Garrow's Law
Has anyone been watching Garrow's Law? For those who don't know, this was a four-part BBC period drama about an 18th C lawyer who made massive breathroughs in the legal system concerning representation for defendents. So, it's both interesting and informative, which is always something I like - and I'm very happy to put it in the 'excellent 18th C
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(By the way, I wrote my master's thesis on 18th-century Virginia, pre- and post-Revolution. So, yes, I am VERY into this era!)
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By the way, I wrote my master's thesis on 18th-century Virginia, pre- and post-Revolution. So, yes, I am VERY into this era!
Oh yay! It's great to see all this enthusiasm for the 18th C, which was such an important time in recent history IMO. By the way, I was just recommending The Patriot to Jaycat above - have you seen it? What did you think?
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I haven't seen all of The Patriot, let's put it that way. I'm such a pill about historical movies that I'm no fun to be with, so I tend to skip them if it's something I know much about. My brother had it on one time when I was over there, and I caught the scene (out of context) where the happy black folks and happy slave-owning white folks all joined together for a pot-luck on the beach and thought, ".....no. Sorry. Not watching." Plus I tend to want to throw things at Mel Gibson under the best of circumstances ( ... )
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Party Animals sounds great, I think I should catch up with it. And re The Patriot, well... I won't say that it doesn't have its off moments (like the one you tuned in for, as well as the implausible romance bit), but many of the performances are solid, and I'm a sucker for epic historical stuff. And who cares about historical inaccuracy? :)
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Oh WOW! What an amazing family link. You must be very proud!
Well, I was until I started reading up on him. It seems he took money from the French--a LOT of money for the time--to set up his own, independent country/state after the Revolution. And he was probably involved in a notorious, huge land fraud. And he was a nasty guerrilla fighter. And that he was kind of on both sides of the Revolution at the same time.
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-668
But I got a kick when my kinda snobby uncle got his panties in a knot because he couldn't join the Society of the Cincinnati (http://www.societyofthecincinnati.org/) because old Elijah was only a general in the militia, not in the Continental Army.
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I had no idea! That's so cool. What specific aspect of colonial/revolutionary Virginia did you research?
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The title of the thesis was, "Less than Gentlemen: Political, Social, and Economic Mobility in Fauquier County, Virginia, 1749-1800." Check it out from the University of Virginia's Alderman Library and you get 46 pages of what it says on the tin. I used county court records (the "county court" was the same thing as the "board of aldermen," or "burgesses," or those such things), wills, and estate assessments to determine how (or if) families moved up and down the social ladder before vs. after the Revolution. I picked those dates because the county was officially founded in 1749 and any earlier records were burned in the Civil War, and 1800 because...well, you gotta end these things SOMEtime.
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That sounds fascinating. I remember reading an article a while back that suggested that upward mobility was much more likely in rural areas than in urban ones, and the relative lack of mobility among social classes in urban areas only really became obvious with increased immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe in the last 1800s and early 1900s.
At any rate, your thesis would be more interesting reading than mine, I'm sure, rofl.
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