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'By a Flash and a Scare' illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing riots, Tolpuddle, and the New Poor Law riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside during the 1800s, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation. In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive research among the local records of Norfolk and Suffolk, Dr Archer identifies and examines the three most serious crimes of protest in the countryside - arson, animal maiming and poaching. He shows how rural society in East Anglia was shaped by terror and...
This book, first published in 2000, examines the diversity of protest from 1780 to 1840 and how it altered during this period of extreme change. This textbook covers all forms of protest, including the Gordon Riots of 1780, food riots, Luddism, the radical political reform movement and Peterloo in 1819, and the less well researched anti-enclosure, anti-New Poor Law riots, arson and other forms of 'terroristic' action, up to the advent of Chartism in the 1830s. Archer evaluates the problematic nature of source materials and conflicting interpretations leading to debate, and reviews the historiography and methodology of protest studies. This study of popular protest gives a unique perspective on the social history and conditions of this crucial period and will provide a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.
When seventeen-year-old Spark takes a summer job working at a secluded house in England, organizing journals that span centuries and all written in the same hand, she discovers her true connection to the people who live there and the trait that makes them unique.
Sex and Gender is a substantially revised second edition of a classic text. Adopting a balanced and straightforward approach to the often controversial study of sex differences, the authors aim to introduce the reader to the fundamental questions relating to sex and gender in an accessible way at the same time as drawing on research in this and related areas. New developments which are explored in this edition include the rise of evolutionary psychology and the influence of Social Role Theory as well as additional psychoanalytic and ethno-methodological approaches which have all contributed to a greater understanding of the complex nature of masculinity and femininity.
Shakespeare was not a citizen of London. But the language of his plays is shot through with the concerns of London 'freemen' and their wives, the diverse commercial class that nevertheless excluded adult immigrants from country towns and northern Europe alike. This book combines London historiography, close reading, and recent theories of citizen subjectivity to demonstrate for the first time that Shakespeare's plays embody citizen and alien identities despite their aristocratic settings. Through three chapters, the book points out where the city shadows the country scenes of the major comedies, shows how London's trades animate the 'civil butchery' of the history plays, ans explains why England's metropolis becomes the fractured Rome of tragedy,
For twenty-five years John Archer has been obsessed by water. His fascination has led him to remote temples where water is worshipped as a living deity, to hot volcanic springs and icy waterfalls, to limpid pools hidden deep in the forest. John has drunk the water dinosaurs drank in the Jurassic swamps, sucked dew from the grasstree flowers at dawn, sipped the sulphurous healing waters of Sukayu in the mountains of northern Japan, and bathed in the legendary Golden Lotus tank at Madurai. He has recorded the legends of water, studied its rituals, and worshipped it with reverence in holy places. He has listened to the rhythms of the waves on the shore, to the sound patterns of lakes, small streams and majestic rivers. And now he distils his extraordinary discoveries in The Wisdom of Water, exploring the many beautiful and mystical aspects of water, and why water has always been and remains precious beyond imagining. John Archer is an author of twenty books, including six on water preservation. His most recent book is Twenty Thirst Century.
A survey of the social and economic conditions and events that gave Liverpool a reputation for being the most crime-ridden place in the country in the nineteenth century.
Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be solved using the same analytical framework. In this revised edition of Culture and Agency, Margaret Archer contextualises her argument in 1990s cultural sociology and links it explicitly to her latest book, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
How power was distributed and exercised is a key issue in understanding attitudes and assumptions in late medieval England. The essays in this volume all deal with those who had the power to make political decisions, whether kings, nobles or gentry, courtiers or clergy. While ultimately power rested on force, it was enshrined in the law and more usually exercised by influence and by the dangling of reward. Most disputes were settled without violence, if often with recourse to prolonged struggles in the courts, but those who offended against established interests could be punished severely, as the cases of Sir John Mortimer and of Bishop Reginald Pecock show. These essays, presented to Gerald Harriss, who has done so much to illuminate the history of the period, show not only how power was exercised but also how men of the time thought about it. Contributors: Rowena E. Archer, Christine Carpenter, Jeremy Catto, Rosemary Horrox, R.W. Hoyle, Maurice Keen, Dominic Luckett, Philippa Maddern, S.J. Payling, Edward Powell, Anthony Smith, Simon Walker, Christopher Woolgar, Edmund Wright.