You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Throughout history plague has been the cause of many major catastrophes. It was responsible for the Black Death of 1348 and the Great Plague of London in 1665, and for devastating epidemics much earlier and much later, in the Mediterranean in the sixth century, and in China and India between the 1890s and 1920s. Today, it has become a metaphor for other epidemic disasters which appear to threaten us, but plague itself has never been eradicated. In this Very Short Introduction, Paul Slack explores the historical impact of plague over the centuries, looking at the ways in which it has been interpreted, and the powerful images it has left behind in art and literature. Examining what plague mean...
The idea of improvement - gradual and cumulative betterment - was something new in 17th century England. It became commonplace to assert that improvements in agriculture, industry, commerce, and social welfare would bring infinite prosperity and happiness. The word improvement was itself new, and since it had no equivalent in other languages, it gave the English a distinctive culture of improvement which they took with them to Ireland, Scotland, and America. Slack explains the political, intellectual, and economic circumstances which allowed notions of improvement to take root.
From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.
This book is a classic study of a disease which had a profound impact on the history of Tudor and Stuart England. Plague was both a personal affliction and a social calamity, regularly decimating urban populations. Slack vividly describes the stresses which plague imposed on individuals, families, and whole communities, and the ways in which people tried to explain, control, and come to terms with it.
Mobility is fundamental to economic and social activities, including commuting, manufacturing, or supplying energy. This book focuses on understanding how mobility is linked with geography. It links spatial constraints and attributes with the origin, destination, extent, nature and purpose of movements.
A concise synthesis of past work on a unique and important system of social welfare.
Paul Slack's book demonstrates the extent to which the poor in England has been formally provided for by the end of the period: the scale of the English welfare apparatus that had been firmly established by 1700 had no parallel in the rest of Europe. This book explains how this unique achievement came about.
These essays honour leading historian of early modern England, Paul Slack, by engaging with his work on social policy and the history of political economy. They explore how languages of happiness and suffering developed, and how historians might explore the public employment and subjective experiences of happiness and suffering in this period.
This collection of essays in English urban history covers a period which has been called 'the Dark Ages in English Economic History', on which it directs a revealing light. The essays range from a discussion of the role of ceremony in the civic life of Coventry at teh end of the Middle Ages to the influence of war on London Merchant class at the end of the seventeenth century. This book was first published in 1972.