Historical Sketch of the College Historical Society (1770-2020)
Historical Sketch of the College Historical Society (1770-2020) The Forerunners The College Historical Society sprang from two associations of a similar character which were founded in the middle of the eighteenth century: Burke’s Club and the Historical Club. The Club founded by Edmund Burke and a few of his fellow students is the earliest debating society composed of students of the University of which any definite record remains. The minute book of this club, a treasured possession of the College Historical Society, relates that the first meeting took place on Tuesday, April 21st, 1747, in a house in George’s Lane, now South Great George’s Street, the members present being Edmund Burke, Matthew Mohun, William Dennis, Andrew Buck, Richard Shackelton and Richard Ardesoif. Mohun, for his ill conduct and neglect was later “formally expelled the Society for ever.” The preamble to the Club’s laws stated its intention to provide “fair opportunities of correcting our taste, regulating and enriching our judgement, brightening our wit, and enlarging our knowledge, and of being serviceable to others in the same things. The business of the Club was to be “speeching, reading, writing and arguing, in Morality, History, Criticism, Politics and all the useful branches of philosophy”; the first law related to the conduct of members and ordained that ‘decency and good manners, virtue and religion, must guide their whole behaviour, and no word, gesture or action, contrary thereto, pass uncensured.’ Burke, who sat ssix times as President and twice as Censor, was the moving spirit and was never once absent from the meetings.
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