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The Concept of “the Establishment” and the Transformation of Political Argument in Britain since 1945 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Stuart Middleton
This article examines the formation and development of the concept of the Establishment in British political argument after its recoining in a celebrated article by the journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955. The author argues that the term “the Establishment” did not have a stable referent but rather acquired a range of possible meanings and uses as part of a new political vocabulary within which the course
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Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Alannah Tomkins
Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register
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Notes toward a Postsecular History of Modern British Secularization Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Sam Brewitt-Taylor
This article argues that British historiography's secularization debate is largely misconceived, being enmeshed in secular ideological assumptions inherited from the West's secular revolution of the 1960s. It therefore introduces an alternative, postsecular paradigm for understanding British secularization, which conceptualizes secularity as an ideological culture in its own right, religion as secularity's
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An Empire of Free Ports: British Commercial Imperialism in the 1766 Free Port Act Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 R. Grant Kleiser
The Free Port Act of 1766 was an important reform in British political economy during the so-called imperial crisis between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783). In an explicit break from the letter if not the spirit of the Navigation Acts, the act opened six British ports in the West Indies (two in Dominica and four in Jamaica) to foreign merchants trading in a
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Music, Politics, and History: An Introduction Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 David Kennerley
Music has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by
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Music to Some Consequence: Reaction, Reform, Race Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Oskar Cox Jensen
A naval chaplain in the 1790s, a radical arrested after Peterloo, and a smash hit of blackface minstrelsy: these three disparate historical actors all provide exemplary cases of music in action, playing upon the political passions of the British people. Thinking across the three examples, this article reflects upon the aims of the forum Music and Politics in Britain, c.1780–1850, as well as advancing
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The Sound of Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Katie Barclay
In the early 1800s, Jonah Barrington, an Irish judge, bemoaned that the air chosen as the march for the Irish Volunteer Movement had “no merit whatever, being neither grand, nor martial, nor animating,” contrasting it with the zeal of French revolutionary music. The emotional impact of music might be a matter of taste, but such a statement is suggestive of an aesthetics, where political music, or music
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Music and Movement in Britain, 1793–1815 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Mark Philp
The frequent references to the actors and events of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in the titles of the dance tunes of the period raise the question of how we should understand their significance. This article argues that the practice is one of a number of examples of music and song shaping people's lived experience and behavior in ways that were rarely fully conscious. Drawing on a range
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“Loud and Open Speaking in ‘the People's’ Mighty Name”: Eliza Cook, Music and Politics Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-04-09 Susan Rutherford
In 1849, the working-class poet Eliza Cook (1818–89) expanded her international profile by venturing into weekly periodical publication with Eliza Cook's Journal. Not only was this the first British journal named after a female editor but it also placed an unusual emphasis on music—unusual not least because few women in that epoch were given the opportunity to participate in the broader critical discourses
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The Acta of William the Conqueror, Domesday Book, the Oath of Salisbury, and the Legitimacy and Stability of the Norman Regime in England Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Paul Dalton
Domesday Book, which is usually considered to be the product of William the Conqueror's great survey of England in 1086, is one of the most important sources of English medieval history. This article contributes to the vigorous and long-standing debate about the purpose of Domesday Book. It does so by exploring the light cast by some of William's royal acta on the activities and concerns of the king
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“Students Who Have the Irish Tongue”: The Gaidhealtachd, Education, and State Formation in Covenanted Scotland, 1638–1651 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Salvatore Cipriano
This article examines the Scottish Covenanters’ initiatives to revamp educational provision in the Gaidhealtachd, the Gaelic-speaking portions of Scotland, from the beginning of the Scottish Revolution in 1638 to the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland in 1651. Scholars have explored in detail the range of educational schemes pursued by central governments in the seventeenth century to “civilize” the
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The Equivalent Societies of Edinburgh and London, the Formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Nature of the Scottish Financial Revolution Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Andrew McDiarmid
The historiography of the Financial Revolution in Scotland remains underdeveloped. This article addresses that gap by rounding out the rough sketch that currently represents our understanding of Scotland's Financial Revolution by focusing on the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland's first new financial institution in more than thirty years when it emerged in 1727. The case is made that
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Refugee Children and the Emotional Cost of Internationalism in Interwar Britain Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Sandra Trudgen Dawson
This article explores the complexity surrounding the politics and emotions of internationalism and humanitarian work in interwar Britain by using as a lens the public and official responses to assisting “refugee children.” Analysis of British responses to refugee emergencies after the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities suggests that attitudes
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“Partnership Not Prejudice”: British Nurses, Colonial Students, and the National Health Service, 1948–1962 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Catherine Babikian
Nurses and their labor are essential to the provision of health care. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the flagship institution of postwar British welfare, the National Health Service. When it launched in 1948, a shortage of thirty-five thousand nurses endangered its future. This article examines the National Health Service's nursing shortage and its most enduring solution: the recruitment of
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One British Thing: The Hair Weavers Text-Book: A Study in the Art of Hair-Weaving and Beauty Culture (1967) Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2021-01-26 Kennetta Hammond Perry
As part of the “One British Thing” series, this essay explores Ena V. McDonald's The Hair Weavers Text-Book, published in 1967, as a source for exploring Black women's intellectual histories in Britain during the twentieth century.
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Pietro Giannone and the Nonjuring Contribution to the Separation of Church and State Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Paul Monod
Why did the English Nonjuror Richard Rawlinson promote the 1729–30 English translation of Pietro Giannone's Civil History of Naples? The Nonjurors in England espoused ecclesiastical independency from the state, which they derived from the thought of Restoration High Churchmen and from the French Gallican Louis Ellies Du Pin. Giannone, a Neapolitan lawyer, proposed a similar “two powers” model of strict
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Limited Liberties: Catholics and the Policies of the Pitt Ministry in an Early Modern Context Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Mary Louise Sanderson
This article contributes to current debates about the role of religion in governance in the late eighteenth century British Atlantic world by examining the Pitt ministry's policies regarding Catholic subjects in England, Quebec, and Ireland in an early modern context. Starting with an overview of early modern attempts to find a compromise between Catholic subjects and their Protestant rulers, this
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Paupers Behaving Badly: Punishment in the Victorian Workhouse Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Samantha Williams
The deterrent workhouse, with its strict rules for the behavior of inmates and boundaries of authority of the workhouse officers, was a central expression of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, known widely as the New Poor Law. This article explores for the first time the day-to-day experience of the power and authority of workhouse masters, matrons, other officers of the workhouse, and its Board of
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David Hume in Chicago: A Twentieth-Century Hoax Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Felix Waldmann
This article alleges that two letters attributed to the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) were forged in the twentieth century. The letters were first published in 1972 and 1973 by Michael Morrisroe, an assistant professor of English in the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, after which they became monuments of conventional scholarship on Hume's life and writings. Both letters are cited without
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“The Show Is Not about Race’”: Custom, Screen Culture, and the Black and White Minstrel Show Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Christine Grandy
In 1967, when the BBC was faced with a petition by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination requesting an end to the televised variety program the Black and White Minstrel Show (1958–1978), producers at the BBC, the press, and audience members collectively argued that the historic presence of minstrelsy in Britain rendered the practice of blacking up harmless. This article uses critical race theory
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One British Thing: The Safety Razor Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Paul R. Deslandes
This essay examines the history of the safety razor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it explores male shaving practices and the male investment in physical appearance in the age of industrial capitalism. In highlighting the history of a single material artifact to showcase the relationship between masculinity, good grooming, personal success, and notions of self-improvement
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Catholic Power and the Irish City: Modernity, Religion, and Planning in Galway, 1944–1949 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-07-01 Richard J. Butler
This article uses a major town planning dispute concerning the location for a new school - fought in the 1940s between church and state in the city of Galway - to rethink Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity. Using town planning and urban governance lenses, it argues that existing scholarship on the post-war Irish Catholic Church overstates its hegemonic power. In analysing the dispute,
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Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-07-01 Padraic X. Scanlan
During the era when British antislavery was ascendant, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as 'peasants' was a commonplace among defenders of slavery. Concomitantly, antislavery advocates hoped that freedpeople might become a 'peasantry' after the abolition of slavery. This article explores how the idea of slaves-as-peasants, a fantasy of black labour
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Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-04-01 Asheesh Kapur Siddique
This article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use
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British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-04-01 Andrea Major
This article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British
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“The People Who Write to Us Are the People Who Don't Like Us”: Class, Gender, and Citizenship in the Survey of Sickness, 1943–1952 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-04-01 Daisy Payling
The Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting Government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broader and more diverse public in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal
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Denunciation in the German-Occupied Channel Islands, 1940–1945 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-04-01 Graham Smyth
Over the course of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945, a number of letters of denunciation were sent by islanders to the German authorities, accusing fellow islanders of violations of occupation law or of anti-German activity of one sort or another. The German occupiers were ambivalent toward the denunciations. While recognizing their usefulness in maintaining order
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Local Matters: Queer Scenes in 1960s Manchester, Plymouth, and Brighton Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Matt Cook
This article compares queer social scenes in the 1960s in three English towns and cities: Brighton and Plymouth on the south coast and Manchester in the northwest. It considers how queer experience in these places was affected by local identities, demographics, geographies, and socio-economic circumstances, and so demonstrates how and why the local matters to queer scenes and lives, even in the midst
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Rehabilitating an Empire: Humanitarian Collusion with the Colonial State during the Kenyan Emergency, ca. 1954–1960 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Emily Baughan
During the Kenyan Emergency of 1952–1960, one of the most violent episodes in the history of the British Empire, humanitarian organizations colluded with the colonial state to shore up British power. This article examines how aid agencies that claimed to exemplify the progressive internationalism of the postwar period participated in colonial violence. Far from condemning the brutality of the imprisonment
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The Bicentenary of Queen Victoria Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2020-01-01 Miles Taylor
The past year, 2019, was the bicentenary of the birth of Queen Victoria. Since 2001, the centenary of her death, much has changed in the scholarship about the British queen. Her own journals and correspondence are more available for researchers. European monarchies are now being taken seriously as historical topics. There is also less agreement about the Victorian era as a distinct period of study
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“A Besy Woman … and Full of Lawe”: Female Litigants in Early Tudor Star Chamber Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Deborah Youngs
This article considers the opportunities available and the constraints to be negotiated by female litigants at the court of Star Chamber during the reigns of the early Tudor kings. Star Chamber was a prerogative court and grew in popularity following the transformation and clarification of its judicial functions under Thomas Wolsey in the early sixteenth century. While it has suffered losses to its
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Coverture and the Marital Partnership in Late Medieval Nottingham: Women's Litigation at the Borough Court, ca. 1300–ca.1500 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Teresa Phipps
Women engaged in litigation in Nottingham's borough court as both plaintiffs and defendants for a variety of reasons relating to trade, household provisioning, misbehavior and interpersonal disputes. This article examines how women's litigation was determined by the doctrine of coverture and the way that women's marital status shaped and defined their experience of the law. In doing so, it explores
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Worthless Witnesses? Marginal Voices and Women's Legal Agency in Early Modern England Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Alexandra Shepard
This article explores the distribution of women witnesses in a selection of English church courts between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, in order to assess the extent to which women's participation as witnesses in these jurisdictions might be characterized as a form of legal agency. It shows that women's participation was highly contingent on their marital status and between places
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Maternity and Justice in the Early Modern English Court of Chancery Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Amanda L. Capern
This article is a case study of female litigants acting in the capacity of mother in the English equity court of Chancery between 1550 and 1700. It starts by asking how prevalent mothers were as plaintiffs and defendants in Chancery, though the burden of the article is a qualitative analysis of maternal narratives in Chancery pleadings and the use of gendered tropes such as “poor mother.” Stepmothers
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A Piece of the Puzzle: Women and the Law as Viewed from the Late Medieval Court of Chancery Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Cordelia Beattie
This article uses fifteenth-century Chancery court bills to demonstrate how women negotiated solutions to social and legal disputes not just in Chancery but through a variety of legal jurisdictions. This approach sheds light on women's actions in courts where the records have not survived, and it also adds nuance to the long-running debate about whether equity was a more favorable jurisdiction for
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Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice in Britain, 1300–1700: An Introduction Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Alexandra Shepard, Tim Stretton
This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional
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Women, Marital Status, and Law: The Marital Spectrum in Seventeenth-Century Glasgow Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Rebecca Mason
Early modern women are often categorized by historians in relation to their marital status—whether they appeared as single, married, or widowed women. These identifications reflected the effects of marriage on women's legal and social status. Focusing on the records of the burgh and commissary courts of seventeenth-century Glasgow, this article shows how Scottish women's legal status existed instead
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Women, Legal Records, and the Problem of the Lawyer's Hand Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-10-01 Tim Stretton
Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting women and how these were (or were not) enforced and exercised. Many documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them. This article examines the
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Landscapes of Internment: British Prisoner of War Camps and the Memory of the First World War Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Tim Grady
During the First World War, all of the belligerent powers interned both civilian and military prisoners. In Britain alone, over one hundred thousand people were held behind barbed wire. Despite the scale of this enterprise, interment barely features in Britain's First World War memory culture. By exploring the place of prisoner-of-war camps within the “militarized environment” of the home front, this
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“Communis Hostis Omnium”: The Smerwick Massacre (1580) and the Law of Nations Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 D. Alan Orr
This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dun An Oir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship
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One British Thing: The Babies’ Anti-Gas Protective Helmet Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Susan R. Grayzel
This one British thing, the baby gas mask, helps us understand the normalization of total war in modern Britain.
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“Sacred Trust”: Rethinking Late British Decolonization in Indigenous Canada Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Joel Hebert
This article considers the political activism of Canada's Indigenous peoples as a corrective to the prevailing narrative of British decolonization. For several decades, historians have described the end of empire as a series of linear political transitions from colony to nation-state, all ending in the late 1960s. But for many colonized peoples, the path to sovereignty was much less straightforward
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Female Merchants? Women, Debt, and Trade in Later Medieval England, 1266–1532 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-07-01 Richard Goddard
This article examines English women who were engaged in wholesale long-distance or international trade in the later Middle Ages. These women made up only a small proportion of English merchants, averaging about 3 to 4 percent of the mercantile population, often working in partnership with their husbands. The article systematically quantifies, for the first time, women's penetration into this male-dominated
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Patrick Griffin. The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire in the Eighteenth Century. Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 376. $40 (cloth). Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-04-01 Anthony Page
In the twenty-first century, empire has loomed increasingly large in scholarship—as Richard Price argued in this journal in 2006, it is the "one big thing" at the heart of modern British history. A scattered Atlantic English empire that emerged from the seventeenth century gave way to a global British empire that dramatically expanded during the mid-eighteenth-century wars, and was debated and shaped
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Puppy Love: Domestic Science, “Women's Work,” and Canine Care Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-04-01 Tom Quick
The health and well-being of pets became a significant matter of medical and scientific concern during the first decades of the twentieth century. Addressing the case of dogs, this article contends that this circumstance was not primarily a consequence of developments internal to veterinary practice but rather emerged from the broader-based domestic-science movement. The elaboration of scientifically
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Radical Steele: Popular Politics and the Limits of Authority Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-04-01 Ashley Marshall
In modern critical imagination, Richard Steele is almost always seen as Joseph Addison's friend and collaborator, as half of the periodical essay-writing team devoted to the promotion of civility, urbanity, and a moral and well-mannered lifestyle. Scholars focus almost exclusively on the Tatler , the Spectator , and Steele's sentimental drama, The Conscious Lovers (1722), virtually ignoring his substantial
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“Here Is a Good Boke to Lerne”: Practical Books, the Coming of the Press, and the Search for Knowledge, ca. 1400–1560 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-04-01 Melissa Reynolds
This article compares the circulation and reception of useful knowledge—from medical and craft recipes to prognostications and agricultural treatises—in late medieval English manuscripts and early printed practical books. It first surveys the contents and composition of eighty-eight fifteenth-century vernacular practical manuscripts identified in significant collections in the United States and United
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Safe for Democracy: Constitutional Politics, Popular Spectacle, and the British Monarchy 1910–1914 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Frank Mort
How did the British monarchy respond to the multiple challenges of early twentieth-century mass democracy? Historians have separated the growth of constitutional sovereignty from the practice of a welfare monarchy, or from royalty as decorative and media friendly. This article argues that the political transformation of the modern monarchy was inseparable from innovations to its style and presentation
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Performing Public Credit at the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Anne L. Murphy
Much is known about the negotiation of personal credit relationships during the eighteenth century. It has been noted how direct contact and observation allowed individuals to assess the creditworthiness of those with whom they had financial connections and to whom they might lend money. Much less is known about one of the most important credit relationships of the long eighteenth century: that between
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“Whatever Community Is, This Is Not It”: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of “Race” in Britain after 1958 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Camilla Schofield, Ben Jones
The impact of the 1958 Notting Hill riots tends to figure in histories of the political right as a galvanising force for anti-immigrant sentiment - or as radical catalyst in the transnational history of the Black Atlantic. Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left
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“Rotten Effeminate Stuff”: Patriarchy, Domesticity, and Home in Victorian and Edwardian English Public Schools Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jane Hamlett
During the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation
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Against Ethnicity: Democracy, Equality, and the Northern Irish Conflict Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Simon Prince
The study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other
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Britain and the World: A New Field? Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Tehila Sasson, James Vernon, Miles Ogborn, Priya Satia, Catherine Hall
Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, “Britain and the world.” This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of approaches, shares a common assumption that Britain's interactions with the world beyond its shores enable us to better understand the histories of both Britain and the globe
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“The Penguins Are Coming”: Brand Mascots and Utopian Mass Consumption in Interwar Britain Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Richard Hornsey
This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst
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Land of Opportunity? The Assimilation of Scottish Migrants in England, 1603–ca. 1762 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Keith M. Brown, Allan Kennedy
Immigration and its consequences is one of the most contentious issues in the contemporary world, and historians are engaged in this debate by offering a longer-term perspective. In recent years, research on the United Kingdom's population has placed greater emphasis on population movement in shaping Britain's story, identifying waves of migrants from elsewhere alongside migration within Britain. One
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Sir John Gladstone and the Debate over the Amelioration of Slavery in the British West Indies in the 1820s Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Trevor Burnard, Kit Candlin
Sir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was
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One British Thing: Clay Pipes Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Beverly Lemire
The clay tobacco pipe is a “British thing” distinct to its time, but that is a partial provenance. Although many thousands have been unearthed in Britain or described in British archival records, the pipe is also evidence of early globalized trade, imperial ventures, and material translation across cultures. Its Britishness is contingent. This small relic accompanied complex enterprises where a new-style
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Puritan Martyrs in Island Prisons Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 David Cressy
Charles I’s Star Chamber prosecution of the lawyer William Prynne, the minister Henry Burton, and the physician John Bastwick generated both contemporary and historiographical controversy, mostly concerned with their writings, their trial, and their punishment in London. This article turns attention to their unusual offshore incarceration on the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scillies between
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Missionaries, the Monarchy, and the Emergence of Anglican Pluralism in the 1960s and 1970s Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-06-29 Daniel S. Loss
In the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family
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On the Character of a “Great Patriot”: A New Essay Ascribed to Bolingbroke Journal of British Studies (IF 0.479) Pub Date : 2018-06-29 Joseph Hone, Max Skjönsberg
This article presents the first addition in recent years to the canon of the British eighteenth-century statesman and political thinker Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a manuscript essay “On the Character of a Great Patriot.” For the first time, this article identifies Bolingbroke as the likely author of this unascribed, undated, and untitled essay in the Senate House Library manuscript collection. Using