1770s
Showing 166 works across all media from the 1770s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
The Wealth of Nations
Wealth is not gold in a vault but what a country produces, and specialization multiplies it. Smith begins with ten men making pins and every economic argument since descends from him.
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Werther writes to a friend about Lotte, who is engaged to a decent man, and about feelings he cannot govern. Young men across Europe dressed like him and read themselves into his condition.
Watson and the Shark
Brook Watson really did lose a leg to a shark in Havana harbor, and Copley put a Black sailor at the top of the rescue.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Three friends argue over whether the order of the world proves a designer. Philo grants the comparison, then dismantles it, asking why a competent god would build this much suffering into the machine.
Common Sense (Collected Writings)
Paine tells the colonists that an island cannot rule a continent and that hereditary kingship is an absurdity. Read aloud in taverns, it turned grievance into independence within months.
A Young Girl Reading
For once Fragonard is not being naughty. A girl in yellow reads, and the ruff at her wrist is a few flicks of impasto.
The Meeting
He is coming over the garden wall and she has just seen him, with a statue of Venus watching from above. Painted for Madame du Barry.
The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur of Antique Fragments
An artist weeps beside a colossal marble foot and a pointing hand, defeated by the size of what antiquity had already managed.
The Shipwreck
Masts splintering, survivors in the surf, and the whole thing arranged for people who wanted to feel terror from a safe distance.
If you inquire what the people are like here, I must answer, "The same as everywhere!"
George Washington at Princeton
Washington leans on a cannon with captured flags at his feet. Peale knew him and served in the war, so this is the man.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.