18thCentury

Highlights from Atkinson’s collection. Credit: English Heritage In the 1980s, a shell collection that included specimens from Captain Cook's final voyage was accidentally thrown into a skip and believed lost forever. But much to the joy of scientists, last week it was rediscovered safe and sound and donated to English Heritage. Her name might not…

Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed. Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished. Only then could a better version – call it Britain 2.0 – arise.But how? In the 1790s, the revolutionary thinker and author of the bestselling Rights of Man was a member of the National Convention in Paris and advised republicans to invade. Later, Paine presented a plan to president Thomas Jefferson to send gunboats to make…

In 1985, Miloš Forman’s screen adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s stage play Amadeus swept the Academy Awards, winning eight Oscars, including best picture. In that acclaimed film, F Murray Abraham’s Antonio Salieri seethed at the divine gift bestowed upon Tom Hulce’s “vulgar” Mozart – a rapscallion whom God appears to have mischievously made his instrument on Earth.In the new biographical drama Chevalier, from writer Stefani Robinson (a Writers Guild of America and Emmy award winner for the TV series Atlanta) and director…

Period drama’s narrow focus on telling and re-telling the same stories has, historically at least, deprived audiences of some rip-roaring screen fare. That’s now changing, as evidenced by this film about 18th-century Parisian polymath Joseph Bologne AKA Chevalier de Saint-Georges. As played by Kelvin Harrison Jr, this fascinating fellow escaped a Caribbean slave plantation – his mother was a Senegalese-African woman; his father her enslaver – to reach the highest echelons of French society. There he excelled as a champion…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S., working with members of The Anson Street African Burial Ground Project, have discovered some of the history behind some of the enslaved people buried in 18th century Charleston, South Carolina—home to one of the busiest slave ports in American history. …

The Colombian army released images of one of the world's most valuable shipwrecks, the location of which was unknown for nearly three centuries.Spain's San Jose galleon was loaded with a vast cargo of treasure when it was sunk by British navy ships in 1708 during the War of the Spanish Succession.  The ship, a 64-gun galleon with around 600 people on board, is believed to have been carrying at least 200 tons of treasure, including gold coins, silver coins, and emeralds, worth an estimated up to $17 billion at today's…