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--- Counterculture Timeline: 1694 to 1829: Enlightenment to the first Democracies ---
Date   Context   Counterculture Events   The Arts   The Period
1694  

  In reaction to the Salem Witch Trials, many of the colonists in the Americas have moved away from religious practices.

  1694-1720 Enlightenment generation (Artist)
born
1674-1700 turns 20

   
1700       First American protest against slavery: `The Selling of Joseph'      







































Paris Salons (théâtre de société):
Mme. du Deffand
1697-1780
,
Mme. de Lambert 1647-1753
Comtesse de St. Brisson,
Duchesse de Choiseul,
Mme. de Marchais,
Mme. D'Epinay/i,
Mme. du Chatelet,
& many more









THE ENLIGHTENMENT

1740-1789

1704   First American newspaper: The Boston Newsletter

       
1712   Last execution for witchcraft in England   Slave revolts, New York    
1714       Prussia: witchcraft trials abolished

   
1715   First German newspaper   Rising of Native American tribes in South Carolina colony

   
1720       First collective settlement in Vermont
(which?)

   
1721       John Lombe's water-powered silk mill at Derby, England - first industrialized factory

   

--- 1720s: First generation born after the end of the witchcraft trials starts to turn 20 ---


 
1727       Quakers demand abolition of slavery

AWAKENING:
Great Awakening 1727-1746 rouses the colonies of the US Eastern Seaboard (Christian evangelist movement) to return to strict Calvinist roots.

  1721-1743 Awakening generation (Prophet)
born 1701-1723 turns 20


In 1732, Rousseau turns 20: Rousseau's devotion to the republican ideal was strengthened by his Genevan heritage, the Calvinist tradition. The spirit of Calvin, though already much relaxed and secularised, was an all-pervasive force in the Geneva of Rousseau's youth, and there is much in his later writings which becomes intelligible only in the light of that early influence. From the point of view of politics, the most important characteristic of Calvinism is its emphasis on inner-worldly asceticism. The ideal Calvinist society was a community of saints, austerely and tirelessly devoted to the task of ensuring that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The good life for them was a life not of worldly pleasure but of strict simplicity and unremitting duty. Although the theological foundations of this way of life, even in Geneva, had been greatly weakened by the end of the seventeenth century, the sober and puritanical habits it had engendered continued long thereafter to dominate the Genevan atmosphere. This was the air that Rousseau breathed in his earliest years, and it remained as one of the major influences on his subsequent thought.
http://www.constitution.org/jjr/watkins.htm


 
1728  

  Freemasons start    
1733   First? [Northern Europe] conscription - Prussia

 

   

--- 1740s: First generation born after the Great Awakening, return to Calvinism, starts to turn 20 ---

 
1740s   June 5 - First balloon,
St. Montgolfier, France
- ?1743?

 

THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
1747 Denis Diderot (1713-1784) begins encyclopedia

THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
1748 Baron de Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws - separation of powers between legislature & executive

  1744-1761 Liberty generation (Nomad)
born 1724-1741 turns 20


Fanny Hill : Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure - John Cleland - The tale of a naïve young prostitute in bawdy eighteenth-century London who slowly rises to respectability (banned in the US until 1966)

 
1750      

THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
Return to Nature - Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) (38) begina to promulgate the romantic conception of the noble - or innocent - savage. He first attracted wide-spread attention with Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts), in which he decried the harmful effects of modern civilization. Pursuit of the arts and sciences merely promotes idleness, and the resulting political inequality encourages alienation.
http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/rous.htm

Rousseau was from a French Protestant family that had moved to Switzerland).
http://www.constitution.org/jjr/watkins.htm

     
1752   Benjamin Franklin experiments with lightning and discovers electricity

         
1755   British East India Company formed 1757
= start of Britain's colonial expansion
  THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
The theme was elaborated in Rousseau's second essay, "Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégualité parmi les hommes" (1755) - which maintains that every variety
of injustice found in human society is an artificial result of the control exercised by defective political and intellectual influences over the healthy natural impulses of otherwise noble savages


  1755 Immanuel Kant (31) (1724-1804 Germany) : Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven

1756-1763 Seven Years War / French and Indian War in North America: France loses much of its colonial empire
   
1759       THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
Voltaire (65): Candide

     

--- 1760- Britain is the first nation to start to industrialize;
meanwhile it gained raw materials and markets through the British East India Company ---


   
1761 & 1762   Rousseau' s Èmile was banned both in France and Switzerland. The French parliament ordered the book to be burned, and in 1762 Rousseau was condemned for religious unorthodoxy. He fled to Switzerland, was only able to return to Paris in 1770, with the agreement that he would not write against the government.  

Diderot: Le Neveu de Rameau - first psychological novel

THE ENLIGHTENMENT:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Julie or the New Heloise (1761) - dream of finding a perfect love with a kindred soul; opened into literature the riches of the subconscious; one of the most widely read novels of the century;
& Emile (1762)- advocate of new educational practices that emphasized the natural development of children’s abilities, but gave most of his attention to the education of boys. His section on the education of girls, centered on the character of Sophie, proved to be one of his most controversial writings; it underlined the importance of mothers in educating their children, but encouraged teaching girls to be entirely subordinate and dependent on their husbands. Rousseau’s book provoked responses from women and men well into the 1800s;
& The Social Contract - "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they." Its catchphrase 'Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité', inspired the French Revolution. Rousseau argues that only by surrendering to the general will, can an individual find his fullest freedom. The general will, essentially directed toward common good, Rousseau believed, is always right. The citizens of a united community exchanges their natural liberty for something better, moral liberty.
/ Proposes the alternate to the situation Rousseau described in 1755 - a civil society voluntarily formed by its citizens and wholly governed by reference to the general will expressed in their unanimous consent to authority.

  1762-1786: Republican generation (Hero)
born 1742-1766 turns 20


Rousseau advised pregnant women to undo the fashionable tight corsets to allow their children to develop normally; encouraged women to nurse their own babies; formulated theories of education which have since been widely adopted; suggested the need for healthy, country vacations, and for children to develop naturally instead of being forced at an early age to conform to adult standards.


Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie (the first) published 1751 - 1772


  1760s-
New wealth from colonial empires, industrialization,
highways, canals, sidewalk paving,
encylopedias, museums; threshing machine, cotton gin, fly shuttle, spinning jenning, milling of silk (Britain mainly)

first classical composers; quadrille, minuet
1760s   1764 James Watt invents condenser, first step toward steam engine 1775 perfects 1782

      1765 Horace Walpole: Castle of Otranto - first Gothic romance

["Gothic novels embraced Medieval ("Gothic") culture, celebrated the wilder aspects of the creativity of Western Europeans from 12th-14th centuries: stained glass in soaring cathedrals, tales of Robin Hood and his merry men, and of King Arthur and the knights of the round table."]
   
1770   First public restaurant, Paris            
1772       Inquisition abolished in France

       

--- 1773 First generation born after Rousseau's ideas were published reaches their 20s: Goethe (24), Schiller (22) ---

    December 16, 1773 - "Boston Tea Party"
     

1773 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) (24): Goetz von Berlichingen - about a Medieval knight who resists submission to any authority beyond himself.

1774 Goethe: Sorrows of Young Werthers

   

Mayan Sacred Calendar: Planetary Underworld: Heaven 2: Night 1: Inner Assimilation - 1775 - 1794

   
1775-1783   CRISIS: INDEPENDENCE WAR OF BRITAIN'S NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES
1775-1783
  Founding Fathers of the US drew their radical political ideas largely from Leveler and Dissenting literature (Bernard Bailyn: The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution);
and much of their design of the structure of the new democracy from the Iroquois Nations White Roots of Peace.

1776 - Adam Smith: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (how old was he?)

1777 - Cooperative workshop for tailors at Birmingham
  1781 Frederich Schiller (23) (1759-1805): Die Räuber (The Robbers) - about a group of naïve revolutionaries and their tragic failure - performed in Mannheim, Stuttgart (region of Germany). Schiller arrested and forbidden to publish any further works. (Influenced by Rousseau and Goethe)

1781 Kant: Critique of Pure Reason

1783 Kant:
An Answer To The Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?'
& Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics

1783 Schiller flees to Leipzig and Dresden


  1770s beginning of ROMANTICISM in Germany:
Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm collect popular fairy tales, Johann Gottfried von Herder studies folk songs

& in
England: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele treat old ballads as if they were high poetry.

ROMANTICISM -
reaction to the sterility of the Enlightenment, celebrates simplicity and naturalness; affirms the worth of each man's experience and the importance of giving expression to it
1784   First mail by coach (London to Bristol)            
1786       Shay's Rebellion

       
1787       Shakers found Mount Lebanon, New York (to 1947)

  1787 Schiller to Weimar

1787-1811 Compromise generation (Artist) born 1767-1791 turns 20

   
1789   FRENCH REVOLUTION 1789 - 1799   French King is forced to create a constitutional monarchy

Vietnam: Tay Son peasant revolt

1791 - Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man

  William Blake (32)
(1757-1827):
1789 - Songs of Innocence
1790 - T
he Marriage of Heaven and Hell
   
1792       Denmark becomes first nation to abolish the slave trade

  Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Women    
1793   France threatened by economic collapse & invasion   July 27 - Maximilien Robespierre elected to the Committee of Public Safety: every male called into military, control over prices and food distribution

  William Blake:
America, A Prophecy
& Visions of the Daughters of Albion

   

Mayan Sacred Calendar: Planetary Underworld: Heaven 3: Day 2: Germination - 1794 - 1814

   
1794       March–April - France: Reign of Terror (ordered by Robespierre and his Committee) guillotines "enemies" of the new state; July 28 - Robespierre guillotined

Slavery abolished in the French colonies

  William Blake:
Europe, a Prophecy
& The Book of Urizen
& Songs of Experience


(slavery abolished in New Orleans? start of music?)

   
1795   October - Paris: royalist uprising, Napoleon Bonaparte disperses by killing 100.

  First poor relief/dole in Britain   Coleridge meets Wordsworth    
1796   March - Napoleon leads invasion of Italy, succeeds because supply system made independent by allowing the troops to live off the land; reliance on speed and massed surprise attacks by small compact units against the Austrian forces; and influence over morale.
  Goethe: Wilhelm Meister - "Wilhelm, disillusioned by love, starts actively to seek out other values, and becomes an actor and playwright."

Coleridge starts using opium as a pain reliever

   
1797   Napoleon fails to cross the Alps to attack Vienna.
Returns to France as the idol of Europe, plots invasion of Britain across the channel, but instead decides to crush the British Empire by striking at Egypt and, ultimately, at India.
  UK: Joseph Mallord William Turner (22) (1775-1851) (had been painting since 14, first exhibits at the Royal Academy at 15): "Millbank, Moonlight" (start of Impressionism?)

Coleridge: Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and most famous poems

  1797-1805
"The Great Revival" (Christian evangelist movement) sweeps the southern and western US





Early 1800s, Romantic critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised admiration for Shakespeare to adulation or bardolatry, in line with the Romantic reverence for the poet as prophet and genius, but this also led to a rediscovery of Shakespeare's works
1798   May - Napoleon takes Malta on the way to Egypt. July - Defeats Mamluks in the battle of the Pyramids. Aug. 1–2 - French fleet destroyed by UK's Nelson in Aboukir Bay.
Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was a province, declares war on France. French expedition to Syria repelled at Acre.


September 5 - First modern conscription enabled creation of the French Grande Armée. (Other European countries had "professional" armies.)


  Malthus: Essay on the Principle of Population (32)

William Wordsworth (28) (1770-1850) and Samuel Tayler Coleridge (26) (1772-1834) publish Lyrical Ballads ---> first ROMANTIC poetry; Wordsworth & Coleridge visit Germany, are influenced by Immanuel Kant's writings

 
1799   July - Ottoman forces attempt to land at Aboukir, Egypt. Meanwhile, French expelled from Italy by the forces of the Second Coalition. Unannounced, Napoleon returned to France, joins plot to overthrow the Directory; Nov. 9–10 becomes Consul.   Schiller is convinced by Goethe to return to playwriting. He and Goethe founded the Weimar Theater which became the leading theater in Germany, leading to a dramatic renaissance.  
1800   June 14 - Napoleon crosses St. Bernard pass and defeats Austrians at Marengo, Italy.

  Robert Owen (1771-1858) (29) takes over New Lanarck mills and starts social reforms      
1801   Treaty of Lunéville with Austria       Leigh Hunt (17) (1784 - 1859) ( "For some time after I left school, I did nothing but visit my school-fellows, haunt the book-stalls and write verses.") - first poems: Juvenilia  
1802   Treaty of Amiens (1802) with Great Britain --> France became paramount on the Continent.
August - plebiscite approved Napoleon becoming first consul for life

Napoleon intervenes in Italy, Germany, the Helvetic Republic (Switzerland), and Netherlands & refuses to arrange a commercial treaty with Great Britain.

+++++++++
Toussaint-L'Ouverture, Santo Domingo (French colony) slave revolt - surpressed

 

atomic theory,
biology
 
1803   May - Britain again declares war on France. Napoleon assembles invasion fleet (1803–5)

New Orleans become part of U.S. (Louisiana Purchase)

August 9 - first passenger steamboat (The Clermont) - first voyage on the Seine
     

--- 1804-1819 first generation to grow up after the French Revolution reaches their 20s ---
1804   Napoleon's invasion fleet is repeatedly struck by storms and tries to capture Haiti.

May - Napoleon had himself proclaimed emperor;
Dec 2 - crowned himself

  William Blake:
Milton (1804-08)
& Jerusalem (1804-20)
   
1805   Napoleon proclaims himself king of Italy and annexes Genoa; Third Coalition formed by Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Sweden. Napoleon defeats Austrians at Ulm, occupies Vienna, Dec. 2 - defeats Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz.

British (Nelson) naval victory at Trafalgar

Dec. 26 - Treaty of Pressburg: Austria forced out of the Third Coalition.

       
1806   Prussia enters the Third Coalition late in 1806, defeated (Oct. 14) at Jena.
Napoleon enters Berlin in triumph.
Holy Roman Empire dissolved; kingdoms of Holland and Westphalia were created (1806 and 1807), with Napoleon's brothers occupying the thrones.


       
1807   Napoleon continues battle with Russia; June 14 - Russia defeated.

Napoleon ruler of Europe, re-arranges Europe:
July - By the treaties of Tilsit King Frederick William III of Prussia loses half of his territories and became a vassal to France; Russia recognized the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, created from Prussian Poland, and other territorial changes.

August 16 - gaslight introduced, London

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Britain bans the slave trade

  Ingres (1780-1867) (27): begins most famous painting    
1808   Napoleon defeats Sweden with help of Russia; makes brother king of Spain  

Rebellion against Napoleon? in Madrid inspires Goya's (1746-1828) paintings of revolution

Napoleon abolishes the Inquisition in Spain & Italy (the end of the Inquisition)

Charles Fourier (1772-1837): Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinees generales (Theory of the four movements and the general destinies), appears anonymously in Lyon.

  Goethe writing Faust Part I -
(1832 Part II)

Leigh Hunt becomes editor of political independent Examiner, his brother's newspaper
   
1809       George Byron (1788-1824) tours Spain, Portugal, Italy, Balkans.        
1810                
1811       Luddite movement destroys industrial machines in North England

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (19) (1792-1822) at Oxford, publishes pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which gets him expelled; four months later elopes with and marries a 16 year old, marries her August 28, later invites college friend Hogg to share household – and wife, according to the ideals of free love. Harriet objects, Shelley abandons attempt at open marriage and moves with Harriet to Lake District, intending to write, then visited Ireland to engage in radical pamphleteering.

  Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility

-- 1812-1841 first generation to grow up after Napoleon started taking over Europe reaches their 20s ---
1812   June - Napoleon invades Russia;
Oct. 19 - begins retreat;
Dec - Napoleon returns to Paris;
Dec. 30 - Napoleon's ally Prussia signs truce with Russian czar

  Byron (24) : Childe Harold's Pilgrimage tells of a hero who spent days similar to his own of 1808, when he had a skull found by his gardener on the grounds of Newstead Abbey polished and mounted as a drinking cup and gave a farewell party of drinking, masquerading as monks, romping with his tame bear, and entertaining his "Paphian girls"

  1812- Grimms Brothers (26 & 27): Fairy Tales published
  1812-1841: Transcendental generation (Prophet) born 1702-1821, starts to turn 20
1813   Feb - Prussia and Russia start new coalition; Great Britain and Sweden join; Aug - Austria joins.
Oct. 16–19 - Leipzig: Napoleon forced to retreat.
  Robert Owen: A New View {?Outlook} of Society (UK)   The Examiner's attack on the Prince Regent, based on substantial truth, results in two years' imprisonment for Leigh Hunt.
"The cheerfulness and gaiety with which he bore his imprisonment attracted general attention and sympathy, and brought him visits from Lord Byron, John Moore, Lord Brougham and others."
  Jane Austen (1775-1817) (38): Pride and Prejudice

Mayan Sacred Calendar: Planetary Underworld: Heaven 4: Night 2: Resistance - 1814 - 1834

   
1814   March 31 - Allies capture Paris; Napoleon defeated and sent to Elba

George Stephenson invents & constructs first practical locomotive steam engine, near Newcastle, England

 

May 30: Treaty of Paris, re-establishes France.

September 1, 1814, to June 9, 1815:
Congress of Vienna, a conference between ambassadors from the major powers in Europe (chaired by Metternich and held in Vienna).
Its purpose was to redraw the continent's political map after the defeat of Napoleonic France the previous spring, and despite the ex-Emperor Napoleon I's return from exile and resumption of power in France in March 1815, and the Congress's Final Act was signed nine days before his final defeat at Waterloo.

  July - Shelley abandons his first wife and children to elope for the second time with a 16-year-old, Mary Shelley, daughter of the famous feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. They sail to Europe, cross France, and settle in Switzerland. Returned to England after six weeks, to discover that Mary's father, William Godwin, one-time champion of free love, would not speak to them, so they married.

  Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
1815   March 1 - Napoleon returns from Elba; March 20 - enter Paris.

June 12-18 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo

  Napoleon sends press-gangs into the student quarter, trying to round up an army; most escape and the tradition of anti-monarchy, anti-enlistment is established among Parisian students


  Shelleys return to Switzerland

"The waltz (first formal dance in which couples could embrace) takes Vienna by storm"
  Jane Austen: Emma
1816   Bourbon restoration in France (to 1830)

Economic postwar crisis in England
  April - a social outcast, Byron leaves England, never to return. Joins Shelley at Lake Geneva, Switzerland.   Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) writes Frankenstein as part of storytelling evenings during stay in Switzerland with Byron & Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Dec- Shelley's wife drowns herself. Dec 30 - Shelley marries Mary Godwin

Leigh Hunt: Story of Rimini - very influential poem; returns to Chaucer's versification (in place of the epigrammatic couplet of Alexander Pope). Effected for English poetry what William Wordsworth had effected in the domain of nature - a triumph in the art of poetical narrative, pervaded by a free, cheerful and animated spirit, despite the tragic nature of the subject. .

  Jane Austen dies (41)
1817   First gaslight introduced in London   South American independence: Simon Bolivar in Venezuela

Leigh Hunt at Hampstead included William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Bryan Procter, Benjamin Haydon, Charles Cowden Clarke, C.W. Dilke, Walter Coulson and John Hamilton Reynolds.

  Byron settles in Venice

The Shelleys move to village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Shelley takes part in literary circle surrounding Leigh Hunt, where he meets John Keats.

Percy Shelley: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
  Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey & Persuasion published posth.
1818       Chile independence

  Percy Shelley: Ozymandias
& Shelley leaves for Italy


   
1819   Recession   Maximum 12-hour work day for juveniles, England
Freedom of the press in France

  Turner's lighting becomes lighter, more luminous

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): {first historical novels}: Ivanhoe


John Keats (1795-1821) (24): Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn


   
1820       Washington Colonization Society founds Liberia for repatriation of Negroes

  Keats to Italy at Shelley's invitation, for his health    
1820s   word "slums" coined

1821 US patent for dry cleaning process for clothes, invented by Thomas Jennings (first African-American to receive US patent)

1825 September 27 - first railway opened, London

1827
S
ulfur friction matches introduced
J.J. Audubon: Birds of North America


  1821 Emma Willard founds first Female Seminary in Troy, New York

1822 Charles Fourier (1722-1837): Traite [accents] de l'association domestique-agricole (Theorie de l'unitie universelle) (Paris) - civilized man is artificial because he had purchased his civilization at the expense of his "passional" attractions.

1823 Byron to Greece

1825 First U.S. Owenist community, New Harmony, Indiana, founded (Shaker)
  Feb 23, 1821 - John Keats dies of tuberculosis (26)

Nov 1821 - Leigh Hunt to Italy to join Shelley and Byron to establish more free Liberal magazine but did not arrive until July 1, 1822.
Shelley drowns in a sudden storm a July 8 (29)

1827 J. J. Audubon: Birds of North America




  AWAKENING:
Second Great Awakening
1822-1844
1828   First railroad built in U.S. (Baltimore & Ohio)

  Working Men's Party founded, New York

New York state ends slavery
  Leigh Hunt: Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, critical of Byron - "shocked British decency"    
1829   Omnibuses become part of London public transport   First cooperative stores in America (Philadelphia and New York)

       

On to 1830-1879: Democracy Adjusted