History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
A runaway slave is recaptured, and charged with ingratitude by the master who has taken such pains to afford him economic security.
Between 1792 and 1796, John Aikin and his sister Anna Barbauld published a series of children’s stories titled ‘Evenings at Home.’ Among them was an imaginary dialogue in which a plantation owner accused a slave of ingratitude for running away. It is relevant not only to the history of Abolition but also to that politics which promises cradle-to-grave security in exchange for letting an elite shape our world.
John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ opens with Christian wondering how to convince his wife that their town and their family are in immediate danger.
John Bunyan’s groundbreaking allegorical novel ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (1678) opens with John in Bedford County Gaol, where he was imprisoned for holding unlicensed Christian gatherings. He recalls the time many years earlier when it first came to him, with disconcerting conviction, that there should be more to a believer’s Sunday than playing tip-cat on the village green.
Inspired by an avid interest in English warrior heroes, the fifteen-year-old Guthlac recruited a band of freebooting militiamen.
As a boy, so his biographer Felix tells us, St Guthlac (673-714) had been a mild-mannered child, a credit to his pious and well-to-do parents Penwald and Tette. But when he was fifteen, Guthlac began to be fascinated by stories of warriors and heroes and deeds of arms, and soon it became apparent that they were having a very negative effect on the blithe and innocent boy.
St Pega welcomed a royal servant with a serious eye condition to the monastery founded by her brother, St Guthlac.
After the death of St Guthlac in 714, his sister St Pega was left in charge of his hermitage at Crowland in modern-day Lincolnshire. For many years, exiled Mercian prince Æthelbald had been a frequent guest, so when one of his servants developed an eye problem which had all the doctors baffled, Crowland was their first thought.
The villagers of Mabutso in Southern Africa begged Dr David Livingstone to rid them of a menacing pride of lions.
On February 16th, 1844, Scottish missionary David Livingstone was digging a water channel at his mission near the South African village of Mabotsa when the villagers rushed up, crying that lions had again raided their village and slaughtered their sheep and goats. Livingstone ‘very imprudently’ agreed to go with them and demoralise the pride by shooting one of the dominant males.
Diplomat William Eton warns his fellow Englishmen that shutting down debate does not make for a more united society.
In 1798, diplomat William Eton published some observations on life in the Ottoman Empire. He warned readers back home that no society can be made harmonious by silencing dissenting voices; in such societies loneliness, drug abuse and distrust spiral out of control, sneering passes for debate, and only fashionably coarse comedians are allowed to raise a laugh.