Search

This article is an expanded version of the centenary Scott Holland Memorial Lecture delivered to an online symposium organised by the Scott Holland Trust on 4 November 2022. R. H. Tawney, one of the most important socialist thinkers and historians of the twentieth century, gave the first Scott Holland Lectures in 1922. This essay examines two controversial aspects of Tawney's life, the relationship of his Christian faith to his politics and Tawney's marriage to Jeanette, the sister of William Beveridge. It explores differences and tensions between public perceptions and private realities in Tawney's biography. Although his private reflections were strongly influenced by his faith, it is argued that Tawney's public political declarations were largely secular in nature. In reassessing Tawney's private failings as a husband and companion, it is cautioned that there should be no present-minded rush to judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores whether reality television personality Jade Goody should be included in the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography." It looks at whether Goody is a notable figure from popular culture to merit inclusion by looking at her personal and career background. It suggests that Goody should be added as she as the first person to achieve and sustain national fame as a reality TV star, and many women will benefit from her example and encouragement at the end of her life.

The article reports on the study that describes the use of hydrophilic polymers as a root canal filling material. It aims to evaluate the new delivery system which is necessary to design and to develop an efficient and easily learned technique. It shows that operators have easily use the delivery system and the new technique of filling the root canal of teeth in patients. It suggests that poly-hyproxyethyl methacrylate (Hema) was superior to the control as a bio-compatible, non-toxic root canal filling material.

Abstract: In modern Britain, pressure on parliament for social reform has been transmitted not only by mass movements of the people, but by well‐organised pressure groups and small coteries of experts. Driven by intellectual imperatives and by differing ideas of ‘progress’, these experts and activists have directed the impetus for measures to tackle poverty, working conditions, or inequality, mediating a broader sense of pressure from without. In contrast to political histories of social reform, this essay offers a history of ideas for social reform and the methods by which reformers shaped parliament's agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between historical and biographical writing. It looks at the way structural and individualized approaches to past events complement each other and also conflict on occasion by focusing on examples drawn from modern British and American history. Given as an inaugural lecture by the new Director of the Institute of Historical Research, it looks in turn at the contribution of the I.H.R. to the development of Tudor historiography; at the history and aims of the original Dictionary of National Biography and its successor, the Oxford D.N.B., published in 2004; and at the advantages and disadvantages of a history of the modern welfare state written through the biographies of its founders, among them William Beveridge, William Temple and R. H. Tawney. On the American side, contrasting depictions of Abraham Lincoln by biographers and historians are compared and the limits of both structural and biographical approaches to the history of American slavery and of individual slave lives are considered. The article argues that the best historical research and the most readable history require both types of analysis, biographical as well as historical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of the on-line and print editions of the book the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-14" (ODNB). The article discusses the ODNB's relation to the book the "Dictionary of National Biography" (DNB) edited by Leslie Stephen, the commissioning of a new version of the DNB beginning in 1992 by the publisher Oxford University Press, and the process utilized to choose entrants to the ODNB.

Historian and biographer Lawrence Goldman examines the life of RH Tawney - soldier, Christian, socialist - and uncovers a man whose political ethos of social involvement and education directly challenges today's more instrumental political left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘This paper provides an overview of aspects of the history of British sociology. In particular, it tries to answer critical historical work by among others, Perry Anderson and Philip Abrams, which sought to explain the supposed indigenous ‘failure’ to develop academic sociology in Britain before the 1960s. It is argued that a narrowly academic reading of the history of sociology cannot do justice to its role in the service of social administration and public enlightenment and may exaggerate the degree to which sociology from its foundations was conceived as a purely intellectual discipline. The paper points to a thriving sociological culture in Britain in the generation before the First World War, though it was one in which many contributions came from philosophers, natural scientists and political economists rather then self-proclaimed ‘sociologists’. It ends with a brief review of Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, a founder of the Sociological Society and editor of the Sociological Review, whose biographies and eclectic social and international interests tell us something about the personalities and political interests of early British sociological pioneers.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). According to the author, Lord Roseberry described DNB as the greatest literary monument of the Victorian age. It is a characteristically Victorian production as agreed by critics and historians. Its coverage was deliberately extended until the last day of 1900 including at a memoir of Queen Victoria, who died on January 22, 1901, and therefore, furnished a better historical landmark

This article focuses on the two volumes of the book "The History of the University of Oxford," edited by M. G. Brock and Mark Curthoys. The publication of volumes VI and VII of The Official History of the University of Oxford, in 1997 and 2000 respectively, brings to a close the writing of Oxford's history a quarter-century after it was first projected and planned in the 1970's. The two volumes are organized in a rough chronological sequence, dividing that point in the mid-Victorian era when the state intervened to reform Oxford and Cambridge. The problems of the internal reform of the university and of the relationship of Oxford to the national church, which gave rise to the Tractarians is discussed.

Examines the political effects on the English working classes of the collaboration of the Workers' Educational Association with the English universities and the British state. Implications of the collaboration; Definitions of intellectuals; Relationship between intellectuals and the working class.

University adult education, with its roots in the Victorian reform of the ancient universities, was conceived and consumed as a political project and, until the present generation, has always carried progressive political connotations. This article surveys its history by examining four different phases through which it moved, each associated with a different form of political commitment. Initially intended by reforming Liberals of the 1870s and 1880s to make responsible democratic citizens of the working class, after 1900 the adult education movement altered its focus in order to educate the emergent labour movement for the exercise of power. This in turn was challenged by a more class-conscious educational project, embodied in the Plebs League and Labour Colleges during the interwar period. In each of these forms, education was understood to have social ends, and students were encouraged to see themselves as members of quasi-political movements. Since the 1950s, however, under many influences, the special association of adult education and politics has been questioned and lost its relevance as new forms of continuing education have emphasised strictly personal development and vocational training. This article examines an educational tradition now at an end, which caught up many leading progressive intellectuals and in which education was axiomatically political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the international context in which American social science was institutionalized in the generation after the Civil War, following the foundation of the American Social Science Association in 1865. The ASSA was modelled on an influential British forum, founded eight years previously, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. A comparison of these two organisations from the 1860s to the 1880s allows consideration of British intellectual and political influences on the first American social scientists. It also helps in the identification of the social and political attitudes of the well-born, cosmopolitan, and high-minded American reformers attracted to social science at this time. The theme of American exceptionalism has recently been emphasized when considering the motives and intentions of early social science in the United States. It is argued here that the replication in America of models of the new discipline which were first developed in Britain, is indicative also of a self-conscious internationalism among the American social-scientific community of this period. In addition to an institutional comparison, the article examines the careers and ideas of several representative figures in this process of Anglo-American liberal transference, among them the physician Dr. Edward Jarvis, the feminist Caroline Healey Dall, the jurist David Dudley Field, and the famed British interpreter of American experience, James Bryce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defends his earlier article and suggests that some of the points raised by Elwitt were covered in other articles.

Discusses Lawrence Goldman's "A Peculiarity of the English? The Social Science Association and the Absence of Sociology in Nineteenth-Century Britain," 'Past & Present' 1987 (114), which discussed the "peculiar" nature of social science in Victorian Britain by comparing it with France and the United States. The author criticizes Goldman for not discussing the political dimensions of social science. In reply, Goldman defends his earlier article and suggests that some of the points raised by Elwitt were covered in other articles.

During a three month participant observation study of an intensive care unit, the maintenance of "detached concern" among medical personnel was analyzed. In order to function in their medical roles and to maintain emotional balance medical personnel typically employed the following coping mechanisms: humor, escape into work, language alteration, and rationalization. Discontinuity of detachment signaled a breakdown of coping and was derived from a specific type of patient contact. The balance between detachment and concern was affected by the age and personality characteristics of patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes a case of a man with chronic ulcerative colitis, skin necrosis and a circulating cryofibrinogen probably responsible for the necrosis. Information on the case report; Discussion on the case.