Institute of Historical Research
From 1832 to the present day, from the countryside in Wales to the Comintern in Moscow, from America to Finland and Ireland to Australia, from the girls’ school to the stage, women’s suffrage was the most significant challenge to the constitution since 1832, seeking not only to settle demands for inclusion and justice but to expand and redefine definitions of citizenship. This collection advances ongoing debates within suffrage history whilst also drawing on a range of new sources, different intellectual techniques and methodological approaches, which challenge established interpretations.
With its focus on politics and political activism in its broadest sense, this collection makes a timely and substantial...
Precarious Professionals uncovers the inequalities and insecurities which lay at the heart of professional life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The book challenges conventional categories in the history of work, exploring instead the everyday labour of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the traditional professions. Situating new historical perspectives on gender at the forefront of their research, the contributors explore how professional cultures could not only define themselves against, but often flourished outside of, the confines of patriarchal codes and structures.
Putting the lives of precarious professionals in dialogue with master narratives in modern British...
An extraordinary court with late medieval roots in the activities of the king’s council, Star Chamber came into its own over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, before being abolished in 1641 by members of parliament for what they deemed egregious abuses of royal power. Before its demise, the court heard a wide range of disputes in cases framed as fraud, libel, riot, and more. In so doing, it produced records of a sort that make its archive invaluable to many researchers today for insights into both the ordinary and extraordinary.
The chapters gathered here explore what we can learn about the history of an age through both the practices of its courts and the disputes of the people who came before them. With...
The history of childhood and welfare in Britain through the eyes of children. Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain brings together the latest historical research on welfare provision by the state, charities and families from 1830 to 1980. Demonstrating how the young were integral to the making, interpretation, delivery and impact of welfare services, the chapters consider a wide range of investments in young people’s lives, including residential institutions, emigration schemes, hospitals and clinics, schools, social housing and familial care. Drawing upon thousands of personal testimonies, including a wealth of writing by children themselves, the book shows that we can only understand the history and impact...
In 1645, as the First Civil War approached its end, a second Reformation took place which created profound dislocations in religion and in British society. The Church was disestablished, and godly puritan practices promoted in parish churches and everyday life. Some clergy and parishioners embraced change; others were horrified, experiencing these as times of madness and trouble. Historians continue to debate the extent of the social disruption that resulted, and the impact of godly ideals.
With an introduction from Professor Bernard Capp, pre-eminent social historian of the period, this collection of essays assesses interregnum religious practice at ground level, based on a sophisticated understanding of the complex and...
The flooding and subsequent closure of Scotland’s last deep coal mine in 2002 brought a centuries long saga to an end. Villages and towns across the densely populated Central Belt owe their existence to coal mining’s expansion during the nineteenth century and its maturation in the twentieth. Colliery closures and job losses were not just experienced in economic terms: they had profound implications for what it meant to be a worker, a Scot and a resident of an industrial settlement. Coal Country presents the first book-length account of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields. It draws on archival research using records from UK government, the nationalized coal industry and trade unions, as well as the words and...
The Grand Tour was a journey to continental Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a rite of passage, the Tour also played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity.
Examining letters, diaries and other records left by Grand Tourists, tutors and their families, this book demonstrates how the Tour was used to educate elite young men in a wide variety of skills, virtues and masculine behaviours that extended well beyond polite society. Sarah Goldsmith argues that dangerous experiences, in particular, were far more central to the Tour as a means of constructing Britain’s next generation of leaders than has...
Ibstock is a large village 15 miles north-west of Leicester and the subject of the third VCH Short from Leicestershire. Neighbouring place-names indicate that the parish was once fringed by heathland to its north and west, while Ibstock’s own place-name references an early dairy farm on this land. Garendon Abbey, near Loughborough, received gifts in the 12th century totalling over 500 a. in Ibstock, and created a large sheep farm on their enclosed estate.
Framework-knitting had become important by 1811, when trade and manufacture employed almost as many families in the parish as agriculture. Ibstock’s character changed more dramatically in the later 19th century, when the coal deposits which lay beneath Ibstock’s soils began to...
In October 1934 the northern Spanish region of Asturias was the scene of the most important outburst of revolution in Europe between the early 1920s and the Spanish Civil War. Thousands of left-wing militants took up arms and fought the Spanish army in the streets of Oviedo while in the rear-guard committees proclaimed a revolutionary dawn. After two weeks, however, the insurrection was crushed and the widespread repression was central to the polarization and fragmentation of Spanish politics prior to the Civil War (1936-9).
Weaving together a range of everyday disputes and arenas of conflict, from tenant activism to strikes, boycotts to political violence, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! reveals how local cleavages and...
This volume explores the relationship between individuals and institutions in scholastic thought and practice across the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, setting an agenda for future debates. Written by leading European experts from numerous fields, this theoretically sophisticated collection analyses a wide range of intellectual practices and disciplines. Avoiding narrow approaches to scholasticism, the book addresses ethics, history, heresy, law, inquisition, metaphysics, pastoral care, poetry, religious orders, saints’ cults and theology. A substantial introduction establishes an accessible historiographical context for the volume’s agenda, and a final afterword examines implications for future research.
The history of...