James Edward Oglethorpe


Book Description










James Edward Oglethorpe


Book Description

James Edward Oglethorpe turned his back on Oxford University, his family's Jacobite schemes, and a career as courtier to a prince to settle as an English country squire. But history was not to let him stay unnoticed. As a member of Parliament in the eighteenth century, Oglethorpe fought for debtors? rights and prison reform, and when he gained them, volunteered to found a new colony in America. Under his direction, settlements were established, strong bonds were formed with the Creek Indians, and the colony of Georgia flourished. He guided it during its formative years and protected it during war with Spain. That alone should have assured Oglethorpe of his place in history...but as he learned, politics and fortune are fickle. In this captivating biography, Joyce Blackburn details the career and life of this gallant gentleman, hero, visionary, and patriot.




Publications of James Edward Oglethorpe


Book Description

Publications of James Edward Oglethorpe contains various writings by the founder of the Georgia colony, supplemented by introductions and notes to further the reader’s understanding of the texts. The collection of articles, letters, essays, and reports gives a reader insight into the life and mind of the man who shaped the history of the state of Georgia with an agenda of social reformation. This book satisfies a reader’s curiosity both regarding Oglethorpe himself as well as life in the colony, through its inclusion of colony reports alongside letters in which Oglethorpe expands on his ideas about British America. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.




James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia


Book Description

Founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733, the Georgia colony was envisioned as a unique social welfare experiment. Administered by twenty-one original trustees, the Georgia Plan offered England’s “worthy poor” and persecuted Christians an opportunity to achieve financial security in the New World by exporting goods produced on small farms. Most significantly, Oglethorpe and his fellow Trustees were convinced that economic vitality could not be achieved through the exploitation of enslaved Black laborers. Due primarily to Oglethorpe’s strident advocacy, Georgia was the only British American colony to prohibit chattel slavery prior to the American Revolutionary War. His outspoken opposition to the transatlantic slave trade distinguished Oglethorpe from British colonial America’s more celebrated founding fathers. James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia uncovers how Oglethorpe's philosophical and moral evolution from slave trader to abolitionist was propelled by his intellectual relationships with two formerly enslaved Black men. Oglethorpe’s unique “friendships” with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano, two of eighteenth-century England’s most influential Black men, are little-known examples of interracial antislavery activism that breathed life into the formal abolitionist movement. Utilizing more than two decades of meticulous research, fresh historical analysis, and compelling storytelling, Michael L. Thurmond rewrites the prehistory of abolitionism and adds an important new chapter to Georgia’s origin story.




Oglethorpe in Perspective


Book Description

Nine essays that attempt to answer some of the questions that continually surface when Oglethorpe's name is mentioned.




Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730-1775


Book Description

Georgia was the only British colony in America in which a sustained effort was made to prohibit the introduction and use of black slaves at a time when the institution of slavery was well established in the other southern colonies. In the first half of Slavery in Colonial Georgia, Betty Wood examines the reasons which prompted James Oglethorpe and the other British founders of the colony to originally ban slavery. In their concern for the manners and morals of white society, she says, they anticipated many of the arguments to be employed subsequently by the opponents of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic. The second half of the book examines the development of slavery in Georgia during the quarter century before the Revolution, with special attention on the experience of black slaves in late colonial Georgia.




George Whitefield


Book Description

Narrates the drama of a famous preacher’s entire career in his historical context GEORGE WHITEFIELD (1714–1770) is remembered as a spirited revivalist, a catalyst for the Great Awakening, and a founder of the evangelical movement in America. But Whitefield was also a citizen of the British Empire who used his political savvy and theological creativity to champion the cause of imperial expansion. In this religious biography of “the Grand Itinerant,” Peter Choi recounts a fascinating human story and, in the process, reexamines the Great Awakening and its relationship to a fast-growing British Empire.




Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven


Book Description

Drawing on unpublished diplomatic and Masonic archives, this study reveals the career of Emanuel Swedenborg as a secret intelligence agent for Louis XV and the pro-French, pro-Jacobite party of “Hats” in Sweden. Utilizing Kabbalistic meditation techniques, he sought political intelligence on earth and in heaven.