Search

The article refers to a June 1753 letter written by English author Samuel Richardson to British poet Elizabeth Carter, as well as Carter's letter in response, which discuss the British Jewish naturalization Act of 1753. Richardson refers to a "little paper" which he included with his letter to Carter. The article argues that this was a pamphlet attributed to Philip Carteret Webb having the abbreviated title "The Bill, Permitting Jews to be Naturalized by Parliament, Having Been Misrepresented in the London Gazetteer, of Friday the 18th May."

From 1807 onwards, bilateral slave-trade treaties stipulated how naval squadrons would rescue slaves from slave ships, and how states should arrange the settlement and apprenticeship of these slaves, to transform them into 'liberated Africans'. Comparing interactions between the state and liberated Africans at sea along the South African and Brazilian coasts, and in the port towns of Cape Town and Salvador, reveals how the legal status of liberated Africans changed over time. Current scholarship has framed liberated Africans in terms of whether they were attributed rights or suffered re-enslavement, and thus focused on their solidarity through claiming rights, 'ethnic survivals' or creolization. Instead, this paper argues anti-slave-trade legislation ascribed to liberated Africans a set of unguaranteed entitlements – promises regarding status and treatment without obligating states to uphold that status or treatment. By focusing on the precise aspects of legislation that operated at each point in the process of anti-slave-trade activity – rescuing slaves from slave ships, transportation to a port, processing through a court, and apprenticeship – this paper unearths how the law came into force in the encounter between state officials and liberated Africans, as part of the complex transition from slavery to free labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the introduction to Britain of the Gräfenberg ring, an early version of what later became known as an intrauterine device (IUD). The struggle during the interwar years to establish the value of the ring provides an opportunity for a case study of the evaluation and acceptance of a new medical device. With the professionalization of the birth control movement and the expansion of birth control clinics in interwar Britain, efforts to develop better scientific means for contraception grew rapidly. At the end of the nineteenth century, methods for controlling fertility ranged from coitus interruptus and abstinence, to diverse substances ingested or placed into the vagina, to barrier methods. The first decades of the twentieth century brought early work on chemical contraceptives as well as a number of new intrauterine devices, among them the Gräfenberg ring. Developing a cheap, reliable, and widely acceptable contraceptive became a pressing goal for activists in the voluntary birth control movement in Britain between the wars. Yet, tensions developed over the best form of contraception to prescribe. By situating the Gräfenberg ring within the context of the debates and competition among British medical and birth control professionals, this paper reveals broader issues of power relationships and expertise in the assessment of a new medical technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the attitudes expressed by consular and embassy officials to a new type of traveller they encountered in the mid-1960s. Their observations are contextualised within wider debates concerning 'youth' in the late 1950s and 1960s. Officials distinguished sharply between 'overlanders' (who could be tolerated or accommodated) and 'beatniks' whose behaviour was characterized as illegal and/or unacceptable. Smoking cannabis was identified as a key marker of beatnik behaviour. Officials' observations are contrasted with four accounts by new travellers from the period. The paper concludes with a proposal for an 'antinominian' approach to the study of youth cultures: researchers should be more sensitive to the constructed nature of the labels used to identify the various strands of youth identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the Working Paper published by the Modern British Studies (MBS) research centre on new ways of thinking about the transformation of British society, culture, politics and economy between 19th century and 2015. It highlights the cultures of democracy and the rising political, social and cultural change. It states that the paper can be used as a study material for understanding the state of history in present times.

This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional 'successor' to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates about the design and provision of post-war housing within the papers and report of the Parker Morris committee. It does so to show how the models of citizens' rights and expectations which underpinned post-war welfare provision were transformed by mass affluence and the dynamic sphere of commercial consumption. Parker Morris's deliberations demonstrate that, as early as the 1950s, the citizen-subject was reimagined as a consuming individual, with requirements based on their expressive needs and consuming desires, and that this had far-reaching consequences for social democratic systems of universal welfare provision. The introduction of consumerist imperatives into publicly defined models of citizens' needs enhanced the political and cultural authority of the commercial domain, prompted a heightened role for commercial experts and market logics within public governance, and served to devalue socialized forms of provision in favour of consumer choice in the private market. The article thus engages with the growing scholarship on the politics of mass consumerism by showing how the material and emotional comforts of post-war affluence came to be constructed as critical to social democratic citizenship and selfhood. Situating this uneasy entanglement of social democratic rights with consumer satisfaction as part of a wider trajectory of political change, the piece suggests that Parker Morris marks an early but significant moment in the transition from post-war welfarism and social democracy to the consumer- and market-oriented forms of governance which came to dominate British politics and society in the latter part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine how the physical reality behind Tallis’s illustrations can be illuminated to explore the commercial, domestic and social dimensions of Tallis’s London. It will explore the range of material culture available, and how this can be used to analyse interior space, in particular through English Heritage’s Architectural Study Collection. Two preliminary case studies will investigate the future potential for looking behind the façades of early Victorian London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Continental Europeans were not just enemies and competitors of the eighteenth-century British Empire; they were also allies, auxiliaries, and coadjutors in British imperial activity. This paper examines the role of European and particularly German soldiers in the British Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. In chronological terms, the focus is on the Seven Years War and especially on the War of American Independence. Geographically, the paper concentrates on three British imperial sites: India, North America, and the Mediterranean garrisons of Gibraltar and Minorca. Historians have already looked at aspects of European military service in the British Empire; but the various foreign military units, and the different imperial theatres, are not usually examined together, as parts of the process of the British state’s use of other Europeans to defend and even expand its imperial possessions. One of the main objectives here is to assess the significance of that European contribution.The paper begins by considering why the British state chose European soldiers in preference to other available options, particularly locally raised forces in India and North America, and even British and Irish manpower. The second section attempts to quantify the continental European contribution, both in absolute terms and as compared with British and imperial inputs. The final section endeavours to assess the quality of European military involvement. Some Britons regarded foreign soldiers as inherently unreliable and therefore less valuable than their own troops; however, there is plenty of evidence of positive assessments of the military role of continental Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The last two hundred years or so have seen the transformation of medical practice from a clinical art to the application of science to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There has been a historical debate about how the use of technology and discoveries of the laboratory have become integrated within medical practice. In trying to understand the evolution of “scientific medicine,” this has generally focused on the tensions between the differing cultures, persons, and professions of the “laboratory” and “clinic” and sought to explain how they were resolved within specific institutions. This paper looks again at the “Glasgow School” (the subject of a number of seminal papers on this subject) and the forces that shaped it, by exploring the career of Leonard Findlay, whose training in Glasgow, and in Berlin (where he worked in a department in which science and medicine were integrated), defined a style of clinical medicine that formed the model for a new sort of university department of medicine in which clinicians and scientists worked side by side, albeit under the leadership of the former. As a clinician exposed in Berlin to the emerging new sciences of nutrition, microbiology, and immunology, which were particularly relevant to the care of sick children, Findlay created in Glasgow a department of medical pediatrics, which owed less to local factors, figures, and forces and more to his experience in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent interpretations of religious change in modern Britain have stressed the importance of a sudden and abrupt 'sexual revolution' during the 1960s. The role the Churches played in bringing about their own demise remains a point of debate, particularly in the case of the Catholic Church. This article attempts to move beyond existing historical disputes over a 'religious crisis' and whether it was rooted in 'internal' causes (problems within the Church) or 'external', secular developments. It explores the way sexual knowledge was discussed and disseminated by Catholic authorities during this decade of perceived cultural transition, drawing on the previously unpublished papers of the Papal Commission for Birth Control 1963-5 and the training manuals of the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (CMAC). These sources offer a unique insight into the often problematic task of reconciling Catholic thought with the discourses of 'sexual liberation'. While the central hierarchy's continued opposition to women's contraceptive autonomy has understandably dominated historical attention, the material presented here suggests that Catholic understandings of female sexuality were not universally at odds with the intellectual infrastructure of a 'sexual revolution'. On the question of female sexual pleasure, progressive Catholic authorities in both the Papal Commission and the CMAC made fervent efforts to engage with contemporary scientific modes of understanding. Perversely, this approach served to neglect certain aspects of corporeal and emotional experience, thereby limiting the case for meaningful doctrinal change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phenomenon of scissors-and-paste journalism in the Victorian periodical press and specifically the movement of texts from the United States into Britain. In the nineteenth-century press, exchange editors and subeditors worked for periodical publishers by reading through the daily mass of print and selecting appropriate material to fill blank space in their own periodical. While some newspapers and magazines worked within an exchange network of agreed syndication, other periodicals reprinted works without the permission of authors or publishers. I argue that this technique is actually a more complex phenomenon than the typical ‘cut-and-paste’ method, familiar in existing scholarship, whereby editors lifted whole articles verbatim. I examine examples of scissors-and-paste journalism in theLadies’ Treasury(1857–1895), where, under Eliza Warren Francis’s direction, the magazine reproduced didactic narratives and prescriptive journalism from a wide range of American periodicals. I show that an editor, or likely, Eliza Warren Francis, modified texts in such a way as to anglicize the text, so that it reads within a British vernacular. Despite these language changes, the moralizing message remains constant in both articles. For the editor of theLadies’ Treasury, ‘cut-and-paste’ was actually a three-step process of cut, revise, and then paste the results without full acknowledgement or permission. To put the practice plainly: steal it, change it, and print it. Incorporating women’s periodicals and prescriptive literature into examinations of the transatlantic circulation of ideas and information, this research uncovers an important cultural pattern through the spread of this particular type of journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the rising use of commercial medical assistance in early modern England. We measure individual consumption of medical and nursing services using a new dataset of debts at death between ca. 1670 and ca. 1790. Levels of consumption of medical services were high and stable in London from the 1680s. However, we find rapid growth in the provinces, in both the likelihood of using medical assistance and the sums spent on it. The structure of medical services also shifted, with an increase in "general practice," particularly by apothecaries. The expansion in medical services diffused from London and was motivated by changing preferences, not wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine a frequently overlooked aspect of William Laud's career: his role in the house of lords. Attempting to move away from simplistic views of Laud as a fusty cleric, it uses official parliamentary records and relevant state papers, as well as Laud's own diary and sermons, in order to show that he was an assiduous and effective parliamentarian, relied upon by both the king and the duke of Buckingham for political advice and as a writer of speeches and political memoranda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The late-nineteenth century saw private book collecting gain a renewed respectability and cultural cachet as a leisure pursuit for the upper- and middle classes. This paper examines representations of collectors in the literature belonging to a new genre of writing which emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the book-collecting passion which could encompass aesthetes and antiquarians as well as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how, during the 1880s and 1890s, this particular type of collecting practice was used rhetorically in a range of printed material to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to feminine forms of engagement with old books in particular. In spite of women's comparative lack of advantage in the market for antiquarian editions, however, I argue that such a critique would not have been articulated so forcefully had women not been taking a determined interest in rare books. Evidence from central London booksellers during this period suggests that a variety of women were making antiquarian collections of their own. Male bibliophiles who denigrated female book-buyers in the periodical press were attempting to partially invent a homosocial tradition of collecting in order to distance their own pursuit from what they saw as the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the circulation of news that daily arrived in the ports of late Elizabethan Devon concerning the Spanish fleet. It utilizes the state and Cecil papers, as well as other centrally and locally held manuscript collections, to probe the nature of provincial news networks through the prism of a county-based case study. Previous scholarly research has tended to focus on the single 'hub' of London. However, as this article reveals, there existed much more complex sets of news networks that operated in the first instance at a local level, but which also had connections with the capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the letters between 20th century the scholar R.W. (Richard William) Hunt and the British historian Beryl Smalley concerning Hunt's efforts to publish his thesis paper on the English scholar Alexander Peckham titled "Alexander Neckham."

The author discusses the 15th year anniversary of the British Society of Rheumatology Biologics Register for Rheumatoid Arthritis (BSRBR-RA) in 2016. Topics covered include eight papers that were published in "Rheumatology" on the safety and effectiveness of anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) therapies in patients with RA and the BSRBR-RA yielding significant clinical guidance in its 15 years.

Twopenny libraries first appeared in North London in 1930 and quickly spread throughout urban Britain. Their innovation was to dispense with subscription fees and charge per loan. Unlike older commercial libraries such as Mudie’s, twopenny libraries served a working-class clientele. Some twopenny libraries were standalone businesses. Many more were sidelines to existing businesses such as tobacconists’ and newsagents’ shops. Library services could be profitable in their own right, but often their main value to their proprietors was to bring customers into the shop more regularly. Established players in the book trade initially responded to twopenny libraries with alarm, but the threat they posed was limited. Their market was not the same as those of booksellers. Some public librarians made arguments along these lines about the twopenny libraries’ impact on public libraries; certainly, the two types of institution coexisted. Twopenny libraries carried a lot of so-called light fiction, but they also lent working-class readers the ‘middlebrow’ bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s. The wider significance of the twopenny library lies in the way it problematizes the distinction commonly made between a middle-class public for new hardcover novels and a working-class readership of fiction that appeared in cheap papers and magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early twentieth century, death rates from typhoid in European cities reached an all time low. By contrast, death rates in America were six times as high, and the American public health community began a crusade against the disease in 1912. In the 1920s, hopes for greater control of the disease focused not just on sewers and drinking water supplies, but on the newly established scientific means of immunization, the supervision of food-related pathways of infection, and the management of healthy carriers. The management of carriers, which lay at the core of any typhoid control program, proved an intractable problem, and typhoid remained a public health concern. America and England both struggled with control of the disease during the interwar period. Coming from different starting points, however, their approaches to the problem differed. This paper compares and contrasts these different public health strategies, considers the variable quality of support provided by bacteriological laboratories, and demonstrates that “accidental” typhoid outbreaks continued to happen up to the outbreak of World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Administrative and financial corruption was a central preoccupation of eighteenth-century Britain, and effective audit supposedly the sine qua non of an efficient fiscal-military state, yet no studies exist of its true extent or why audit mechanisms could prove so ineffective. Through a close study of the papers of James Brydges, Paymaster of the Forces between 1705 and 1713 and ‘a byword for corruption’, this article argues that a variety of inventive means were used to bypass the Exchequer audit, including outright falsification and forgery. Yet the Exchequer was not ineffective, and ultimately political standing determined how far corruption was detected or deterred. Where Brydges could mobilise personal and political connections with the Exchequer and other bodies such as the Comptrollers of Army Accounts, he had more success at evading scrutiny. By contrast, although the parliamentary Commissioners of Public Accounts used arbitrary and relatively unsystematic audit procedures and were motivated mainly by partisan interests, this lent them political power and motivation and thereby increased the credibility of their investigations. Less assured of political protection, Brydges therefore ceased most of his activities. Thus effective audit was not primarily the product of more impartial, rational or bureaucratic administrative structures, as most historians have suggested, but of the relative political standing of auditors versus their opponents. This has profound implications for studies of corruption and auditing during the eighteenth century and its continuities with earlier practices, and for understanding the decisive changes that occured during the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The two surviving inventories of the library of the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare bear witness to a particularly large and diverse collection of books in the Earls' castle at Maynooth, Co. Kildare. Between them, the lists record well over one hundred separate items in four languages: Latin, French, English and Irish. This paper traces the history of the library and analyses the Fitzgeralds' particular interests as book collectors and as readers. It provides the first full published set of suggested identifications and bibliographical details for the books at Maynooth. It also includes a fresh transcription of the library lists and a discussion of the manuscript context in which they are preserved. Sources like the Kildare library lists provide valuable evidence for the potential circulation of a wide range of non-native manuscripts and prints in late-medieval Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the relationship between suicide and insanity in the eyes of both legal and medical professionals in nineteenth century Britain and Ireland. Both jurisdictions had a similar historical legacy in relation to the treatment of suicide, punishing sane suicides, those found felo de se, by ignominious burial and forfeiture. Legal changes between 1823 and 1882 negated the need for a verdict of temporary insanity as suicide essentially became a crime without legal punishment. Nevertheless, the rise of forensic psychiatry within the legal system meant that definitions of the temporary insanity of suicides became a controversial question for medical professionals. Similarly, the retention of distinctions of sanity and insanity for religious and insurance purposes ensured that there were spiritual and practical ramifications to a verdict of felo de se even if there were no legal consequences. The debate among doctors and legal professionals suggests that the process of "medicalization" of suicide was not, as MacDonald has suggested, driven by these elite professional groups, but rather by public opinion. While legal punishments for attempted suicide remained in force and in use, by the end of the nineteenth century medicine was seen as the main actor in the fight against this "social disease." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses former British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel's conservative political strategy from 1832 to 1841, focusing on his efforts to pass the Controverted Elections Act of 1839, which was aimed at ensuring Great Britain's House of Commons' privileges in terms of adjudicating cases involving alleged breaches of electoral law. The author highlights controversy over Peel's proposal, including discussions of the Great Reform Act of 1832, partisanship in the British parliament, and parliamentary election committees. Special attention is paid to Peel's response to the legal case of Stockdale v. Hansard, which involved the publication of parliamentary papers.

Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious books proportionally lost popularity while travel books became more popular. This paper examines a hybrid of these two genres, Protestant missionary monographs, through a detailed analysis of David Cranz's 1767 History of Greenland, including the rationale behind publishing the book; its translation from German into English; how it was used as a political tool to influence British foreign policy; and how the book was received by British literary critics and scientists. This analysis demonstrates how authorial intentions that the religious and secular components of Protestant Missionary literature be considered as parts of a whole produced confusion and tension in the secular reception of such books. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) was a member of the landed aristocracy well connected with the inner circle of late Victorian high society and high politics. He is known as a poet and a translator of Arabic poetry, as well as an adventurous traveller and an ardent anti-imperialist controversialist. He rates, in fact, as something of a precursor, and a fellow traveller, of J.A. Hobson. However, in the 1870s, at the beginning of his Arabophilia, he might have easily been mistaken for an ambitious patrician bent on making the East his ‘career’ (in the line of Disraeli's Tancred) at a time when the decline of Turkish religious and political authority over Islamic lands seemed to open up exciting opportunities for nations which were not ‘afraid of growing great’, as well as for enterprising individuals. It was only in 1881–82, through his commitment to the Egyptian nationalists, that his vague political sympathies were reshaped into a coherent critical attitude towards British colonial policies. Relying on Blunt's autobiographical writings, on his poetry and on other sources (published and unpublished), and – for the overall critique of imperialism – on Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, my paper foregrounds the details of Blunt's ‘political education’, discussing his orientalist beginnings, and then his reaction to Urabi's Nationalist Movement and to Britain's involvement in its repression. What I intend to underline is how Blunt's conflicting personal allegiances sharpened his awareness of the contradictions of British ‘liberal’ foreign policy by placing him at the meeting point of multiple crucial political faultlines, at the forefront of colonial modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the views of philosopher John Locke concerning the franchise in Great Britain in the late seventeenth century. It examines a draft of an election bill found in the papers of English politician Edward Clarke that was annotated by Locke. The author comments on election regulation and concern about corruption and bribery. He also reflects on Locke's Whiggism, examining what is referred to as Court Whiggery and Country Whiggery. The relationship between population, wealth, and representation is considered.

In today's intelligence community, elaborate background checks yield mounds of details about a prospect's life and history, but in the formative years of British intelligence between 1909-1919, these procedures were only just emerging. As with diplomatic personnel, intelligence workers needed to be "known" entities, whose discretion and background could be assured. This process of subjecting prospects to an examination in order to separate likely candidates from unsuitable ones is known today as "vetting." This paper explores the cultural practice of vetting and the ways in which twentieth-century British intelligence not only depended upon and exploited familial connections in order to gain recommendations for personnel, but more importantly, used the notion of family loyalty to shape the assumptions and realities of such intelligence work. Certainly intelligence workers were not without considerable skills, often in languages, yet other considerations such as class background, family connections, gender, and nationality were the real filters used to vet personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After returning from the Beagle in 1836, Charles Darwin suffered for over 40 years from long bouts of vomiting, gut pain, headaches, severe tiredness, skin problems, and depression. Twenty doctors failed to treat him. Many books and papers have explained Darwin's mystery illness as organic or psychosomatic, including arsenic poisoning, Chagas' disease, multiple allergy, hypochondria, or bereavement syndrome. None stand up to full scrutiny. His medical history shows he had an organic problem, exacerbated by depression. Here we show that all Darwin's symptoms match systemic lactose intolerance. Vomiting and gut problems showed up two to three hours after a meal, the time it takes for lactose to reach the large intestine. His family history shows a major inherited component, as with genetically predisposed hypolactasia. Darwin only got better when, by chance, he stopped taking milk and cream. Darwin's illness highlights something else he missed--the importance of lactose in mammalian and human evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a historical source found in the archives of the Cecil Papers at Hatfield House in Herfordshire, England related to the February 8, 1601 uprising in London, England led by Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex, against the monarchy of British Queen Elizabeth I. The document details a conspiracy by supporters of the Earl of Essex to free the Earl from his imprisonment for treason in the Tower of London planned for February 15, 1601. It reports that the plan was reconsidered and abandoned, but not before crown authorities heard of it and arrested three leaders of the conspiracy.