Rough Diamonds

Hutton was one of many rough diamonds—‘men of great talent but no polish’—who offer an alternative model to ‘politeness’. These self-educated entrepreneurs add a new layer to our k...

Chapter 6 revisits the Priestley riots (1791) from the viewpoint of a victim, and finds causes concerning the wealth and power of rough diamonds. Birmingham’s print culture and att...

Previous scholarly treatment of the history of Lucy Mack Smith has explained the work of Martha and Howard Coray in editing and compiling it. In “A Textual and Archival Reexaminati...

The book contains materials on the search for modern and buried alluvial and primary deposits of diamonds. Much attention is paid to prospecting testing of potentially diamondife...

Reading and writing were cornerstones of the lives of self-educated rough diamonds like Hutton. He is a perfect example of the dreaded rising author, who wrote for money, without e...

Chapter 5 shows the opportunities and limits of participating in Birmingham’s government. A lively print culture and competing newspapers led to high levels of engagement. Since Bi...

The introduction shows the convergence and intertwining of the Industrial Revolution and the provincial Enlightenment. At the centre of this industrial universe lay Birmingham; and...

This chapter discusses complex algebraic surfaces, with particular emphasis on the Miyaoka-Yau inequality and the rough classification of surfaces. Every complex algebraic surface ...