#English Revolution

[comradeupdog]

Can’t sleep, thinking about how Cromwell didn’t kill enough loyalist and now I have to hear about yet another fucking King Charles and his weird ass German family

[richo1915]

After years of Greek, Roman and Byzantine histories, both in Podcast and Books, I took a step forward in time to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast.

After 6 months of listening to the English, American, French, Spanish ReConquista of South America, Haitian and Mexican Revolutions, I have popped out bleary eyed and squinting into the 20th century’s 1920s.

I still have the Russian Revolution to go (and a few odd Cold War books) but I find myself missing the Ancient World.

[nando161mando]

"In this episode we discuss Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, originally published in 1972.

This book is widely regarded as a seminal work of history from below, which popularised the concept of the English Revolution and helped to establish the ideas of the Levellers, Diggers, Seekers and Ranters as a key part of the radical tradition in England and beyond."

https://open.spotify.com/episode/28Kxvtu9tqe9xUSNKbNo5P

[haggishlyhagging]

“By 1900 child mortality was already declining—not because of anything the medical profession had accomplished, but because of general improvements in sanitation and nutrition. Meanwhile the birthrate had dropped to an average of about three and a half; women expected each baby to live and were already taking measures to prevent more than the desired number of pregnancies. From a strictly biological standpoint then, children were beginning to come into their own.

Economic changes too pushed the child into sudden prominence at the turn of the century. Those fabled, pre-industrial children who were "seen, but not heard," were, most of the time, hard at work—weeding, sewing, fetching water and kindling, feeding the animals, watching the baby. Today, a four-year-old who can tie his or her own shoes is impressive. In colonial times, four-year-old girls knitted stockings and mittens and could produce intricate embroidery; at age six they spun wool. A good, industrious little girl was called "Mrs." instead of "Miss" in appreciation of her contribution to the family economy: she was not, strictly speaking, a child.

But when production left the houschold, sweeping away the dozens of chores which had filled the child's day, childhood began to stand out as a distinct and fascinating phase of life. It was as if the late Victorian imagination, still unsettled by Darwin's apes, suddenly looked down and discovered, right at knee-level, the evolutionary missing link. Here was the pristine innocence which adult men romanticized, and of course, here, in miniature, was the future which today's adult men could not hope to enter in person. In the child lay the key to the control of human evolution. Its habits, its pastimes, its companions were no longer trivial matters, but issues of gravest importance to the entire species.

This sudden fascination with the child came at a time in American history when child abuse—in the most literal and physical sense—was becoming an institutional feature of the expanding industrial economy. Near the turn of the century, an estimated 2,250,000 American children under fifteen were full-time laborers—in coal mines, glass factories, textile mills, canning factories, in the cigar industry, and in the homes of the wealthy—in short, wherever cheap and docile labor could be used. There can be no comparison between the conditions of work for a farm child (who was also in most cases a beloved family member) and the conditions of work for industrial child laborers. Four-year-olds worked sixteen-hour days sorting beads or rolling cigars in New York City tenements; five-year-old girls worked the night shift in southern cotton mills.

So long as enough girls can be kept working, and only a few of them faint, the mills are kept going; but when faintings are so many and so frequent that it does not pay to keep going, the mills are closed.

These children grew up hunched and rickety, sometimes blinded by fine work or the intense heat of furnaces, lungs ruined by coal dust or cotton dust—when they grew up at all. Not for them the "century of the child," or childhood in any form:

The golf links lie so near the mill

That almost every day

The laboring children can look out

And see the men at play.

Child labor had its ideological defenders: educational philosophers who extolled the lessons of factory discipline, the Catholic hierarchy which argued that it was a father's patriarchal right to dispose of his children's labor, and of course the mill owners themselves. But for the reform-oriented, middle-class citizen the spectacle of machines tearing at baby flesh, of factories sucking in files of hunched-over children each morning, inspired not only public indignation, but a kind of personal horror. Here was the ultimate "rationalization" contained in the logic of the Market: all members of the family reduced alike to wage slavery, all human relations, including the most ancient and intimate, dissolved in the cash nexus. Who could refute the logic of it? There was no rationale (within the terms of the Market) for supporting idle, dependent children. There were no ties of economic self-interest to preserve the family. Child labor represented a long step toward that ultimate "anti-utopia" which always seemed to be germinating in capitalist development: a world engorged by the Market, a world without love.”

-Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women

[bunniesandbeheadings]

The UK had the chance to be the funniest country on earth if after Louis xvi was executed they were just like “so happy you finally killed that usurper! Obviously king George iii is the rightful king of France, descended from Edward iii, so we’re gonna be installing him asap”

[saltcherrycat]

• Angel Cloud •

[illustratus]

William Pitt the Younger by George Romney 

[enlitment]

Saw this in an antique book shop today and simply couldn't resist

Actual cost: 150 CZK (around 6 $)

Cost to my mental well-being: incalculable

[stfrancisprayer]

DEXTER FLETCHER as NED DOBB REVOLUTION (1985) - dir. HUGH HUDSON

[serendark]

【🐇Asahi🐇】

Day 12 of @magitober, Folklore of Zero!

Asahi stole my heart during Ashen Revolution :,)

Twitter post.

[comradeupdog]

One of the great tragedies of the English Civil War is that the so-called Long Parliament of 1640-1660 shut down theatre in London in 1642. The Revolution had accomplished much but its social policy was so tragically backwards and regressive. I find it hard to support any revolution that

[irhabiya]

the stillborn, arwa salih

[little-desi-historian]

Re: Dandyism

The inherent problem with the “foncy poncy oppressive English narrative” that is definitely historical revisionism.

1) anyone who was anyone in the 18th century (Hamilton, Tallmadge, Major André, Washington’s other aides to camp and the British generals) would’ve both presented as a “dandy” it was a symbol of status and being cultured and/or well read.

2) imperialism cuts both ways and both sides brutalized and lied to black and indigenous folks. Don’t get me, a brown person, started on the British Raj. (Reading 1) (reading 2)

Prompted by this post also I highly recommend The Vampire Lestat, Tallmadge’s memoir, the scarlet pimpernel, and dangerous liaisons.

[apollos-olives]

bullshitting my way through this thesis

[burningvelvet]

"I may stand alone, but would not change my free thoughts for a throne."

— Lord Byron, Don Juan (1823)