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While many religious writers praised Paxton's innovative design, often likening it to a temple or the modern equivalent of a medieval cathedral, High Churchmen and Roman Catholics abhorred the design, comparing it most unfavourably to the neo‐Gothic style then in vogue for ecclesiastical and public buildings. Certain exhibits also proved controversial, none more so than Pugin's contributions to the Medieval Court, which were often seen as importing Catholic devices into the very heart of the Exhibition. This chapter centres on the religious controversies surrounding the Crystal Palace and its contents in order to show that it was a highly contested space and that protagonists across the religious spectrum endowed it with different spiritual meanings.

This chapter develops further the place of habit within improvisation. Using the Slovenian dancer Jurij Konjar's re-improvisation of Steve Paxton original Goldberg Variations improvisations as a case study, the chapter provides a commentary on the correspondence between Konjar and Paxton. The central issue addressed here is Paxton's desire to 'outwit' his own habits of performance and Konjar's ultimate acceptance and affirmation of his own. Countering the dominant antipathy to habit in the discourses on improvisation, this chapter argues for a deeper engagement with the essence of the habitual and it's creative potential. The writings of Catherine Malabou play an important role in this re-evaluation.

However progressive their notions of reform, rural Americans’ anger has long found expression through violence as well as conventional politics. Class, race, religious, and ethnic resentments played a part in nearly all rural movements. The Paxton Boys of Pennsylvania advocated the killing of native people. Populist ideology contained frequent anti-Semitic references. Southern Populists also joined the Ku Klux Klan. Violence uniquely marked the American countryside from the days of the frontier.

This chapter explores the alternative quarters the American colonists sought for the North American Establishment, describing how massive barracks arose in the four largest American cities and several smaller towns in 1756-58. Following a history of barracks since ancient times, it explains the effects that barracks had on urban locales, colonists, and soldiers, as well as what happened in places that did not have barracks. The conclusion of the French and Indian War brought Canada, Florida, and the backcountry into the British Empire, which raised new questions about quartering as few of these places had barracks. Although the removal of the British army from the American colonies emptied the urban barracks, events like the Paxton Boys raids of 1763-64 put control of the military infrastructure at odds with the military geography of the colonies.

Chapter 9 discusses how Pennsylvania gave Franklin more room for his talents, doubts, and questions than Boston did, thanks to the Quakers’ commitment to intellectual and religious freedom. The colony’s religious diversity, especially among German Protestants, was a challenge to its well-being especially when Quaker pacifism proved a liability in defending against French and Native American military forces. It shows how Franklin continued to rely on his knowledge of Protestantism and skills as a civic leader while he served in the Pennsylvania Assembly during the French and Indian War and then as the colony’s chief negotiator in London with the Penn family and British government officials in efforts to secure a royal charter for Pennsylvania.

This chapter shows that tribal delegates were not the only Indian people to be found in the cites of early America. Indian people included cities in their trade networks and they lived and worked in and around town in various capacities as both free and unfree labor. They went to cities and stayed there for many reasons and cities became centers of cultural mixing as well as economic exchange. Colonial laws designed to regulate Indian people reveal how much they were part of the fabric of urban life. Some Indians sought refuge in cities during times of war; others were taken there as prisoners of war. Increasing racial violence rendered Indian people in and around town vulnerable.

The Introduction examines the changing historiography of Vichy and Occupied France, particularly since the 1970s, when historians challenged postwar French myths as they discovered newly accessible archival sources and exposed the reality behind Pétain’s claim that Vichy merely acted as a shield. In fact the regime’s nationalism differed from that of many Frenchmen in stressing the soil as opposed to political principle and hence the imperative for the administration to remain on it. This, however, was at the price of collaboration with an occupying power, which not only made increasing demands but also served as an umbrella for the regime’s desired political changes. Researchers still need to examine the results for French culture and particularly music, an art of special interest to the Germans, as Vichy moved toward greater collaboration. And they must examine how composers confronted the Vichy model of French culture as opposed to that now defined by the Resistance.

This chapter examines legal developments between the passage of the Declaratory Act and the outbreak of the American Revolution. It also examines various rebellions against colonial governments that took place during the 1760s. In the end it shows how policies of conciliation and compromise that had made the British empire function effectively in the mid-eighteenth century broke down by the mid-1770s.

This chapter provides a summary of treason law in Pennsylvania from the founding of the colony by William Penn in 1682 through the outbreak of the War for Independence. After several halting starts, Pennsylvania formally adopted English treason law in 1718. This law was rooted in the 1351 English Statute of Treasons and the chapter explains the broad contours of that law as it was developed in the succeeding centuries. Treason law, however, was rarely employed in colonial Pennsylvania, even though the Seven Years’ War, the march of the Paxton Boys, and the disputes with Virginia and Connecticut over land claims (hostilities that amounted to low-level open warfare) provided possible opportunities for its employment. The chapter also addresses whether members of American Indian tribes were subject to Pennsylvania treason law.

This chapter examines Otis’s speech in Paxton’s Case to understand why John Adams regarded it as the start of the American Revolution, and describes Otis’s speech as the inflection point when European state of nature theories began to turn into a revolutionary American discourse. In Otis’s system, the state of nature was a source of substantive rights (including life, liberty, and property) that endured in the polity and remained inalienable for both white colonists and enslaved African Americans. Newly discovered archival evidence about this key speech is presented. The chapter follows further strands of state of nature interpretation before the Stamp Act, including Williams’s 1762 election sermon and polemical publications by Otis, which introduced the meaning of the state of nature as interstate relations into the revolutionary discourse. It concludes with Thomas Pownall’s view of citizens of the British Empire sharing the sociability, interdependence, and common rights that characterize the state of nature.