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"Scotland -- Biography"
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Scotland's Pariah
Scotland's Pariah is the first book to examine the remarkable life of John Pinkerton: antiquarian, poet, forger, cartographer, historian, serial adulterer, bigamist, and religious skeptic. A pugnacious and persistent man of letters who knew and was admired by literary masters such as Edward Gibbon, Horace Walpole, and William Godwin, Pinkerton's life was full of personal and professional misadventures.Patrick O'Flaherty's biography presents an engrossing account of Pinkerton's life and works from his early years in Scotland to his Parisian exile, covering his major editorial, antiquarian, and geographic works. Examining Pinkerton's involvement in the London literary scene, his conflicted relationship with the rise of Celtic nationalism, and his response to early literary romanticism, Scotland's Pariah is a shrewd and compassionate evaluation of an astonishing literary life.
eBook
Hard down! Hard down! : the life and times of Captain John Isbester from Shetland : 1852-1913
'Hard Down! Hard Down!' describes the eventful life of a Shetland man in pursuit of his ambitions - to reach the top in his profession, to find a wife, to cherish a family, to do his job well and to be respected by his peers. The account is enlivened by extracts from numerous well-chosen family letters, diaries and postcards revealing the minutiae of shipboard and family life 120 years ago.
Book
William Wallace
A deconstruction of the national biography and mythology of William Wallace. Freed from the historian’s bedrock of empiricism by a lack of corroborative sources, the biography of this short-lived late-medieval patriot has long been incorporated into the ideology of nationalism.
eBook
Cosmo Innes and the Defence of Scotland's Past c. 1825-1875
Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned?
The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives.
Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century.
This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.
eBook
John stuart blackie
John Stuart Blackie was one of the most impressive and influential figures of nineteenth-century Scotland, as well as one of the most striking and flamboyant. As an intellectual he translated Goethe's Faust and brought first-hand knowledge of German philosophy to Scotland as a means of keeping the Enlightenment tradition alive. As first Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen from 1839 to 1852 and then as Professor of Greek at Edinburgh until 1882, he played a, perhaps the, central role in modernising the Scottish university curriculum, removing the dead hand of theological orthodoxy, raising standards (and the entry age), introducing tutorial teaching and establishing new chairs (including the Edinburgh chair of Celtic). His role in the reform of secondary school teaching was equally central.
eBook
Listen : how Evelyn Glennie, a deaf girl, changed percussion
\"A nonfiction picture book biography celebrating Evelyn Glennie, a deaf woman, who became the first full-time solo percussionist in the world\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Livingstone's 'lives'
Explores how Livingstone has been represented in diverse ways and put to work in a variety of socio-political contexts.David Livingstone, the ‘missionary-explorer’, has attracted more commentary than nearly any other Victorian hero. Beginning in the years following his death, he soon became the subject of a major biographical tradition. Yet out of this extensive discourse, no unified image of Livingstone emerges. Rather, he has been represented in diverse ways and in a variety of socio-political contexts. Until now, no one has explored Livingstone’s posthumous reputation in full. This book meets the challenge. In approaching Livingstone’s complex legacy, it adopts a metabiographical perspective: in other words, this book is a biography of biographies. Rather than trying to uncover the true nature of the subject, metabiography is concerned with the malleability of biographical representation. It does not aim to uncover Livingstone’s ‘real’ identity, but instead asks: what has he been made to mean? Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Livingstone’s 'lives' will interest scholars of imperial history, postcolonialism, life-writing, travel-writing and Victorian studies.
eBook