Arts & Culture
The music, theatre, and landmark writing of 1776, from Mozart and Haydn to Paine, Gibbon, and Phillis Wheatley.
Every Arts & Culture article in the 1776 knowledge base. Use the topic filters to narrow by sub-topic.
Thomas Paine's The American Crisis, Number I
*The American Crisis* is a series of pamphlets written by Thomas Paine during the American Revolu...
The Founding of Phi Beta Kappa
Phi Beta Kappa, the first collegiate society in the United States to take its name from the initi...
Scottish Enlightenment and American Revolutionary Thought...
The Scottish Enlightenment reached its intellectual apex in 1776, converging on the American Decl...
William Cowper's Mental Crisis and Poetry of 1776
In 1776, English poet William Cowper experienced a severe mental health crisis that would reshape...
David Garrick's Farewell and Sheridan's Drury Lane (1776)
David Garrick, the most celebrated actor-manager of the eighteenth-century English stage, retired...
Joshua Reynolds and Portrait Painting in 1776
Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait painter of Britain and founding president of the Royal Acad...
The Pennsylvania Magazine and Revolutionary Printing in 1776
The Pennsylvania Magazine served as a preeminent vehicle for revolutionary ideology in 1776 — edi...
Founding of the Bolshoi Theatre
The Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow traces its founding to March 28, 1776, when Empress Catherine II gr...
Phillis Wheatley and 'To His Excellency General Washington'
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) was an enslaved African-born woman who became the first African A...
Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of th...
Edward Gibbon was born on May 8, 1737, in Putney, Surrey, England. His formal education was irreg...
Women Writers and Intellectuals of 1776
Female writers, poets, and thinkers in 1776 participated in revolutionary political discourse des...
Mozart in 1776
In 1776, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was twenty years old and resident in Salzburg as a court musicia...
Joseph Haydn's Autobiographical Sketch of 1776
In 1776, at age 44, Joseph Haydn composed an *Autobiographical Sketch*—a concise but revealing ac...