James Melton's lucid and accessible 2001 study examines the rise of 'the public' in eighteenth-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking ...territories, this was the first book-length, critical reassessment of what Habermas termed the 'bourgeois public sphere'. During the Enlightenment the Public assumed a new significance as governments came to recognise the power of public opinion in political life; the expansion of print culture created new reading publics and transformed how and what people read; authors and authorship acquired new status, while the growth of commercialized theatres transferred monopoly over the stage from the court to the audience; salons, coffeehouses, taverns and Masonic lodges fostered new practices of sociability. Spanning a variety of disciplines, this important addition to the New Approaches in European History series will be of great interest to students of social and political history, literary studies, political theory, and the history of women.
This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of ...the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.
Melton focuses on Thomas Geschwandel (1693--1761), a miner from the Gasteinertal, a remote Alpine valley some hundred kilometers south of the city of Salzburg. Geschwandel was only one of the roughly ...twenty thousand Protestants whom the archbishop of Salzburg expelled from his territory in the 1730s. Unlike most of the exiles, who ultimately found refuge in Protestant Prussia, Geschwandel, along with his wife, child, sister-in-law and twelve other natives of the valley, crossed the Atlantic on the first transport of Salzburgers to the newly founded colony of Georgia. Here, Melton finds out the life of Geschwandel back in Alpine village, and how he was able to survive in a non-European state.
Vienna's reputation as a musical capital dates back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it became synonymous with the composer's names of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. ...Here, Melton addresses several broader issues related to the role of music in the culture of the Habsburg monarchy and to Joseph Haydn's place in that culture. He also explores three key moments in Haydn's career and development as a composer, including his boyhood years in the Lower Austrian town of Hainburg, the decade that followed his leaving the Choir School of St Stephen's in Vienna, and his participation in Viennese salon life during the 1770s and 1780s.
Thomas Geschwandel (1693-1761) was a miner from a remote alpine valley south of Salzburg, and one of 20,000 Protestants whom the archbishop of that city expelled in the 1730s. Unlike most of the ...exiles, Thomas and his family crossed the Atlantic on the first transport of Salzburgers to the newly founded colony of Georgia. What sort of world did Thomas leave behind in his Salzberg valley? What was it about his life in the Old World that predisposed him to choose refuge in the New? What did he encounter when he got there, how did he adapt to the circumstances of his new home, and how did his life intersect with the larger colonial world into which he was suddenly thrust? And once he found himself in a new and unfamiliar world specifically one in which the institution of slavery (at least across the river, in the South Carolina colony) was taking root with a speed and brutality unprecedented in colonial North America how did he respond to a non-European people with whom he and his fellow Salzburgers had had no prior contact? The story of Thomas, the persecuted refugee from a European land who ended his days a yeoman in the Georgia low country, is the stuff of American myth; it is also a lesson in the ineluctable reach of slavery, even in a colony founded to exclude it. (Quotes from original text)
