Browsing by Subject "Colonial America"
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Item John Singleton Copley's Boy with a squirrel : colonial American status and Anglicizing form(2011-08) Conti, Nicole Noel; Rather, Susan; Cohen, MatthewIn 1765, Boston artist John Singleton Copley sent Boy with a Squirrel—a portrait of his half-brother Henry Pelham—across the Atlantic Ocean; the painting ended up in the hands of London-based artists Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West. Because the work did not depict a patron and it was intended for an artistic audience, Boy with a Squirrel challenges the functionality of traditional portraiture in mid-eighteenth century colonial America. In Boy with a Squirrel, Copley uses form, iconography, and composition as a way to assert to his English counterparts his belonging to the London art community, showcasing his knowledge and even mastery of British and continental traditions. Copley communicates his membership in the London art public through his use through the formal lexicon of his desired audience, effectively Anglicizing his forms. While Anglicization plays a central role in the emergence of the public self in the mid- eighteenth-century American colonies, Copley's adaptation of Anglicizing forms challenges many of the standard conventions. Though the exchange of information between Britain and the American colonies was slow and incomplete, Copley would have had many different opportunities to learn about the British and continental traditions he hoped to demonstrate. The circulation of books and prints, the display of private collections, John Smibert's copies of masterworks, and the growing awareness of the Grand Tour all would have informed Copley's awareness of these British tastes.Item Slavery, war, and Britain's Atlantic empire : black soldiers, sailors, and rebels in the Seven Years' War(2009-12) Bollettino, Maria Alessandra; Sidbury, James; Brooks, Joanna; Eastman, Carolyn; Kamil, Neil; Olwell, RobertThis work is a social and cultural history of the participation of enslaved and free Blacks in the Seven Years’ War in British America. It is, as well, an intellectual history of the impact of Blacks’ wartime actions upon conceptions of race, slavery, and imperial identity in the British Atlantic world. In addition to offering a fresh analysis of the significance of Britain’s arming of Blacks in the eighteenth century, it represents the first sustained inquiry into Blacks’ experience of this global conflict. It contends that, though their rhetoric might indicate otherwise, neither race nor enslaved status in practice prevented Britons from arming Blacks. In fact, Blacks played the most essential role in martial endeavors precisely where slavery was most fundamental to society. The exigencies of worldwide war transformed a local reliance upon black soldiers for the defense of particular colonies into an imperial dependence upon them for the security of Britain’s Atlantic empire. The events of the Seven Years’ War convinced many Britons that black soldiers were effective and even indispensable in the empire’s tropical colonies, but they also confirmed that not all Blacks could be trusted with arms. This work examines “Tacky’s revolt,” during which more than a thousand slaves exploited the wartime diffusion of Jamaica’s defensive forces to rebel, as a battle of the Seven Years’ War. The experience of insecurity and insurrection during the conflict caused some Britons to question the imperial value of the institution of slavery and to propose that Blacks be transformed from a source of vulnerability as slaves to the key to the empire’s strength in the southern Atlantic as free subjects. While martial service offered some Blacks a means to gain income, skills, a sense of satisfaction, autonomy, community, and even (though rarely) freedom, the majority of Blacks did not personally benefit from their contributions to the British war effort. Despite the pragmatic martial antislavery rhetoric that flourished postwar, in the end the British armed Blacks to perpetuate slavery, not to eradicate it, and an ever more regimented reliance upon black soldiers became a lasting legacy of the Seven Years’ War.