Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Peter Linebaugh was born in 1942 [1] He was a student of British labor historian E. P. Thompson, and received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick in 1975. [2] He has taught at University of Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts–Boston, Franconia College, Harvard University, and Tufts University. Linebaugh retired from the University of Toledo in 2014. [3]
Linebaugh's books have been generally well received within the discipline of history, and several of his books have demonstrated popularity among general readers.[ citation needed ] Historian Robin Kelley praised Linebaugh's book The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008), arguing that there is "not a more important historian living today. Period." [4]
In late April 2012, Occupy Ypsilanti published and began to distribute throughout Ypsilanti, Michigan, free of charge, Linebaugh's Ypsilanti Vampire May Day. His writing also appears in New Left Review , the New York University Law Review, Radical History Review , and Social History .
Linebaugh is married to Michaela Brennan. He has two daughters, Kate and Riley Linebaugh. [5]
Magna Carta Libertatum, commonly called Magna Carta or sometimes Magna Charta, is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood by their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War.
Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough,, was an English judge. After serving as a member of parliament and Attorney General, he became Lord Chief Justice.
Libertatia was a purported pirate colony founded in the late 17th century in Madagascar under the leadership of Captain James Misson. The main source for Libertatia is Volume 2 of A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book which describes Captain Misson and Libertatia. Little to no corroborating evidence for Libertatia beyond this account has been found, however. Whether Libertatia was real but somehow "lost" to history, a pirate legend that the author recorded based on interviews with sailors, or a concocted work of utopian fiction by the author from the start is contested.
The inclosure acts created legal property rights to land previously held in common in England and Wales, particularly open fields and common land. Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 km2.
The Conspiracy of 1741, also known as the Slave Insurrection of 1741, was a purported plot by slaves and poor whites in the British colony of New York in 1741 to revolt and level New York City with a series of fires. Historians disagree as to whether such a plot existed and, if there was one, its scale. During the court cases, the prosecution kept changing the grounds of accusation, ending with linking the insurrection to a "Popish" plot by Spaniards and other Catholics.
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
Edward Marcus Despard, an Irish officer in the service of the British Crown, gained notoriety as a colonial administrator for refusing to recognise racial distinctions in law and, following his recall to London, as a republican conspirator. Despard's associations with the London Corresponding Society, the United Irishmen and United Britons led to his trial and execution in 1803 as the alleged ringleader of a plot to assassinate the King.
The Golden Age of Piracy is a common designation for the period between the 1650s and the 1730s, when maritime piracy was a significant factor in the histories of the North Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
The Charter of the Forest of 1217 re-established rights of access for free men to the royal forest that had been eroded by King William the Conqueror and his heirs. Many of its provisions were in force for centuries afterwards. It was originally sealed in England by the young King Henry III, acting under the regency of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke.
Atlantic history is a specialty field in history that studies the Atlantic World in the early modern period. The Atlantic World was created by the contact between Europeans and the Americas, and Atlantic History is the study of that world. It is premised on the idea that, following the rise of sustained European contact with the New World in the 16th century, the continents that bordered the Atlantic Ocean—the Americas, Europe, and Africa—constituted a regional system or common sphere of economic and cultural exchange that can be studied as a totality.
Marcus Buford Rediker is an American historian, writer, professor, and social activist. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976 and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an Master of Arts and Ph.D. in history. He taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994 and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History of the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh.
A bill of rights, sometimes called a declaration of rights or a charter of rights, is a list of the most important rights to the citizens of a country. The purpose is to protect those rights against infringement from public officials and private citizens.
The Battle of Fort Mose was a significant action of the War of Jenkins' Ear that took place on June 14, 1740, in Spanish Florida. Captain Antonio Salgado commanded a Spanish column of 300 regular troops, backed by the free black militia under Francisco Menéndez and allied Seminole warriors consisting of Indian auxiliaries. They stormed Fort Mose, a strategically crucial position newly held by 170 British soldiers under Colonel John Palmer. Palmer and his garrison had taken the fort from the Spanish as part of James Oglethorpe's offensive to capture St. Augustine.
The distribution of justice was a practice commonly adopted by pirates. Ships operated as limited democracies and imposed their ideas of justice upon the crew of the ship that they captured. After capture, the crew would be questioned as to whether they had suffered cruel or unjust treatment from the commander of the ship. Any commanders "against whom Complaint was made" would be punished or even executed. This punishment was not indiscriminately given to all ships' commanders. An "honest Fellow that never abused any Sailors" would be rewarded, and sometimes freed.
The Atlantic World refers to the period between European colonization of the Americas (1492-) and the early nineteenth century. Piracy became prevalent in this era because of the difficulty of policing this vast area, the limited state control over many parts of the coast, and the competition between different European powers. The best known pirates of this era are the Golden Age Pirates who roamed the seas off the coasts of North America, Africa, and the Caribbean.
The title of The Woodcutter and the Trees covers a complex of fables that are of West Asian and Greek origins, the latter ascribed to Aesop. All of them concern the need to be wary of harming oneself through misplaced generosity.
The Despard Plot was a failed 1802 conspiracy by British revolutionaries led by Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, a former army officer and colonial official. Evidence presented in court suggested that Despard planned to assassinate the monarch George III and seize key strong points in London such as the Bank of England and Tower of London as a prelude to a wider uprising by the population of the city. The British Government was aware of the plot five months before the scheduled date of attack, but waited to arrest to gain enough evidence. One week before the scheduled attack, Despard and his co-conspirators were arrested at the Oakley Arms pub in Lambeth on suspicion of plotting an uprising. Despard's execution on 21 February 1803 was attended by a crowd of around 20,000, the largest public gathering until the funeral of Lord Nelson two years later following the Battle of Trafalgar.
Hydrarchy, is the organizational structure of a ship, or the ability for individual(s) to gain power over land by ruling through the instrument of water, as defined by English poet Richard Braithwaite (1588–1673), who coined the term.
Dinah Black, also known as Dinah the Moor and Dinah the Black, was a Black woman who lived in the English city of Bristol during the 17th century and was baptised as a Christian. Though historical information on her life is scarce, records show that she visited Baptist spiritualist Sarah Wight in London in 1647 and appeared in a case heard by the Bristol Court of Aldermen in July 1667 after escaping from a ship which was supposed to transport her to a plantation overseas.
Modern capitalist society is a term used to describe a type of capitalist society in which a capitalist class of "new elites" and "old elites" concerned with maximizing their wealth secures a political system that serves and protects their interests, leading to the development of a wage-earning class. The term is commonly used by historians to refer to a transition from a premodern feudal society to a modern capitalist society, with consensus being that England emerged as the first modern capitalist society through the English Civil War (1642-51) and the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). Historians identify that the transition into modern capitalist society is often defined by a bourgeois revolution in which rising elites secure a system of representative democracy, rather than direct democracy, that serves their interests over the interests of the previously ruling royal aristocracy, such as in the American Revolution.
