Suchergebnisse

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is seen as seminal in signalling a new chapter in United States history, at one and the same time seeking to define the process of Americanization while also championing a new American identity, both distinct and distinctive. Turner's "frontier thesis" was presented little over ten years after another Frontier, the Habsburg Militärgrenze, or military frontier, was dissolved after over 350 years of existence. Yet the dissolution of the Habsburg frontier did not result in any such claims of significance for the longest military frontier in Europe. What did appear was a body of commentary and literature influenced by Romanticism and orientalism. This article reflects on the nineteenth-century popular and literary understanding of the Militärgrenze and calls for further investigation into the significance of the Habsburg frontier in Central European history.

Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is seen as seminal in signaling a new chapter in United States history, at one and the same time seeking to define the process of Americanization while also championing a new American identity, both distinct and distinctive. Turner's "frontier thesis" was presented little over ten years after another frontier, the Habsburg Militärgrenze, or military frontier, was dissolved after over 350 years of existence. Yet the dissolution of the Habsburg frontier did not result in any such claims of significance for the longest military frontier in Europe. What did appear was a body of commentary and literature influenced by Romanticism and orientalism. This article reflects on the nineteenth-century popular and literary understanding of the Militärgrenze and calls for further investigation into the significance of the Habsburg frontier in central European history.

Working for the Crown: German Migrants and Britain's Commercial Success in the Early Eighteenth-century American Colonies Relaxation in the movement of foreigners into Britain and the origins of the Foreign Protestants Naturalization Act of 1708 (7 Ann c 5) have been seen to lie in the arrival of religious refugees in England and the unsuitability of existing legislation to accommodate large numbers of foreigners. This paper proposes that trade and commercial interests in the American colonies promoted the cause of naturalisation by inciting German migration, causing Parliament to relax access to the domestic labour market and crucially allow German labour to be trafficked to the colonies. Reform was dictated by the needs of commerce and colonial enterprise, not just by politicians, courtiers and bureaucrats in London. The passing of the Naturalization Act (1708) and the subsequent General Naturalization Act (1709) both took advantage of European warfare and economic destruction, and were a direct response to the colonial needs to source continental labour. The Acts owed much to colonial Americans like Carolina Governor John Archdale who, like his co-religionist neighbour William Penn, acted in the interest of commerce and the colonial classes, broadening the base of non-Anglican access to the colonies. Opportunities afforded to German migrants in the American colonies, in particular, grew from this signal legislative change.

"As the meeting point between Europe, colonial America, and Africa, the history of the Atlantic world is a constantly shifting arena, but one which has been a focus of huge and vibrant debate for many years. In over thirty chapters, all written by experts in the field, The Atlantic World takes up these debates and gathers together key, original scholarship to provide an authoritative survey of this increasingly popular area of world history"--Provided by publisher

Anyone wishing to look beyond the paradigm of Western progress needs to understand how it came into being. In the intellectual culture of the 17th and 18th centuries, the competitive comparison of Ancients and Moderns and their respective relations to civilization and barbarism constituted one of the formative discourses. Yet alternative ideas of time and historicity are encountered not only in cultural contexts outside of Europe but also in the largely forgotten professional knowledge of the Old World: Thomism, Peripatetism, moderate forms of criticism, political theory, and legal practice. This book introduces a broad panorama of such intellectual cultures in Central Europe. It situates theological, historical, and philosophical scholarship in its institutional and epistemological environments: the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and the emerging Habsburg Monarchy. In doing so, it identifies struggles over competing pasts - Christian, ethnic, legal - as the core of those domains' intellectual development.