J. C. D. CLARK

'Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark' (born 28 February, 1951) is a British historian of British history and American history. He currently serves as the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas.
Clark began as a leading “revisionist” historian of the 17th century and 18th century British history. Clark is notable for arguing against both the Marxist and Whiggish views of the period as either ones of over-determined social change or of progressive constitutional advancement respectively. Instead Clark has argued for seeing the unities and coherences within period between 1660 and 1832, a periodization that he first termed the “long eighteenth century”, an idea now widely adopted. Clark maintains that this period was one of Anglican-aristocratic hegemony marked by the popular acceptance of the monarchy and the Church of England as symbols of national unity, together with the dominance of an aristocratic-gentry oligarchy and a sense of national identity that preceded nineteenth-century nationalism and was instead underpinned by shared history and religious allegiance. In Clark’s model, British life was characterized by the official entrenchment of these parameters, despite the periodic flourishing of religious dissent. Clark has also framed an explanation of the American Revolution as, in part, a war of religion triggered by the denominational conflicts still at that time endemic within the English-speaking North Atlantic world.
Clark has often maintained that too often has the eighteenth century been reinterpreted retrospectively in the light of the 19th century and sees his mission as an historian to explain the “long eighteenth century” in its own terms. Clark earlier criticised those, especially Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, who formerly held the field in Britain during the era of later modernism.
He is now primarily interested in the history of religion, and his chief achievement is the re-introduction of the religious dimension into the agendas formerly set by positivist, functionalist and reductionalist historians.

Contents

Work

External links

Work

★ ''The Dynamics of Change : the Crisis of the 1750s and English Party Systems'', Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1982 ISBN 0-521-23830-7.

★ ''English Society, 1688-1832 : Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancien Régime'', Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1985 ISBN 0-521-30922-0; second edition, much revised, as ''English Society 1660-1832: Religion, ideology and politics during the ancien regime'', Cambridge University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-521-66180-3.

★ ''Revolution and Rebellion : State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries'', Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-521-33063-7.

★ ''The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, 1742-1763'', edited, with an introduction by J.C.D. Clark, Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1988 ISBN 0-521-36111-7.

★ (Editor) ''Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain'', Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1990 ISBN 0-333-51551-X.

★ ''The Language Of Liberty, 1660-1832 : Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World'', Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-521-44957-X.

★ ''Samuel Johnson : Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism'', Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-521-47304-7.

★ ''Samuel Johnson in Historical Context'' edited by Jonathan Clark and Howard Erskine-Hill, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave, 2002 ISBN 0-333-80447-3.

★ (Editor), Edmund Burke, ''Reflections on the Revolution in France'', Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3923-4.

★ ''Our Shadowed Present : Modernism, Postmodernism, and History'', Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8047-5149-8.

External links

★ J.C.D. Clark

★ Review of English Society 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Regime

★ Reappraises of English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime

★ Review of OUR SHADOWED PRESENT: MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORY