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John Talbot & the War in France, 1427–1453
by A. J. PollardJohn Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury was the last of the celebrated English commanders of the Hundred Years' War. In his lifetime his reputation for audacity and courage gave him an unrivalled fame among the English, and he was feared and admired by the French. A.J. Pollard, in this pioneering and perceptive account, reconstructs the long career of this extraordinary soldier and offers a fascinating insight into warfare in the late medieval period. Talbot was the last representative of generations of brave, brutal warriors whose appetite for glory and personal gain had sustained English policy in France since the time of Edward III. His defeat and death at the Battle of Castillon on 17 July 1453 marked the end of the wars. It was also the final act in a heroic but savage tradition.
John Thelwall: Radical Romantic And Acquitted Felon (The Enlightenment World #11)
by Steve PooleJohn Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
John Trumbull: Painter of the Revolutionary War
by Stuart A MurrayJohn Trumbull's sweeping historical paintings of battle scenes of the American Revolution hang in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., for all to see. This patriot-artist painted lifelike portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and he traveled around the country to capture realistic likenesses of the other Founding Fathers who drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Pore over the landmark work left by this brilliant artist and become acquainted with a man who, despite great adversity, was determined to portray in lush detail the first stirrings of the nation that would become America. The inscription on John Trumbull's memorial fittingly reads: "To his country he gave his sword and pencil."
John Tyler, the Accidental President
by Edward P. CrapolThe first vice president to become president on the death of the incumbent, John Tyler (1790-1862) was derided by critics as "His Accidency." In this biography of the tenth president, Edward P. Crapol challenges depictions of Tyler as a die-hard advocate of states' rights, limited government, and a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Instead, he argues, Tyler manipulated the Constitution to increase the executive power of the presidency. Crapol also highlights Tyler's faith in America's national destiny and his belief that boundless territorial expansion would preserve the Union as a slaveholding republic. When Tyler sided with the Confederacy in 1861, he was branded as America's "traitor" president for having betrayed the republic he once led.
John U. Monro: Uncommon Educator (Southern Biography Series)
by Toni-Lee CaposselaIn 1967, John U. Monro, dean of the college at Harvard, left his twenty-year administrative career at that prestigious university for a teaching position at Miles College -- an unaccredited historically black college on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. This unconventional move was a natural continuation of Monro's life-long commitment to equal opportunity in education. A champion of the underprivileged, Monro embodied both the virtues of the Greatest Generation and the idealism of the civil rights era. His teaching career spanned more than four decades, and, as biographer Toni-Lee Capossela demonstrates, his influence reached well beyond his lifetime. In addition to being a talented administrator, Monro was a World War II veteran, a crusading journalist, a civil rights proponent, and a spokesman for the fledgling Peace Corps. His dedication to social justice outlasted the fervor of the 1960s and fueled bold initiatives in higher education. While at Harvard he developed a financial aid formula that became the national template for needs-based scholarships and earned him the title "The Father of Modern Financial Aid." During his decade at Miles College he spearheaded a satellite freshman program in the economically depressed Greene County, then went on to help design a literacy program, a senior research requirement, and a writing-across-the-curriculum program at Tougaloo College. When hearing and memory loss drove him from the classroom, he moved his base of operations to Tougaloo's Writing Center, working with students in a collaborative relationship that suited his personality and teaching style. Only in 1996, after struggling with the symptoms of Alzheimer's for several years, did he retire with great reluctance. John U. Monro: Uncommon Educator is a tribute to this passionate teacher and an affirmation of how one person can inspire many to initiate positive and lasting change.
John Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life
by Danielle ShapiroWhat should a television look like? How should a dial on a radio feel to the touch? These were questions John Vassos asked when the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) asked him to design the first mass-produced television receiver, the TRK-12, which had its spectacular premier at the 1939 New York World&’s Fair. Vassos emigrated from Greece and arrived in the United States in 1918. His career spans the evolution of central forms of mass media in the twentieth century and offers a template for understanding their success. This is Vassos&’s legacy—shaping the way we interact with our media technologies. Other industrial designers may be more celebrated, but none were more focused on making radio and television attractive and accessible to millions of Americans.In John Vassos: Industrial Design for Modern Life, Danielle Shapiro is the first to examine the life and work of RCA&’s key consultant designer through the rise of radio and television and into the computer era. Vassos conceived a vision for the look of new technologies still with us today. A founder of the Industrial Designers Society of America, he was instrumental in the development of a self-conscious industrial design profession during the late 1920s and 1930s and into the postwar period. Drawing on unpublished records and correspondence, Shapiro creates a portrait of a designer whose early artistic work in books like Phobia and Contempo critiqued the commercialization of modern life but whose later design work sought to accommodate it.Replete with rich behind-the-product stories of America&’s design culture in the 1930s through the 1950s, this volume also chronicles the emergence of what was to become the nation&’s largest media company and provides a fascinating glimpse into its early corporate culture. In our current era of watching TV on an iPod or a smartphone, Shapiro stimulates broad discussions of the meaning of technological design for mass media in daily life.
John Venn: A Life in Logic (Studies In History And Philosophy Of Science Ser. #56)
by Lukas M. VerburgtThe first comprehensive history of John Venn’s life and work. John Venn (1834–1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn’s own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a “highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought,” Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women’s higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group. This essential book takes readers on Venn’s journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn’s key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician’s wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies—sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.
John Venn: A Life in Logic (Studies In History And Philosophy Of Science Ser. #56)
by Lukas M. VerburgtThe first comprehensive history of John Venn’s life and work. John Venn (1834–1923) is remembered today as the inventor of the famous Venn diagram. The postmortem fame of the diagram has until now eclipsed Venn’s own status as one of the most accomplished logicians of his day. Praised by John Stuart Mill as a “highly successful thinker” with much “power of original thought,” Venn had a profound influence on nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, ranging from Mill and Francis Galton to Lewis Carroll and Charles Sanders Peirce. Venn was heir to a clerical Evangelical dynasty, but religious doubts led him to resign Holy Orders and instead focus on an academic career. He wrote influential textbooks on probability theory and logic, became a fellow of the Royal Society, and advocated alongside Henry Sidgwick for educational reform, including that of women’s higher education. Moreover, through his students, a direct line can be traced from Venn to the early analytic philosophy of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and family ties connect him to the famous Bloomsbury group. This essential book takes readers on Venn’s journey from Evangelical son to Cambridge don to explore his life and work in context. Drawing on Venn’s key writings and correspondence, published and unpublished, Lukas M. Verburgt unearths the legacy of the logician’s wide-ranging thinking while offering perspective on broader themes in religion, science, and the university in Victorian Britain. The rich picture that emerges of Venn, the person, is of a man with many sympathies—sometimes mutually reinforcing and at other times outwardly and inwardly contradictory.
John Venn: Unpublished Writings and Selected Correspondence (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science #56)
by Lukas M. VerburgtThis is the first book to present a carefully chosen and annotated selection of the unpublished writings and correspondence of the English logician John Venn (1834-1923). Today remembered mainly as the inventor of the famous diagram that bears his name, Venn was an important figure of nineteenth-century Cambridge, where he worked alongside leading thinkers, such as Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, on the development of the Moral Sciences Tripos. Venn published three influential textbooks on logic, contributed some dozen articles to the then newly-established journal Mind, of which he became co-editor in 1892, and counted F.W. Maitland, William Cunningham and Arthur Balfour among his pupils. After his active career as a logician, which ended around the turn of the 20th century, Venn reinvented himself as a biographer of his University, College and family. Together with his son, he worked on the massive Alumni Cantabrigienses, which is still used today as a standard reference source. The material presented here, including the 100-page Annals: Autobiographical Sketch, provides much new information on Venn's philosophical development and Cambridge in the 1850s-60s. It also brings to light Venn's relation with famous colleagues and friends, such as Leslie Stephen, Francis Galton, and William Stanley Jevons, thereby placing him at the heart of Victorian intellectual life.
John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend (Railroads Past and Present)
by H Roger GrantIn John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend, historian H. Roger Grant details the fascinating life and impact of a transportation tycoon and "doctor of sick railroads." After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John W. Barriger III (1899–1976) started his career on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a rodman, shop hand, and then assistant yardmaster. His enthusiasm, tenacity, and lifelong passion for the industry propelled him professionally, culminating in leadership roles at Monon Railroad, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad and the Boston and Maine Railroad. His legendary capability to save railroad corporations in peril earned him the nickname "doctor of sick railroads," and his impact was also felt far from the train tracks, as he successfully guided New Deal relief efforts for the Railroad Division of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Depression and served in the Office of Defense Transportation during World War II. Featuring numerous personal photographs and interviews, John W. Barriger III is an intimate account of a railroad magnate and his role in transforming the transportation industry.
John W. Barriger III: Railroad Legend (Railroads Past and Present)
by H. Roger Grant“Readers will find in his biography an extraordinary tale of the travails of twentieth-century railroading through the career of this one man.” —The Annals of IowaAfter graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John W. Barriger III (1899–1976) started his career on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a rodman, shop hand, and then assistant yardmaster. His enthusiasm, tenacity, and lifelong passion for the industry propelled him professionally, culminating in leadership roles at Monon Railroad, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad and the Boston and Maine Railroad. His legendary capability to save railroad corporations in peril earned him the nickname “doctor of sick railroads,” and his impact was also felt far from the train tracks, as he successfully guided New Deal relief efforts for the Railroad Division of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Depression and served in the Office of Defense Transportation during World War II. Featuring numerous personal photographs and interviews, John W. Barriger III is an intimate account of a railroad magnate and his role in transforming the transportation industry.“Thanks to Roger Grant’s latest book, Barriger and his amazing legacy endures, waiting to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers. Trust me, you’ll learn a lot.” —Classic Trains“H. Roger Grant’s biography, John W. Barriger III, offers a new and much needed perspective on this prominent individual. Grant brings together an overview of Barriger’s career developments with an appropriate balance of insights into his early life and introduction to railroads.” —Journal of Transport History
John W. Garrett and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
by Kathleen Waters SanderHow John W. Garrett and the B&O Railroad he headed for twenty-six years helped to transform America by linking the nation.Chartered in 1827 as the country’s first railroad, the legendary Baltimore and Ohio played a unique role in the nation’s great railroad drama and became the model for American railroading. John W. Garrett, who served as president of the B&O from 1858 to 1884, ranked among the great power brokers of the time. In this gripping and well-researched account, historian Kathleen Waters Sander tells the story of the B&O’s beginning and its unprecedented plan to build a rail line from Baltimore over the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River, considered to be the most ambitious engineering feat of its time. The B&O’s success ignited "railroad fever" and helped to catapult railroading to America’s most influential industry in the nineteenth century.Taking the B&O helm during the railroads’ expansive growth in the 1850s, Garrett soon turned his attention to the demands of the Civil War. Sander explains how, despite suspected Southern sympathies, Garrett became one of President Abraham Lincoln's most trusted confidantes and strategists, making the B&O available for transporting Northern troops and equipment to critical battles. The Confederates attacked the B&O 143 times, but could not put "Mr. Lincoln’s Road" out of business. After the war, Garrett became one of the first of the famed Gilded Age tycoons, rising to unimagined power and wealth. Sander explores how—when he was not fighting fierce railroad wars with competitors—Garrett steered the B&O into highly successful entrepreneurial endeavors, quadrupling track mileage to reach important commercial markets, jumpstarting Baltimore’s moribund postwar economy, and constructing lavish hotels in Western Maryland to open tourism in the region. Sander brings to life the brazen risk-taking, clashing of oversized egos, and opulent lifestyles of the Gilded Age tycoons in this richly illustrated portrait of one man’s undaunted efforts to improve the B&O and advance its technology. Chronicling the epic technological transformations of the nineteenth century, from rudimentary commercial trade and primitive transportation westward to the railroads’ indelible impact on the country and the economy, John W. Garrett and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a vivid account of Garrett’s twenty-six-year reign.
John Walker's Passage
by Darrell VargaJohn Walker is one of Canada's most prolific and important documentary filmmakers and is known for his many thoughtful, personally inflected films. His masterwork, Passage, centres on Sir John Franklin's failed expedition to find the final link of the Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Canadian Arctic. It also gives us the story of John Rae, the Scottish explorer who discovered the fate of Franklin and the final link in the passage, but was left to the margins of history. Walker's film brings to this story a layering of dramatic action and behind-the-scenes documentary footage that build tension between the story of the past and interpretations of the present.Darrell Varga provides a close analysis of Passage, situating it within Walker's rich body of work and the Canadian documentary tradition. Varga illuminates how the film can be viewed through the lens of Harold Innis's theories of communication and culture, opening up the work of this great Canadian political economist to film studies.
John Washington's Civil War: A Slave Narrative (A History of the South #Vol. 9)
by Crandall ShifflettIn 1872, just seven years after his emancipation, a thirty-four-year-old former slave named John Washington penned the story of his life, calling it "Memorys of the Past." One hundred and twenty years later, in the early 1990s, historian Crandall Shifflett stumbled upon Washington's forgotten manuscript at the Library of Congress while researching Civil War Fredericksburg. Over the ensuing decade, Shifflett sought to learn more about this Virginia slave and the people and events he so vividly portrays. John Washington's Civil War presents this remarkable slave narrative in its entirety, together with Shifflett's detailed annotations on the life-changing events Washington records.While joining the canon of better-known slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, Washington's account illuminates a far different world. The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, Washington never lived outside the seventy-five-mile radius that included Richmond and Fredericksburg, until his emancipation. His narrative spans his experiences as a household slave, a laborer in the Fredericksburg tobacco factory, and a hotel servant on the eve of the Civil War. He also tells of his bold venture across Union lines and his experiences as a slave under Union officers.Washington's recollections allow for a singular look at the more personal aspects of slave life. Forced attendance at the slaveowner's church, much-anticipated gatherings of neighboring slaves at harvesttime, even a brief episode of courtship among slaves are among the events described in this remarkable narrative. On a broader scale, Washington was a witness to key moments of the Civil War, and his chronicle includes his thoughts about the wider political turmoil surrounding him, including his dramatic account of watching the Union Army mass around Fredericksburg as it prepared to invade the town. An excellent introduction and expert annotations by Shifflett reconstruct Washington's life through his death in 1918 and provide informative historical background and context to Washington's recollections.An unprecedented window into the life of a Virginia bondsman, John Washington's Civil Warcommunicates with real urgency what it meant to be a slave during a period of extreme crisis that sounded the notes of freedom for some and the end of a way of life for others.
John Wayne's World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties
by Russell MeeufThis cultural study examines the significance of John Wayne as a global symbol of masculinity in the mid-twentieth century. In a film career that spanned five decades, John Wayne became a US icon of heroic individualism and rugged masculinity. His widespread popularity, however, was not limited to the United States: he was beloved among moviegoers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. In John Wayne&’s World, Russell Meeuf considers the actor&’s global popularity and makes the case that Wayne&’s depictions of masculinity in his most popular films of the 1950s reflected the social disruptions of global capitalism and modernization during that time. John Wayne&’s World places the actor at the center of gender- and nation-based ideologies, opening a dialogue between film history, gender studies, political and economic history, and popular culture. Moving chronologically, Meeuf provides new readings of the films Fort Apache, Red River, Hondo, The Searchers, Rio Bravo, and The Alamo and connects Wayne&’s characters with a modern image of masculinity taking shape after World War II. Considering Wayne&’s international productions, such as Legend of the Lost and The Barbarian and the Geisha, Meeuf shows how they resonated with US ideological positions about Africa and Asia. Meeuf concludes that, in his later films, Wayne&’s image shifted to one of grandfatherly nostalgia for the past, as his earlier brand of heroic masculinity became incompatible with the changing world of the 1960s and 1970s.
John Wesley Hardin: Texas Gunfighter
by Lee FlorenTHE TRUE STORY OF THE BOY KILLER, JOHN WESLEY HARDIN, ACE OF THE FAST-GUN CROWD….MURDERER OF FORTY MEN….LIVING AND DYING WESTERN STYLE was paced by the fast-gun gentry, and John Wesley Hardin was the most prominent pace-setter among them. No gun in Texas was so deadly; no gunfighter so young. And yet many said he was a smart, friendly man, fighting on the side of Right...against the cruel and corrupt Carpetbaggers who overran his beloved Lone Star State...Hardin, criminal or saint, was fearless...and fast. He survived the blazing guns of other killers, countless Ranger roundups, the bloody Taylor-Sutton Feud, lynching parties and stalks by Pinkerton detectives. He outwitted his guards at the prison in Huntsville who tried to break him via the inhuman and ingenious “Water-house Torture.” He even survived his own reputation....In middle-age John Wesley Hardin became a lawyer and was admitted to the Texas Bar.But could he survive his own nature’s dark side?
John Wesley Powell: Grand Canyon Explorer
by Jerry MillerJohn Wesley Powell was known for his explorations of the canyon land area of southern Utah and northern Arizona, still "unknown" in the 1860s.
John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity
by Geordan HammondWhy did John Wesley leave the halls of academia at Oxford to become a Church of England missionary in the newly established colony of Georgia? Was his ministry in America a success or failure? These questions--which have engaged numerous biographers of Wesley--have often been approached from the vantage point of later developments in Methodism. Geordan Hammond presents the first book-length study of Wesley's experience in America, providing an innovative contribution to debates about the significance of a formative period of Wesley's life. John Wesley in America addresses Wesley's Georgia mission in fresh perspective by interpreting it in its immediate context. In order to re-evaluate this period of Wesley's life, Hammond carefully considers Wesley's writings and those of his contemporaries. A laboratory for implementing his views of primitive Christianity, the mission served to restore the doctrine, discipline, and practice of the early church in the pristine Georgia wilderness. Understanding the centrality of primitive Christianity to Wesley's thinking and pastoral methods is essential to comprehending his experience in America. Wesley's conception of primitive Christianity was rooted in his embrace of patristic scholarship at Oxford. The most direct influence, however, was the High Church ecclesiology of the Usager Nonjurors who inspired him with their commitment to the restoration of the primitive church.
John Wesley, Practical Divinity and the Defence of Literature (Routledge Methodist Studies Series)
by Emma Salgård CunhaJohn Wesley (1703–1791), leader of British Methodism, was one of the most prolific literary figures of the eighteenth century, responsible for creating and disseminating a massive corpus of religious literature and for instigating a sophisticated programme of reading, writing and publishing within his Methodist Societies. <P><P>John Wesley, Practical Divinity and the Defence of Literature takes the influential genre of practical divinity as a framework for understanding Wesley’s role as an author, editor and critic of popular religious writing. It asks why he advocated the literary arts as a valid aspect of his evangelical theology, and how his Christian poetics impacted upon the religious experience of his followers.
John Wesley: A Preaching Life
by Michael Pasquarello IIIThat John Wesley was not a systematic theologian is a point frequently made. Yet if that be the case, what kind of theologian was he? To look at his literary output over the course of his long life and ministry is to recognize the central role that sermons played. Thus, claims Michael Paquarello, Wesley was a homiletical theologian, one for whom the Word preached was the core means of reflecting on and understanding the meaning of the Gospel.In this "preaching life" of Wesley Pasquarello places Wesley's sermons in the larger religious, political, and intellectual world of their eighteenth-century context. Neither a biography nor an intellectual history, it is a homiletic history, one that both uses the details of Wesley's milieu to build a framework for understanding his sermons, and that illumines the practical wisdom embodied in the content, form, and style of Wesley's preaching. John Wesley: A Preaching Life vividly portrays the centrality of Wesley's preaching to the religious revival that transformed eighteenth-century England.
John Wesley: The Life of John Wesley
by Roy HattersleyJohn Wesley led the Second English Reformation. His Methodist 'Connexion' was divided from the Church of England, not by dogma and doctrine but by the new relationship which it created between clergy and people. Throughout a life tortured by doubt about true faith and tormented by a series of bizarre relationships with women, Wesley kept his promise to 'live and die an ordained priest of the Established Church'. However by the end of the long pilgrimage - from the Oxford Holy Club through colonial Georgia to every market place in England - he knew that separation was inevitable. But he could not have realised that his influence on the new industrial working class would play a major part in shaping society during the century of Britain's greatest power and influence and that Methodism would become a worldwide religion and the inspiration of 20th century television evangelism.
John Wheatley, Catholic Socialism, and Irish Labour in the West of Scotland, 1906-1924 (Routledge Library Editions: The Labour Movement #14)
by Gerry C. GunninFirst published in 1987. This examination of the career of John Wheatley indicates the way in which one Irishman – reared among Liberal and Radical coal miners and taught by Roman Catholic priests and nationalist leaders to regard obedience to the Catholic Church and promotion of Home Rule as the vital interests for Irish Catholics – became a Socialist and adapted his Radical political views and devotional Roman Catholic convictions to a Parliamentary and Catholic Socialism. This title will be of interest to scholars and students of British and Labour history.
John Wilkes Booth and the Women Who Loved Him
by E. Lawrence AbelWhen John Wilkes Booth died—shot inside a burning barn and dragged out twelve days after he assassinated President Lincoln—all he had in his pocket were a compass, a candle, a diary, and five photographs of five different women. They were not ordinary women. Four of them were among the most beautiful actresses of the day; the fifth was Booth's wealthy fiancée. And those five women are just the tip of the iceberg. Before he shot the president of the United States and entered the annals of history as a killer, actor John Wilkes Booth had quite a way with women. There was the actress who cut his throat and almost killed him in a jealous rage. There was the prostitute who tried to kill herself because he abandoned her. There was the actress who would swear she witnessed him murdering Lincoln, even though she was thousands of miles away at the time. John Wilkes Booth was hungry for fame, touchy about politics, and a notorious womanizer. But this book isn't about John Wilkes Booth---not really. This book is about his women: women who were once notorious in their own right; women who were consumed by love, jealousy, strife, and heartbreak; women whose lives took wild turns before and after Lincoln's assassination; women whom have been condemned to the footnotes of history... until now.
John Wilkes: The Lives of a Libertine
by John SainsburyJohn Wilkes remains one of the most colourful and intriguing characters of eighteenth-century Britain. Born in 1725, the son of a prosperous London distiller, he was given the classical education of a gentleman, before entering politics as a Whig. Finding his party in opposition following the accession of George III in 1760 he took up his pen with sensational effect, and made a career out of excoriating the new administration and promoting the Whig interest. His charismatic style and vicious wit soon ensured that he became a figurehead for the radical cause, earning him many admirers and many enemies. Amongst the latter were the king, and the artist William Hogarth who famously depicted Wilkes as a grinning, squint-eyed, pug-nosed agent of misrule. Whilst Wilkes's political career has been much explored, particularly the period between 1763 and 1774, much less has been written about his remarkable private life. This biography provides a more comprehensive examination of Wilkes throughout his long life than has hitherto been available. Taking a thematic, rather than chronological approach it is divided into six main chapters covering family, ambition, sex, religion, class and money, which allows a much more rounded picture of Wilkes to emerge. In so doing it provides a fascinating insight, not only into one of the most intriguing characters of the Georgian period, but also into wider eighteenth-century British society and its shifting attitudes to morality, politics and gender.
John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty
by Arthur H. CashThis book is about an audacious journalist and politician who was born in the City of London in 1726 and died in the City of Westminster in 1797, his life spanning a time that included the American Revolution, which he admired, the French Revolution, which he hated, and the industrial revolution, which he did not know was happening.