For twenty years in the eighteenth century, Georgia--the last British colony in what became the United States--enjoyed a brief period of free labor, where workers were not enslaved and were paid. The Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia created a "Georgia experiment" of philanthropic enterprise and moral reform for poor white workers, though rebellious settlers were more interested in shaking off the British social system of deference to the upper class. Only a few elites in the colony actually desired the slave system, but those men, backed by expansionist South Carolina planters, used the laborers' demands for high wages as examples of societal unrest. Through a campaign of disinformation in London, they argued for slavery, eventually convincing the Trustees to abandon their experiment. In The Short Life of Free Georgia, Noeleen McIlvenna chronicles the years between 1732 and 1752 and challenges the conventional view that Georgia's colonial purpose was based on unworkable assumptions and utopian ideals. Rather, Georgia largely succeeded in its goals--until self-interested parties convinced England that Georgia had failed, leading to the colony's transformation into a replica of slaveholding South Carolina. -- Noeleen McIlvenna is associate professor of history at Wright State University and author of A Very Mutinous People

Downloaded pdf to Note - good summary

For its competition of 1771, the Berlin Academy of Sciences asked: "Supposing men abandoned to their natural faculties, are they in a position to invent language? And by what means will they arrive at this invention?" The winning essay was Herder's "On the Origin of Language." This was actually the Academy's 2nd on language. In 1759 they asked: "What is the reciprocal influence of the opinions of people on language, and of language on opinions?" The winner was the orientalist Johann David Michaelis. Lifschitz's lucid and engaging book is about the 1759 contest, as he considers the historical, philosophical, and political circumstances that led to its proposal and the broader scholarly views of Michaelis. -- While one might quibble with Lifschitz's attempt to find deep roots in the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy for the 1759 Academy question, there is no doubting that in Berlin of the 1750s a number of thinkers took an active interest in language, its role in framing social institutions, and its relation to the mind, primarily under the influence of the work of Condillac and Rousseau. These include the president of the Academy, Maupertuis, and Moses Mendelssohn There was also lively discussion among Academy members regarding the (synchronic) connection between language and opinions, esp French as the language of the Academy. -- Already in the 1750s ...mainstream Enlightenment figures recognized the "linguistic rootedness of all human forms of life" and the importance of language as a "tool of cognition". Lifschitz rightly contends [this counters the story that such a view ], with its focus on the historical and non-rational aspects of human nature, [came from counter-Enlightenment figures] such as Herder and Hamann. [This directly] challenge[s] the characterization ... in Isaiah Berlin's seminal studies [as well as more recent studies] such as Michael Forster's work on Herder's philosophy of language. ...Herder's claim, as characterized by Forster, that "thought is essentially dependent upon and bounded by language" and that "one cannot think unless one has a language and one can only think what one can express linguistically" must be taken in the broader context of these earlier philosophical (and political) debates.

Tucker only appears for historians as a blank without principles -- family papers acquired in 1970 cast a different light on how historians have viewed last part of Walpole regime through mid century -- extensive references to secondary literature -- downloaded pdf to Note

JSTOR: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1977), pp. 487-500 -- downloaded pdf to Note