Reading the Royal Monument in Eighteenth-Century Europe is the first in-depth study of the major role played by royal monuments in the public space of expanding cities across eighteenth-century Europe. Using the royal public statues as the basis for its examination of modern European cities, the book considers the development of urban landscapes from the creation of capital cities to the last embers of the Ancien R?me and at how the royal politics of the arts affected the cityscapes of the time. The focus of the book thereby intersects across a spectrum of disciplines, including the social and architectural history of cities, the politics of urban planning, the history of monumental sculpture, and the material culture of the eighteenth century.

Reading the Royal Monument in Eighteenth-Century Europe is the first in-depth study of the major role played by royal monuments in the public space of expanding cities across eighteenth-century Europe. Using the royal public statues as the basis for its examination of modern European cities, the book considers the development of urban landscapes from the creation of capital cities to the last embers of the Ancien R?me and at how the royal politics of the arts affected the cityscapes of the time. The focus of the book thereby intersects across a spectrum of disciplines, including the social and architectural history of cities, the politics of urban planning, the history of monumental sculpture, and the material culture of the eighteenth century.

This book provides significant new insights into the Enlightenment in Portugal and its relationships with other European cultural movements using Eugénio dos Santos (1711–1760) as a common reference point. Eugénio dos Santos was a Portuguese architect and city planner who, among other projects, was responsible for the plans to rebuild Lisbon after the earthquake of 1st November 1755. His artistic and technical training, architectural production, aesthetic preferences and some of the books in his private library point to a person who embodied the transition between two moments in Portuguese culture, with their specific characteristics and particular reception of the practices and ideas that circulated among European intellectuals and practitioners. Over the 18 chapters of this volume, several specialists in different disciplinary areas discuss ideas, libraries, printed and handwritten documents, drawings, printing techniques, and architects, philosophers and writers of the 18th century, in order to offer a broad view of a time period closely associated with the construction of modernity.

This highly original study provides a detailed analysis of Catherine the Great's celebrity avant la lettre and how gender, power, and scandal made it commercially successful. In 1762, when Catherine II overthrew her husband to seize the throne of the Russian Empire, her instant popular fame in regions of Europe far from her own domains fit the still new discourse of modern celebrity and soon helped shape it. Catherine the Great and Celebrity Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe shows that over the next 35 years Catherine was part of a standard troika of celebrity-making agents-intriguing central figure, large-scale media, and an engaged public. Ruth P. Dawson reveals how writers, print makers, newspaper editors, playwrights, and more-the 18th-century's media workers-laboured to produce marketable representations of the empress, and audiences of non-elite readers, viewers, and listeners savoured the resulting commodities. This book presents long neglected material evidence of the tsarina's fantasy-inducing fame, examines the 1762 coup as the indispensable story that first constructed her distant public image, and explains how the themes of enlightenment, luxury consumption, clashing gender roles, and exotic Russia continued to attract non-elite fans and anti-fans during the middle decades of her reign. For the later years, the book considers the scrutiny inspired by the French Revolution and Catherine's skewering in unsparing misogynist cartoons as they applied to visual representations, her achievements as ruler, the long-ago overthrow of her husband, and her gradually revealed list of lovers. Dawson reflects on Catherine II's demise in 1796 and how this instigated a final burst of adoration, loathing, and ambivalence as new accounts of her life, both real and fictional, claimed to unwrap the final secrets of the first modern international female celebrity – even now the only woman in history widely known as 'the Great'.

Ten scholars examine English identity, what makes it distinct, and its role in shaping American culture To many, English immigrants contributed nothing substantial to the varied palette of ethnicity in North America. While there is wide recognition of German American, French American, African American, and Native American cultures, discussion of English Americans as a distinct ethnic group is rare. Yet the historians writing in English Ethnicity and Culture in North America show that the English were clearly immigrants too in a strange land, adding their own hues to the American and Canadian characters. In this collection, editor David T. Gleeson and other contributors explore some of the continued links between England, its people, and its culture with North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These essays challenge the established view of the English having no "ethnicity," highlighting the vibrancy of the English and their culture in North America. The selections also challenge the prevailing notion of the English as "invisible immigrants." Recognizing the English as a distinct ethnic group, similar to the Irish, Scots, and Germans, also has implications for understanding American identity by providing a clearer picture of how Americans often have defined themselves in the context of Old World cultural traditions. Several contributors to English Ethnicity and Culture in North America track the English in North America from Episcopal pulpits to cricket fields and dance floors. For example Donald M. MacRaild and Tanja Bueltmann explore the role of St. George societies before and after the American Revolution in asserting a separate English identity across class boundaries. In addition Kathryn Lamontagne looks at English ethnicity in the working-class culture and labor union activities of workers in Fall River, Massachusetts. Ultimately all the work included here challenges the idea of a coherent, comfortable Anglo-cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be English in North America.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an era of continuity as well as change. Though properly portrayed as the era of 'Protestant Ascendancy' it embraces two phases - the eighteenth century when that ascendancy was at its peak; and the nineteenth century when the Protestant elite sustained a determined rear-guard defence in the face of the emergence of modern Catholic nationalism. Employing a chronology that is not bound by traditional datelines, this volume moves beyond the familiar political narrative to engage with the economy, society, population, emigration, religion, language, state formation, culture, art and architecture, and the Irish abroad. It provides new and original interpretations of a critical phase in the emergence of a modern Ireland that, while focused firmly on the island and its traditions, moves beyond the nationalist narrative of the twentieth century to provide a history of late early modern Ireland for the twenty-first century.

Offers new insights into the political and modern uses of public monuments devoted to figures from the past and the role of historical culture in the creation of national identity.