Word: 1730s
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...searching effort to determine why a band of Parisian printers bludgeoned to death a lot of cats, notably including the master printer's wife's pet, then subjected several of the animals to a mock trial and hanged them. More important, why did these printers of the 1730s think the butchery was so comic that they guffawed as they re-enacted it in pantomime more than 20 times? Was it sadism? Mass hysteria? Demonic ritual...
DESPITE EXTENSIVE documentation, Rifkin's argument suffers from a lack of clarity and a dose of wishful thinking. According to his model of America's two Great Awakenings, the Christian revival movement of the 1730s and 1820s, charismatic preachers first break the hold of the established orthodoxy through a return to the core religion of estatic experience, and then the theologians construct a new doctrinal synthesis. The process is like pushing Humpty Dumpty off the church wall so he cracks and his yolk runs down the block and then gathering it all up and making scrambled eggs for the congregation...
Times of national crises in the past have often inspired outbursts of folk songs. Independence-minded folk singers of the 1730s wrote anti-British songs so "seditious" that Governor William Cosby of New York felt called upon to stage a public song burning. In the America that Walt Whitman heard singing, New Hampshire's Hutchinson Family drew abolitionist admirers like William Lloyd Garrison. Today's folk singers are lyrically lashing out at everything from nuclear fallout (What Have They Done to the Rain?) and the American Medical Association ("We really love to stitch/ The diseases of the rich...
Yale survived the paroxysms of the Great Awakening, the fierce evangelical movement that swept through New England in the 1730s and '40s. Then came the American Revolution. The gallant old Reverend Naphtali Daggett, president pro tem ("Would you have me president pro eternitate?"), took down his long fowling piece and opened fire ("You old fool," cried the British, "what are you doing here, firing on His Majesty's soldiers?"). Captain Nathan Hale, '73, was captured and sent to the gallows, and Alumnus David Bushnell devised the first submarine and tried to blow up the enemy fleet...
Revivals are as much a phenomenon of U. S. civilization as quilting bees or rail splitting. Georgia has been a revivalist stronghold ever since pioneer Evangelists John Wesley and George Whitefield saved souls there in the 1730s. But lately revivals have not done so well, even in Georgia. Few years ago famed Old Salem Campground, 32 miles southeast of At lanta, a scene of Methodist evangelistic meetings since 1828, had to turn interdenominational to survive. Last week, as it wound up a rousing ten-day camp meeting, Salem seemed to have hit the sawdust trail for a comeback...