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Few measures, if any, could claim to have had a greater impact on British society than the poor law. As a comprehensive system of relieving those in need, the poor law provided relief for a significant proportion of the population but influenced the behaviour of a much larger group that lived at or near the margins of poverty. It touched the lives of countless numbers of individuals not only as paupers but also as ratepayers, guardians, officials and magistrates. This system underwent significant change in the nineteenth century with the shift from the old to the new poor law. The extent to which changes in policy anticipated new legislation is a key question and is here examined in the cont...
This book explores the importance of history to Elizabethan and early Stuart gentry and how this led to a vibrant antiquarian culture. The family, town and county histories written by the community, which form the core of the study, had an influence on the development of local history in England which lasted into the twentieth century and is still felt today. Eschewing a narrow historiographical approach, the author examines a range of manuscript and published works and other material reflecting the gentry's interest in the past: pedigree rolls, antiquarian notebooks, heraldic displays and maps. The book provides a survey of the development of local history in England from its medieval origins to 1660. This is followed by chapters on the practicalities of local historical research: the national educational and institutional framework, the development of regional networks of local historians and the gentlemen who controlled access to their sources, and analysis of the source materials available. The final section features chapters on genealogy, didacticism and the physical world.
The actions of Irish nationalists in Britain are often characterised as a 'sideshow' to the revolutionary events in Ireland between 1912 and 1922. This original study argues, conversely, that Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to contemporary Irish and British assessments of the Irish Revolution between the Third Home Rule Bill and the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Darragh Gannon charts the development of Irish nationalism across the Irish Sea over the course of a historic decade in United Kingdom history – from constitutional crisis, to war, and revolution. The book documents successive Home Rule and IRA campaigns in Britain coordinated by John Redmond and Michael Collins respectively and examines the mobilisation of Irish migrant communities in British cities in response to major political crises, from the Ulster crisis to the First World War. Finally, Conflict, Diaspora, and Empire assesses the impacts of Irish nationalism in metropolitan Britain, from Whitehall to Westminster. The Irish Revolution, this study concludes, was defined by political conflicts, and cultures, across the Irish Sea.
Lost Freedom addresses the widespread feeling that there has been a fundamental change in the social life of children in recent decades: the loss of childhood freedom, and in particular, the loss of freedom to roam beyond the safety of home. Mathew Thomson explores this phenomenon, concentrating on the period from the Second World War until the 1970s, and considering the roles of psychological theory, traffic, safety consciousness, anxiety about sexual danger, and television in the erosion of freedom. Thomson argues that the Second World War has an important place in this story, with war-borne anxieties encouraging an emphasis on the central importance of a landscape of home. War also encour...
The story of the revolutionary transformation of the British educational system in the second half of the 20th century from a rigid hierarchy for a minority, to a fundamental right of all citizens, one of the most valued and enduring features of the welfare state - and the crisis of the meritocracy that this has entailed.
Victorian Britain is often considered as the high point of 'laissez-faire', the place and the time when people were most 'free' to make their own lives without the aid or interference of the State. This book explores the truth of that assumption and what it might mean. It considers what the Victorian State did or did not do, what were the prevailing definitions and practices of 'liberty', what other sources of discipline and authority existed beyond the State to structure people's lives - in sum, what were the broad conditions under which such a profound belief in 'liberty' could flourish, and a complex society be run on those principles. Contributors include leading scholars in British political, social and cultural history, so that 'liberty' is seen in the round, not just as a set of ideas or of political slogans, but also as a public and private philosophy that structured everyday life. Consideration is also given to the full range of British subjects in the nineteenth century - men, women, people of all classes, from all parts of the British Isles - and to placing the British experience in a global and comparative perspective.
"Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 7832-7867 offers a literary complement to recent historians' emphasis upon the cultural visibility and significance of the British aristocracy during the Victorian period. Aristocratic women benefited from a leisured model of socialised dilettante interaction that allowed them both to maintain and to market their high social status through their writing, but this model could prove a liability in attempts at serious social and/or intellectual engagement. Instead, these women became targets for critiques aimed at defining certain forms of individual and national identity, even as they themselves adapted to changing value schemes. Aristocratic women's writing therefore offers an important literary and cultural trope through which to consider gendered models of influence, elite identities, the nature of politics, private and public spheres, marriage, professional identities, literary hierarchies, imperial experiences, and ultimately the ongoing representation of the nation state between the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867."--BOOK JACKET.
Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
This volume brings together the most recent research on the part played by European aristocracies in the radical right-wing movements of the first half of the twentieth century. An international array of social and political historians analyses the aristocracies of eleven countries at a particularly testing time: the interwar years.