Colin Jones

Dror Wahrman

"This superb collection of essays brings together the most exciting new work in cultural and literary history. Although the authors focus on the various cultural revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the significance of their investigations extends far beyond that moment. They show how the major categories of modern social life took root in this era, but they emphasize the surprising and often paradoxical ways those developments took place. Nothing about the experience of class, gender, race, nation, sentiment or even death was pre-ordained. These essays will enable readers to take a fresh new look at the origins of modernity."—Lynn Hunt, editor of The New Cultural History and coeditor of Beyond the Cultural Turn "This is a valuable and provocative set of essays. Differing markedly in subject matter, they are linked by their intelligence and concern to re-assess early modern English and French histories, and the differences conventionally drawn between them, in the light of current work on language, class, race and gender."—Linda Colley, author of Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

Britain and France, 1750-1820

The Age of Cultural Revolutions

Uncovers an artistic puzzle in the illusionist paintings by Edward Collier, a Dutch-British still-life painter who moved to London at the end of the seventeenth century and encoded a sophisticated critique of the information revolution that ushered in the modern information age.

A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age

Mr. Collier's Letter Racks

Ruth N Halls Professor of History Dror Wahrman

A radically new interpretation of political and social concepts during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

The Political Representation of Class in Britain, C.1780-1840

Imagining the Middle Class

Wahrman argues that toward the end of the 18th century there was a radical change in notions of self & personal identity - a sudden transformation that was a revolution in the understanding of selfhood & of identity categories including race, gender, & class.

Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-century England

The Making of the Modern Self

Mendel John Diness

Carney E. S. Gavin

Harvard Semitic Museum

Nitza Rosovsky

At a garage sale in Minnesota in 1989, a young American photographer, John Barnier, bought eight wooden crates containing over 130 glass plate negatives. Realizing that many of the negatives were of Jerusalem, he brought them to the Harvard Semitic Museum where they were eventually identified as the long-lost work of Mendel John Diness, who lived in Jerusalem in the 1850s and was the first photographer to learn--and practice--the art there. Until a decade ago Diness did not even appear in the annals of photography. It was Dror Wahrman, an Israeli historian, who discovered that Diness was a Russian Jewish watchmaker who arrived in Jerusalem in 1848 to pursue rabbinical studies. A year later he converted and his baptism by the Anglican bishop caused near-riots in the city's Jewish community. Having lost his Jewish clients, Diness supported his family by learning photography and eventually became the Holy City's first commercial photographer. This volume traces Diness' role in the history of photography and his life in Jerusalem and subsequently in the United States. From the uncovered negatives, 60 platinum prints were developed showing with utmost clarity rare views of Jerusalem and environs. Other photographs, lent by Diness' descendants, enhance this most unusual tale.

M.J. Diness and the Beginnings of Photography in Jerusalem

Capturing the Holy Land

Jonathan Sheehan

Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction. In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.

Dror Wahrman

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