The Ashley Cooper Plan

The Ashley Cooper Plan
Author: Thomas D Wilson
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-01-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469626292

In this highly original work, Thomas D. Wilson offers surprising new insights into the origins of the political storms we witness today. Wilson connects the Ashley Cooper Plan--a seventeenth-century model for a well-ordered society imagined by Anthony Ashley Cooper (1st Earl of Shaftesbury) and his protege John Locke--to current debates about views on climate change, sustainable development, urbanism, and professional expertise in general. In doing so, he examines the ways that the city design, political culture, ideology, and governing structures of the Province of Carolina have shaped political acts and public policy even in the present. Wilson identifies one of the fundamental paradoxes of American history: although Ashley Cooper and Locke based their model of rational planning on assumptions of equality, the lure of profits to be had from slaveholding soon undermined its utopian qualities. Wilson argues that in the transition to a slave society, the "Gothic" framework of the Carolina Fundamental Constitutions was stripped of its original imperative of class reciprocity, reverberating in American politics to this day. Reflecting on contemporary culture, Wilson argues that the nation's urban-rural divide rooted in this earlier period has corrosively influenced American character, pitting one demographic segment against another. While illuminating the political philosophies of Ashley Cooper and Locke as they relate to cities, Wilson also provides those currently under attack by antiurbanists--from city planners to climate scientists--with a deeper understanding of the intellectual origins of a divided America and the long history that reinforces it.

An Empire Transformed

An Empire Transformed
Author: Kate Luce Mulry
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479895261

Examines the efforts to bring political order to the English empire through projects of environmental improvement When Charles II ascended the English throne in 1660 after two decades of civil war, he was confronted with domestic disarray and a sprawling empire in chaos. His government sought to assert control and affirm the King’s sovereignty by touting his stewardship of both England’s land and the improvement of his subjects’ health. By initiating ambitious projects of environmental engineering, including fen and marshland drainage, forest rehabilitation, urban reconstruction, and garden transplantation schemes, agents of the English Restoration government aimed to transform both places and people in service of establishing order. Merchants, colonial officials, and members of the Royal Society encouraged royal intervention in places deemed unhealthy, unproductive, or poorly managed. Their multiple schemes reflected an enduring belief in the complex relationships between the health of individual bodies, personal and communal character, and the landscapes they inhabited. In this deeply researched work, Kate Mulry highlights a period of innovation during which officials reassessed the purpose of colonies, weighed their benefits and drawbacks, and engineered and instituted a range of activities in relation to subjects’ bodies and material environments. These wide-ranging actions offer insights about how restoration officials envisioned authority within a changing English empire. An Empire Transformed is an interdisciplinary work addressing a series of interlocking issues concerning ideas about the environment, governance, and public health in the early modern English Atlantic empire.

A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper

A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper
Author: W. D. Christie
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2023-01-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 3382100797

Reprint of the original. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Charleston and Savannah

Charleston and Savannah
Author: Thomas D. Wilson
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2023-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0820368113

Thomas D. Wilson’s Charleston and Savannah is the first comprehensive history of Charleston and Savannah in a single volume that weaves together the influences and parallels of their intrinsic stories. As two of the earliest English-speaking cities founded in America, Charleston and Savannah are among the nation’s top historic sites. Their historic characters, which attract millions of visitors each year, are each a rich blend of cultural, environmental, and socioeconomic elements. Yet even with this popularity, both cities now face a challenge in preserving their authentic historic character, natural beauty, and environmental quality. Wilson charts the ebb and flow of the progress and development of the cities using various through lines running within each chapter, constructing an overall character assessment of each. Wilson charts the economic rise of these port cities, beginning with their British foundations and transatlantic trade in the colonies through to their twentieth-century economic declines and resurgences. He examines the cultural and economic aspects of their Lowcountry landscapes and their evolution as progress and industrialization made their mark. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in his comparisons of the two cities, he considers their histories, natural landscapes, weather patterns, economies, demographics, culture, architecture, city planning, and infrastructure. While each has its own civic and cultural strengths and weaknesses, both are positioned as historically significant southern cities, even as they assess aspects of their problematic pasts.

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers
Author: Edward Pearson
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2023-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1512824399

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.