John Trumbull
John Trumbull was an American artist during the period of the American Revolutionary War and was notable for his historical paintings. He has been called The Painter of the Revolution. Trumbull's Declaration of Independence, one of his four paintings which hang in the United States Capitol Rotunda, was used on the reverse of the commemorative bicentennial two-dollar bill. Trumbull was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, in 1756, to Jonathan Trumbull and his wife Faith Trumbull, his father served as Governor of Connecticut from 1769 to 1784. Both sides of his family were descended from early Puritan settlers in the state, he had two older brothers, Joseph Trumbull, the first commissary general of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, Jonathan Trumbull Jr. who would become the second Speaker of the House of the United States. The young Trumbull entered the 1771 junior class at Harvard College at age fifteen and graduated in 1773. Due to a childhood accident, Trumbull lost use of one eye; this may have influenced his detailed painting style.
As a soldier in the American Revolutionary War, Trumbull rendered a particular service at Boston by sketching plans of the British and American lines and works. He witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, he was appointed second personal aide to General George Washington, in June 1776, deputy adjutant-general to General Horatio Gates. He resigned from the army in 1777 after a dispute over the dating of his officer commission. In 1780, with funds depleted, Trumbull turned to art as a profession, he traveled to London, where upon introduction from Benjamin Franklin, Trumbull studied under Benjamin West. At West's suggestion, Trumbull painted small pictures of the War of Independence and miniature portraits, he painted about 250 in his lifetime. On September 23, 1780, British agent Major John André was captured by Continental troops in North America. After news reached Great Britain, outrage flared and Trumbull was arrested, as having been an officer in the Continental Army of similar rank to André, he was imprisoned for seven months in London's Tothill Fields Bridewell.
After being released, Trumbull returned to the United States in a voyage that lasted six months, ending late January 1782. He joined his brother David in supplying the army stationed at New Windsor, New York during the winter of 1782–83. In 1784, following Britain's recognition of the United States' independence, Trumbull returned to London for painting study under West. While working in his studio, Trumbull painted Battle of Bunker Hill and Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec. Both works are now in the Yale University Art Gallery. In July 1786, Trumbull went to Paris, where he made portrait sketches of French officers for the Surrender of Lord Cornwallis. With the assistance of Thomas Jefferson, serving there as the American minister to France, Trumbull began the early composition of the Declaration of Independence. Over the next 5 years Trumbull painted small portraits of signers, which he would use to piece together the larger painting. If the signer was deceased, a previous portrait would be copied, as was the case with Arthur Middleton, whose head position stands out in the painting.
While visiting with each signer or their family, always looking for funding, used the occasion to sell subscriptions to engravings that would be produced from his paintings of the American Revolution. While in Paris, Trumbull is credited with having introduced Jefferson to the Italian painter Maria Cosway. Trumbull's painting of Jefferson, commissioned by Cosway, became known due to a engraving of it by Asher Brown Durand, reproduced. Trumbull's Declaration of Independence painting was purchased by the United States Congress, along with his Surrender of General Burgoyne, Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, General George Washington Resigning His Commission, all related to the Revolution. All now hang in rotunda of the United States Capitol. Congress authorized only funds sufficient to purchase these four paintings. Trumbull completed several other paintings related to the Revolution: Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill; this was once owned by the Boston Athenaeum and is now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Trumbull encountered hard times. After many years of trying to create income from his painting, he had found a way to sustain himself from his art; this is by far the largest single collection of his works. The collection was housed in a neoclassical art gallery designed by Trumbull on Yale's Old Campus, along with portraits by other artists, his portraits include full lengths of General Washington and George Clinton, now held in New York City Hall. New York bought his full-length paintings of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1791 Trumbull was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences, he painted portraits of John Adams, Jonathan Trumbull, Rufus King.
Philanthropy
Philanthropy means the love of humanity. A conventional modern definition is "private initiatives, for the public good, focusing on quality of life", which combines an original humanistic tradition with a social scientific aspect developed in the 20th century; the definition serves to contrast philanthropy with business endeavors, which are private initiatives for private good, e.g. focusing on material gain, with government endeavors, which are public initiatives for public good, e.g. focusing on provision of public services. A person who practices philanthropy is called a philanthropist. Philanthropy has distinguishing characteristics separate from charity. A difference cited is that charity aims to relieve the pain of a particular social problem, whereas philanthropy attempts to address the root cause of the problem—the difference between the proverbial gift of a fish to a hungry person, versus teaching them how to fish. In the second century CE, Plutarch used the Greek concept of philanthrôpía to describe superior human beings.
During the Roman Catholic Middle Ages, philanthrôpía was superseded by Caritas charity, selfless love, valued for salvation and escape from purgatory. Philanthropy was modernized by Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, credited with preventing the word from being owned by horticulture. Bacon considered philanthrôpía to be synonymous with "goodness", correlated with the Aristotelian conception of virtue, as consciously instilled habits of good behaviour. Samuel Johnson defined philanthropy as "love of mankind; this definition still survives today and is cited more gender-neutrally as the "love of humanity." In London prior to the 18th century and civic charities were established by bequests and operated by local church parishes or guilds. During the 18th century, however, "a more activist and explicitly Protestant tradition of direct charitable engagement during life" took hold, exemplified by the creation of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and Societies for the Reformation of Manners.
In 1739, Thomas Coram, appalled by the number of abandoned children living on the streets of London, received a royal charter to establish the Foundling Hospital to look after these unwanted orphans in Lamb's Conduit Fields, Bloomsbury. This was "the first children's charity in the country, one that'set the pattern for incorporated associational charities' in general." The hospital "marked the first great milestone in the creation of these new-style charities."Jonas Hanway, another notable philanthropist of the era, established The Marine Society in 1756 as the first seafarer's charity, in a bid to aid the recruitment of men to the navy. By 1763, the society had recruited over 10,000 men and it was incorporated in 1772. Hanway was instrumental in establishing the Magdalen Hospital to rehabilitate prostitutes; these organizations were run as voluntary associations. They raised public awareness of their activities through the emerging popular press and were held in high social regard—some charities received state recognition in the form of the Royal Charter.
Philanthropists, such as anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, began to adopt active campaigning roles, where they would champion a cause and lobby the government for legislative change. This included organized campaigns against the ill treatment of animals and children and the campaign that succeeded in ending the slave trade throughout the Empire starting in 1807. Although there were no slaves allowed in Britain itself, many rich men owned sugar plantations in the West Indies, resisted the movement to buy them out until it succeeded in 1833. Financial donations to organized charities became fashionable among the middle-class in the 19th century. By 1869 there were over 200 London charities with an annual income, all together, of about £2 million. By 1885, rapid growth had produced with an income of about £ 4.5 million. They included a wide range of religious and secular goals, with the American import, the YMCA as one of the largest, many small ones such as the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association.
In addition to making annual donations wealthy industrialists and financiers left generous sums in their wills. A sample of 466 wills in the 1890s revealed a total wealth of £76 million, of which £20 million was bequeathed to charities. By 1900 London charities enjoyed an annual income of about £8.5 million. Led by the energetic Lord Shaftesbury, philanthropists organized themselves. In 1869 they set up the Charity Organisation Society, it was a federation of one in each of the 42 Poor Law divisions. Its central office had experts in coordination and guidance, thereby maximizing the impact of charitable giving to the poor. Many of the charities were designed to alleviate the harsh living conditions in the slums; such as the Labourer's Friend Society founded in 1830. This included the promotion of allotment of land to labourers for "cottage husbandry" that became the allotment movement, in 1844 it became the first Model Dwellings Company—an organization that sought to improve the housing conditions of the working classes by building new homes for them, while at the same time receiving a competitive rate of return on any investment.
This was one of the first housing associations, a philanthropic endeavor that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century, brought about by the growth of the middle class. Associations included the Peabody Trust, t
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity the Roman Catholic Church, his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in every literary form, including plays, novels and historical and scientific works, he wrote more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time; as a satirical polemicist, he made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day. François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris, the youngest of the five children of François Arouet, a lawyer, a minor treasury official, his wife, Marie Marguerite Daumard, whose family was on the lowest rank of the French nobility; some speculation surrounds Voltaire's date of birth, because he claimed he was born on 20 February 1694 as the illegitimate son of a nobleman, Guérin de Rochebrune or Roquebrune.
Two of his older brothers—Armand-François and Robert—died in infancy, his surviving brother Armand and sister Marguerite-Catherine were nine and seven years older, respectively. Nicknamed "Zozo" by his family, Voltaire was baptized on 22 November 1694, with François de Castagnère, abbé de Châteauneuf, Marie Daumard, the wife of his mother's cousin, standing as godparents, he was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he was taught Latin and rhetoric. By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided he wanted to be a writer, against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to become a lawyer. Voltaire, pretending to work in Paris as an assistant to a notary, spent much of his time writing poetry; when his father found out, he sent Voltaire to study law, this time in Normandy. But the young man continued producing essays and historical studies. Voltaire's wit made him popular among some of the aristocratic families with. In 1713, his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands, the marquis de Châteauneuf, the brother of Voltaire's godfather.
At The Hague, Voltaire fell in love with a French Protestant refugee named Catherine Olympe Dunoyer. Their affair, considered scandalous, was discovered by de Châteauneuf and Voltaire was forced to return to France by the end of the year. Most of Voltaire's early life revolved around Paris. From early on, Voltaire had trouble with the authorities for critiques of the government; as a result, he was twice sentenced once to temporary exile to England. One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused the Régent of incest with his daughter, resulted in an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille; the Comédie-Française had agreed in January 1717 to stage his debut play, Œdipe, it opened in mid-November 1718, seven months after his release. Its immediate critical and financial success established his reputation. Both the Régent and King George I of Great Britain presented Voltaire with medals as a mark of their appreciation, he argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. He campaigned to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority, supported a constitutional monarchy that protects people's rights.
The author adopted the name Voltaire following his incarceration at the Bastille. Its origin is unclear, it is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname and the initial letters of le jeune. According to a family tradition among the descendants of his sister, he was known as le petit volontaire as a child, he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life; the name reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family's home town in the Poitou region. Richard Holmes supports the anagrammatic derivation of the name, but adds that a writer such as Voltaire would have intended it to convey connotations of speed and daring; these come from associations with words such as voltige, volte-face, volatile. "Arouet" was not a noble name fit for his growing reputation given that name's resonance with à rouer and roué. In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire concludes by asking that, if Rousseau wishes to send him a return letter, he do so by addressing it to Monsieur de Voltaire.
A postscript explains: "J'ai été si malheureux sous le nom d'Arouet que j'en ai pris un autre surtout pour n'être plus confondu avec le poète Roi", This refers to Adenes le Roi, the'oi' diphthong was pronounced like modern'ouai', so the similarity to'Arouet' is clear, thus, it could well have been part of his rationale. Voltaire is known to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime. Voltaire's next play, Artémire, set in ancient Macedonia, opened on 15 February 1720, it was a flop and only fragments of the text survive. He instead turned to an epic poem about Henry IV of France that he had begun in early 1717. Denied a licence to publish, in August 1722 Voltaire headed north to find a publisher outside France. On the journey, he was acco
Corporal punishment
Corporal punishment or physical punishment is a punishment intended to cause physical pain on a person. It is most practised on minors in home and school settings. Common methods include paddling, it has historically been used on adults on prisoners and enslaved people. Other common methods include caning. Official punishment for crime by inflicting pain or injury, including flogging and mutilation, was practised in most civilizations since ancient times. However, with the growth of humanitarian ideals since the Enlightenment, such punishments were viewed as inhumane. By the late 20th century, corporal punishment had been eliminated from the legal systems of most developed countries; the legality in the 21st century of corporal punishment in various settings differs by jurisdiction. Internationally, the late 20th century and early 21st century saw the application of human rights law to the question of corporal punishment in a number of contexts: Corporal punishment in the home, punishment of children or teenagers by parents or other adult guardians, is legal in most of the world.
58 countries, most of them in Europe and Latin America, have banned the practice as of 2018. School corporal punishment, of students by teachers or school administrators, has been banned in many countries, including Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and all of Europe, it remains legal, if less common, in some states of the United States. Judicial corporal punishment, as part of a criminal sentence ordered by a court of law, has long disappeared from European countries. However, as of November 2017, it remains lawful in parts of Africa, the Anglophone Caribbean and indigenous communities of Ecuador and Colombia. Related is prison corporal punishment or disciplinary corporal punishment, ordered by prison authorities or carried out directly by staff. Corporal punishment is allowed in some military settings in a few jurisdictions. Other uses of corporal punishment have existed, for instance, as once practised on apprentices by their masters. In many Western countries and human-rights organizations oppose corporal punishment of children.
Campaigns against corporal punishment have aimed to bring about legal reform to ban the use of corporal punishment against minors in homes and schools. Author Jared Diamond writes that hunter-gatherer societies have tended to use little corporal punishment whereas agricultural and industrial societies tend to use progressively more of it. Diamond suggests this may be because hunter-gatherers tend to have few valuable physical possessions, misbehavior of the child would not cause harm to others' property. Researchers living among the Parakanã and Ju/’hoansi people, as well as among some Aboriginal Australians, have written of the absence of physical punishment of children in those cultures. Wilson writes: Probably the only generalization that can be made about the use of physical punishment among primitive tribes is that there was no common procedure Pettit concludes that among primitive societies corporal punishment is rare, not because of the innate kindliness of these people but because it is contrary to developing the type of individual personality they set up as their ideal An important point to be made here is that we cannot state that physical punishment as a motivational or corrective device is'innate' to man.
Corporal punishment of children has traditionally been used in the Western world by adults in authority roles. Beating one's child as a punishment was recommended as early as the c. 10th century BC book of Proverbs attributed to Solomon: He that spareth the rod, hateth his son. A fool's lips enter into contention, his mouth calleth for strokes. Chasten thy son while there is hope, let not thy soul spare for his crying. Judgements are prepared for scorners, stripes for the backs of fools. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child. Withhold not correction from the child. A whip for a horse, a bridle for an ass, a rod for a fool's back. Robert McCole Wilson argues, "Probably this attitude comes, at least in part, from the desire in the patriarchal society for the elder to maintain his authority, where that authority was the main agent for social stability, but these are the words that not only justified the use of physical punishment on children for over a thousand years in Christian communities, but ordered it to be used.
The words were accepted with but few exceptions. Curiously, the gentleness of Christ towards children was ignored". Corporal punishment was used in Egypt, China and Rome for both judicial and educational discipline. Disfigured Egyptian criminals were exiled to the Sinai border at Tjaru and Rhinocorura, whose own name meant "cut-off noses". China disfigured some criminals and tattooed others; some states gained a reputation for using such punishments cruelly. Although the Spartan example was extreme, corporal punishment was the most frequent type of punishment. In the Roman Empire, the maximum penalty that a Roman citizen could receive under the law was 40 "lashes" or "strokes" with a whip applied to the back and shoulders, or with the "fasces" (similar to a birch rod, but consisting of 8–10 lengths of willow r
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was among the first American Christian missionary organizations. It was created in 1810 by recent graduates of Williams College. In the 19th century it was the largest and most important of American missionary organizations and consisted of participants from Reformed traditions such as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, German Reformed churches. After some secessions due to the slavery issue and the movement of New School Presbyterian-affiliated missionaries to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, the ABCFM was left as a Congregationalist body after 1870; the American Board, as it was known continued to operate as a Congregationalist entity until the 1950s. In 1957, the Congregational Christian church merged with the German Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ; as a part of the organizational merger associated with this new denomination, the ABCFM ceased independent existence and merged operations with other missions entities to form the United Church Board for World Ministries, an agency of the United Church of Christ.
Other organizations that draw inspiration from the ABCFM include InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, the Missionary Society of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches. The ABCFM consisted of an annual meeting with a Prudential Committee that took care of day-to-day business, it elected a Corresponding Secretary to produce written documents, a Treasurer to receive donations, had board members. The ABCFM held its first meeting on September 5, 1810, elected Samuel Worcester corresponding secretary. Samuel Worcester was the first corresponding secretary, starting in 1810. Jeremiah Evarts, corresponding secretary of the ABCFM from 1821 to 1831 At the 1822 Annual Meeting, Board members elected officers consisting of Evarts as Corresponding Secretary, with John Treadwell as President and Rev. Joseph Lyman as Vice President; the Prudential Committee consisted of William Reed, Rev. Leonard Woods, Jeremiah Evarts, Samuel Hubbard, Rev. Warren Fay.
Elias Cornelius became corresponding secretary Dec 1831 – February 1832 Benjamin B. Wisner, Rufus Anderson and David Greene became "coequal" secretaries in 1832; when Wisner died, William Jessup Armstrong took his place. Anderson and Armstrong led as coequals from 1835 to 1846, with Anderson as foreign secretary, Armstrong as domestic secretary, David Greene as secretary for American Indian missions and editor of the Missionary Herald Rufus Anderson continued as foreign secretary until 1866. Armstrong died in a shipwreck between Boston and New Jersey in 1846. In 1843, the Missionary Herald announced that Selah B. Treat had been elected to the Office of Recording Secretary, it listed Rufus Anderson, Rev. David Greene, Rev. William J. Armstrong as "Secretaries for Correspondence." By 1858, the New York State Register listed George Warren Wood as sole corresponding secretary, with Rev. Mark Hopkins as President and Abolitionist William Jessup as Vice-President Hopkins had been the President of Williams College since 1836.
By 1866, Rev. Nathan George Clark and Rev G. W. Wood had joined Rufus Anderson and Selah Treat as corresponding secretaries. Wood, as ABCFM Secretary in New York City, held his position from 1850 to 1871. Clark assumed the position of Foreign Secretary when Anderson left in 1866 and remained Foreign Secretary until 1894. Note: After some secessions due to the slavery issue and the movement of New School Presbyterian-affiliated missionaries to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, the ABCFM was left as a Congregationalist body after 1870. James Levi Barton was secretary in 1896 when N. G. Clark died, he retired in 1927; the Congregational Yearbook from 1899 lists James L. Barton, Judson Smith, Charles H. Daniels as the three Corresponding Secretaries of the ABCFM, it lists Charles M. Lamson and D. Willis James as ABCFM president and vice president, respectively. Henry H. Riggs' brother Ernest Wilson Riggs joined James Levi Barton as associate secretary and corresponding secretary of the ABCFM from 1921 to 1932.
Note: After 1930, the ABCFM revised its constitution to create the position of "Executive Vice-President" to provide a position, "first among equals" amongst ABCFM secretaries. Dr. Frank Field Goodsell was the first Executive Vice-President of the ABCFM, which he led from 1930 to 1948. Alford Carleton served as executive vice president of the board from 1954 to 1970. Note: when the Evangelical and Reformed Church merged with the Congregational Christian Church in 1957, the Congregationalist-affiliated ABCFM merged with the E&R affiliated Board of International Missions to become the United Church of Christ denomination's United Church Board of World Ministries under Carleton On June 29, 1961, the ABCFM formally concluded. On July 1, 2000, a UCC restructure renamed UCBWM became "Wider Church Ministries" under the UCC's covenanted ministries structure. Timothy DwightIn 1826, the American Board absorbed 26 members of the United Foreign Missionary Society into its board; the founding of the ABCFM was inspired by the Second Great Awakening.
In 1806, five students from Williams College in western Massachusetts took shelter from a thunderstorm in a haystack. At the Haystack Prayer Meeting, they came to the common conviction that "the field is the world" and inspired the creation of the ABCFM four years later; the objective of the ABCFM was to spread Christianity worldwide. Congregationalist in origin, the
Society of the Cincinnati
The Society of the Cincinnati is a hereditary society with branches in the United States and France, founded in 1783, to preserve the ideals and fellowship of officers of the Continental Army who served in the Revolutionary War. Now in its third century, the Society promotes the public interest in the revolution through its library and museum collections and other activities, it is the oldest hereditary society in the United States. The Society does not allow women to join, though there is a patriarchal consolation society called Daughters of the Cincinnati which permits all female descendants of Continental officers; the Society is named after Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who left his farm to accept a term as Roman Consul and served as Magister Populi. He assumed lawful dictatorial control of Rome to meet a war emergency; when the battle was won, he went back to plowing his fields. The Society's motto reflects that ethic of selfless service: Omnia reliquit servare rempublicam; the Society has had three goals: "To preserve the rights so dearly won.
The concept of the Society of the Cincinnati was that of Major General Henry Knox. The first meeting of the Society was held in May 1783 at a dinner at Mount Gulian in Fishkill, New York, before the British evacuation from New York City; the meeting was chaired by Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Hamilton, the participants agreed to stay in contact with each other after the war. Membership was limited to officers who had served at least three years in the Continental Army or Navy. Officers in the Continental Line who died during the War were entitled to be recorded as members, membership would devolve to their eldest male heir. Members of the larger fighting forces comprising the Colonial Militias and Minutemen were not entitled to join the Society. Within 12 months of the founding, a constituent Society had been organized in each of the 13 states and in France. Of about 5,500 men eligible for membership, 2,150 had joined within a year. King Louis XVI ordained the French Society of the Cincinnati, organized on July 4, 1784.
Up to that time, the King of France had not allowed his officers to wear any foreign decorations, but he made an exception in favor of the badge of the Cincinnati. In the 18th century, the Society's rules adopted a system of primogeniture wherein membership was passed down to the eldest son after the death of the original member. Present-day hereditary members must be descended from an officer who served in the Continental Army or Navy for at least three years, from an officer who died or was killed in service, or from an officer serving at the close of the Revolution; each officer may be represented by only one descendant at any given time, following the rules of primogeniture. The requirement for primogeniture made the society controversial in its early years, as the new states did away with laws supporting primogeniture as remnants of the English feudal system. George Washington was elected the first President General of the Society, he served from December 1783 until his death in 1799. The second President General was Alexander Hamilton.
Upon Hamilton's death the third President General of the Society was Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The society's members have included notable military and political leaders, including 23 signers of the United States Constitution. Joseph Cilley, Henry Dearborn, Nicholas Gilman, John Sullivan, James Reed. Stephen Abbot, Jeduthan Baldwin, John Brooks, Henry Burbeck, David Cobb, John Crane, Thomas Humphrey Cushing, William Eustis, Constant Freeman, John Greaton, Africa Hamlin, William Heath, William Hull, Thomas Hunt, Henry Knox, Henry Jackson, Michael Jackson, Simon Larned, Benjamin Lincoln, Samuel Nicholson, William North, Rufus Putnam, William Shepard, William Stacy, Benjamin Tupper, Elisha Horton, Abraham Williams, John Yeomans, Dr. Abijah Richardson. Israel Angell, William Barton, Archibald Crary, Nathanael Greene, Moses Hazen, Daniel Jackson, William Jones, Daniel Lyman, Coggeshall Olney, Jeremiah Olney, Stephen Olney, Henry Sherburne, Silas Talbot, William Tew, Simeon Thayer, James Mitchell Varnum, Abraham Whipple, Joseph Arnold.
Abraham Baldwin, Joel Barlow, Zebulon Butler, Henry Champion, John Chester, Jonathan Hart, David Humphreys, Ebenezer Huntington, Jedediah Huntington, Jacob Kingsbury, John Mansfield, Joseph Spencer, Benjamin Tallmadge, Jonathan Trumbull, Jr. John Wyllys, Palgrave Wyllys, Amos Walbridge Aaron Burr, George Clinton, James Clinton, John Doughty, Nicholas Fish, Peter Gansevoort, Alexander Hamilton, Rufus King, Joseph Hardy, John Keese,John Lamb, Morgan Lewis, Henry Beekman Livingston, Alexander McDougall, Charles McKnight, David Olyphant, Philip Schuyler, John Morin Scott, William Stephens Smith, John Stagg Jr, Ebenezer Stevens, Silas Talbot, Benjamin Tallmadge, Philip Van Cortlandt, Henry Vanderburgh, Cornelius Van Dyck, John Van Dyck, Richard Varick, William Scudder, Dr. Caleb Sweet, Maj. Gen. Baron von Steuben, Lt. Col. Bernardus Swartwout, Cornelius Swartwout, BG Philip Van Cortlandt, Frederick Von Weisenfels. James Anderson, Abraham Appleton, James Francis Armstrong, Daniel Baldwin, Jeremiah Ballard, William Barton
Northampton, Massachusetts
The city of Northampton is the county seat of Hampshire County, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population of Northampton was 28,549. Northampton is known as an academic, artistic and countercultural hub, it features a large politically liberal community along with numerous alternative health and intellectual organizations. Based on U. S. Census demographics, election returns, other criteria, the website Epodunk rates Northampton as the most politically liberal medium-size city in the United States; the city has a high proportion of residents who identify as gay and lesbian, a high number of same-sex households, is a popular destination for the LGBT community. Northampton is part of the Pioneer Valley and is one of the northernmost cities in the Knowledge Corridor—a cross-state cultural and economic partnership with other Connecticut River Valley cities and towns. Northampton is part of the Springfield Metropolitan Area, one of western Massachusetts's two separate metropolitan areas.
It sits 19 miles north of the city of Springfield. Northampton is home to Smith College, Northampton High School, Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School, the Clarke Schools for Hearing and Speech. Northampton is known as "Norwottuck", or "Nonotuck", meaning "the midst of the river", named by its original Pocumtuc inhabitants. According to various accounts, Northampton was given its present name by John A. King, one of its original English settlers, or in King's honor, since it is supposed that he came to Massachusetts from Northampton, his birthplace; the Pocumtuc confederacy occupied the Connecticut River Valley from what is now southern Vermont and New Hampshire into northern Connecticut. The Pocumtuc tribes were Algonquian and traditionally allied with the Mahican confederacy to the west. By 1606 an ongoing struggle between the Mahican and Iroquois confederacies led to direct attacks on the Pocumtuc by the Iroquoian Mohawk nation; the Mahican confederacy had been defeated by 1628, limiting Pocumtuc access to trade routes to the west.
The area suffered a major smallpox epidemic in the 1630s following the arrival of Dutch traders in the Hudson Valley and English settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the previous two decades. It was in this context that the land making up the bulk of modern Northampton was sold to settlers from Springfield in 1653. On May 18, 1653, a petition for township was approved by the general court of Springfield. While some settlers visited the land in the fall of 1653, they waited till early spring 1654 to arrive and establish a permanent settlement; the situation in the region further deteriorated when the Mohawk people escalated hostilities against the Pocumtuc confederacy and other Algonquian tribes after 1655, forcing many of the plague-devastated Algonquian groups into defensive mergers. This coincided with a souring of relations between the Wampanoag and the Massachusetts Bay colonists leading to the expanded Algonquian alliance, which took part in King Philip's War. Northampton was part of the Equivalent Lands compromise.
Its territory was enlarged beyond the original settlement, but portions would be carved up into separate cities and municipalities. Southampton, for example, was incorporated in 1775 and included parts of the territories of modern Montgomery and Easthampton. Westhampton was incorporated in 1778 and Easthampton in 1809. A hamlet of Northampton, called Smith's Ferry, became separated from the rest of the city with the drawing of boundaries for Easthampton; because the village was separated by Mount Tom, the shortest path to from the downtown to this area was a road near the Connecticut River oxbow, subject to flooding. This led to many services such as fire and police being provided by the city of Holyoke rather than Northampton's own municipal departments, after a number of negotiations between the two cities, Smith's Ferry was ceded to Holyoke in 1909 for a sum of $62,000. Congregational preacher and philosopher Jonathan Edwards was a leading figure in a 1734 Christian revival in Northampton.
In the winter of 1734 and the following spring it reached such intensity that it threatened the town's businesses. In the spring of 1735 the movement began to subside and a reaction set in, but the relapse was brief, the Northampton revival, which had spread through the Connecticut River Valley and whose fame had reached England and Scotland, was followed in 1739–1740 by the Great Awakening, under the leadership of Edwards. For this achievement, Edwards is considered one of the founders of evangelical Christianity, he is credited with being one of the primary inspirations for transcendentalism, because of passages like this: "That the works of nature are intended and contrived of God to signify and indigitate spiritual things is evident concerning the rainbow, by God's express revelation." Northampton hosted its own witch trials in the 1700s. Members of the Northampton community were present at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. On August 29, 1786, Daniel Shays and a group of Revolutionary War veterans stopped the civil court from sitting in Northampton, in an uprising known as Shays' Rebellion.
In 1805 a crowd of 15,000 gathered in Northampton to watch the executions of two Irishmen convicted of murder: Dominic Daley, 34, James Halligan, 27. The crowd, composed of New England Protestants of English ancestry, lit bonfires and expressed virulently anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiments; the trial evidence against Daley and Halligan was sparse, contrived, p
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dwight, Timothy". Encyclopædia Britannica. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 741–742.
