Word: 1780s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations--the state's official name--first rankled the nation's leaders in the 1780s when it refused to pay for the Revolutionary War and dragged its feet on ratifying the new constitution...
Making wine may not be as American as cherry pie, but the tradition is a lot older than the Constitution. French Huguenot settlers fermented juice from Florida's native muscadine grapes as early as 1565. In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson scoured France for cuttings to replant at Monticello, his Virginia estate. (None took root, alas.) And Count Agoston Haraszthy, the patriarch of California vintners, started his first U.S. vineyard at what is now the Wollersheim winery in Prairie du Sac, Wis., in 1847. During the 19th century, wines from Ohio and Missouri won gold medals in European competitions, but thousands...
...devotion to the English scene and his delight in guying the manners and affectations of the French. But he was unusually well traveled. In a day when tourism was an arduous and expensive business, confined mainly to the rich, he made several visits to France (in the 1780s), toured Holland and Germany, and seems to have been to Rome and Florence. His final trip to Paris was in 1814, when he went to see the enormous collection of paintings and sculptures that Napoleon had brought back as war plunder for the Louvre. What he saw comes out in his work...
...rejects excess decor as a sign of cultural effeminacy. The rococo did not suit the democratic, mercantile temper. It spoke of royal courts. The desire for a general style that asserted first principles, tended toward abstraction and worshiped antiquity -- this mattered greatly to the young Republic in the 1780s...
...republican, in political terms, West was not. He was George III's favorite painter and, more than that, his personal friend, so much so that when the unpopular King contemplated going into exile in Germany in the early 1780s, the man he asked to go with him was West. The artist was painting the King's portrait at the moment a messenger arrived with the news of the Declaration of Independence. The unfolding of the Revolution caused him endless social difficulty, because the English and the American loyalist exiles in London suspected him of siding with the rebels. But still...