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In today's world, many believe that everyday life has become selfish and atomised--that individuals live only to consume. Jon Lawrence argues that they are wrong, and that whilst community has changed, it is far from dead. It is time to embrace new communities, and let go of nostalgia for the past.
Speaking for the People, first published in 1998, draws our attention to the problematic nature of politicians' claims to represent others, and in doing so it challenges conventional ideas about both the rise of class politics, and the triumph of party between 1867 and 1914. The book emphasises the strongly gendered nature of party politics before the First World War, and suggests that historians have greatly underestimated the continuing importance of the 'politics of place'. Most importantly, however, Speaking for the People argues that we must break away from teleological notions such as the 'modernisation' of politics, the taming of the 'popular', or the rise of class. Only then will we understand the shifting currents of popular politics. Speaking for the People represents a major challenge to the ways in which historians and political scientists have studied the interaction between party politics and popular political cultures.
In this engagingly written history of electioneering in Britain from the eighteenth century to the present, Jon Lawrence explores the changing relationship between politicians and public. Throughout this period, he argues, British politics has been characterized by bruising public rituals intended to bestow legitimacy on politicians by obliging them to face an often irreverent public on broadly equal terms. Face-to-face interaction was central both to the disorderly civic rituals of eighteenth-century politics, and to the Victorian and Edwardian election meeting. Perhaps surprisingly, it also survived in pretty rude health between the wars, despite the emergence of the new mass communication...
This book situates the controversial Thatcher era in the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain.
This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities - relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.
This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the physical and sexual abuse of children, forced child migration and role of the welfare state.
This major collection of essays challenges many of our preconceptions about British political and social history from the late eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, twelve leading scholars explore both the long-term structures - social, political and intellectual - of modern British history, and the forces that have transformed those structures at key moments. The result is a series of insightful, original essays presenting new research within a broad historical context. Subjects covered include the consequences of rapid demographic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the forces shaping transnational networks, especially those between Britain and its empire; and the recurrent problem of how we connect cultural politics to social change. An introductory essay situates Stedman Jones's work within the broader historiographical trends of the past thirty years, drawing important conclusions about new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.
Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990, during which time her Conservative administration transformed the political landscape of Britain. Science Policy under Thatcher is the first book to examine systematically the interplay of science and government under her leadership. Thatcher was a working scientist before she became a professional politician, and she maintained a close watch on science matters as prime minister. Scientific knowledge and advice were important to many urgent issues of the 1980s, from late Cold War questions of defence to emerging environmental problems such as acid rain and climate change. Drawing on newly released primary sources, Jon Agar explores h...
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.