpretation. Moreover, prominent feminist scholars and museum theorists maintain that curators virtually exclude their contributions. Attending to these recurrent concerns, this thesis charts shifts in emphases and inquiry in writing centered on Morisot to survey the extent to which curators convey new constructions of her artistic, social, and historical identities. This analysis will observe how distinct exhibition forms—the retrospective, the Impressionism blockbuster, and the gendered “women Impressionists” show—may frame Morisot’s work differently according to their organizing principles

The legacy of nineteenth-century replicas for object cultural biographies : lessons in duplication from 1830s Fife

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The Faculty Notebook, September 2005

The Faculty Notebook is published periodically by the Office of the Provost at Gettysburg College to bring to the attention of the campus community accomplishments and activities of academic interest. Faculty are encouraged to submit materials for consideration for publication to the Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Copies of this publication are available at the Office of the Provost

Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright

Copyright law is the site of significant contemporary controversy. In recent years copyright history has transformed as a subject from being one of interest to a few books historians to the focus of sustained historical investigation attracting the attention of scholars from across the humanities. This book comprises a collection of essays on copyright history by leading experts drawn from a range of countries and disciplinary perspectives. Covering the period from 1450 to 1900, these essays engage with a number of related themes. The first considers the general movement, from the sixteenth century onwards, from privilege to property-based conceptions of copyright protection. The second addresses the relationship between the protection provided for literary and print materials and that provided for other forms of cultural production. The third concerns the significance and relevance of these various histories in shaping and informing contemporary policy and academic practice. Essays include: 0. The History of Copyright History, by Kretschmer, Deazley & Bently; 1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent, by Joanna Kostylo; 2. A Mongrel of early modern copyright: Scotland in European Persepctive, by Alastair Mann; 3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne, by Mark Rose; 4. Early American Printing Privileges: the Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America, by Oren Bracha; 5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones, by Laurent Pfister; 6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright, by Maurizio Borghi; 7. Les formalités son mortes, vive les formalities! Copyright formalities in nineteenth century Europe, by Stef van Gompel; 8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the reprinting sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794, by Friedemann Kawohl; 9. Nineteenth Century Controversies relating to the protection of Artistic Property in France, by Frédéric Rideau; 10. Maps, Views and Ornament. Visualising Property in Art and Law: The Case of pre-modern France, by Katie Scott; 11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Art Copyright Bill 1862, by Ronan Deazley; 12. ‘Neither bolt nor chain, iron safe nor private watchman, can prevent the theft of words’: The birth of the performing right in Britain, by Isabella Alexander; 13. The Return of the Commons: Copyright History as a Common Source, by Karl-Nikolaus Peifer; 14. The Significance of Copyright History for the Publishing History and Historians, by John Feather; 15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property, by William St Clair. The volume is a companion to the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): www.copyrighthistory.or