Magni Formica Laboris

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

A mobile army of metaphors,  metonyms , and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral [or Extra-moral] Sense

Although Pennsylvania had begun an  abolition  of slavery in 1780, it permitted slaveholders from other states to hold slaves in the state for up to six months. After that time, slaves would gain their freedom. Members of Congress were exempt from Pennsylvania's  Gradual Abolition Act , but not officers of the executive and judicial branches. Washington and other slaveholders  rotated their slaves out of the state  to prevent the slaves from establishing the 6-month residency needed to qualify for  manumission . His slave  Oney Judge  escaped from captivity in Philadelphia, and he gradually replaced most of his slaves in Philadelphia with  indentured servants   who were German immigrants. "This being the case, the Attorney General conceived, that after six months residence, your slaves would be upon no better footing than his. But he observed, that if, before the expiration of six months, they could, upon any pretense whatever, be car...

The husband may demand a divorce on the ground of his wife's adultery. The wife may demand divorce on the ground of adultery in her husband, when he shall have brought his concubine into their common residence. (source: French Civil Code, Book I. Title VI. Chapter I. "Of the Causes of Divorce". http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/code/book1/c_title06.html)

"This great drama [the French Revolution] transformed the whole meaning of political change, and the contemporary world would be inconceivable if it had not happened. . . . In other words it transformed men's outlook. The writers of the Enlightenment, so revered by the intelligentsia who made the Revolution, had always believed it could be done if men dared to seize control of their own destiny. The men of 1789 did so, in a rare moment of courage, altruism, and idealism which took away the breath of educated Europe. What they failed to see, as their inspirers had not foreseen, was that reason and good intentions were not enough by themselves to transform the lot of their fellow men. Mistakes would be made when the accumulated experience of generations was pushed aside as so much routine, prejudice, fanaticism, and superstition. The generation forced to live through the upheavals of the next twenty-six years paid the price. Already by 1802 a million French citizens lay dead; a...

Lucy calls into doubt the value of all of the specifically European modes of artistic or linguistic expression that are the touchstones not only of David's career, but his worldview: she jokes with him that he must think her activities - running a boarding kennel and growing produce for a farmers' market - worthless, that he must think she 'ought to be painting still lives' or learning Russian (p. 74). Where David stresses the apparent rights of individual desire, or self-expression, of a concern with individual consciousness and its apprehension of the sublime, Lucy emphasizes individual responsibility and responsibility to others - including non-human others  (p 28 of Andrew Van Der Vlies' J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace , Continuum 2010)

Reading Patterns of World History: Since 1750. On p789 it is asked: Why did the industrial movement begin in Britain? Why not, say, in China in the Song or Ming period? Why in the eighteenth century? Why in such areas as textiles, iron, mining, and transport?" The sort of answer that does not seem acceptable to a historian, but which I nonetheless think should hold some weight, is that it comes down to the contributions of key players in the industrial period. I am certainly interested in pursuing this question by looking at how the stage was set. How, so many factors came together in just the right proportion in order to create a climate where the ideas of such key players were fostered instead of neglected. But I cannot draw my attention away from those key players and the way they lived. Perhaps my early foray with the history of science has led me to this, because there it seems very plausible indeed that breakthroughs in science, or natural philosophy as it was called at t...