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The article provides a historiographical overview of the history of applied science as presented within the public sphere in the nineteenth-century press of Great Britain. It focuses on two schools of history, the Cambridge School of Intellectual History following the work of science historian Quentin Skinner, and the German school of conceptual history termed "Begriffsgeschichte," exemplified by German historian Reinhart Koselleck. Topics include Scottish inventor James Watt, engineering professor W. J. R. Rankine, and science reporting.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the benefits which digital technology offers to all aspects of dental practice and education. This paper provides an overview of how digital technology has enhanced clinical and administrative procedures within dental practice, including computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacture (CAD/CAM), digital radiography, 3D printing, patient records, electronic patient referrals and electronic communications from dental practices. It then considers the development of teledentistry (mHealth) and its benefits in enabling distant consultations with patients, who for one reason or another are unable to visit dental practices easily. It then goes on to consider how and why digital dental distance learning materials were provided to general dental practitioners in England by the Department of Health (DoH) (England) and how they evolved. Finally, this paper considers the use of digital technology in dental education by dental schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using diverse sources, including archaeological evidence, this paper scrutinises the technology of the ordinary British Atlantic merchant ship, assessing continuity and change during the formation and development of the Atlantic empire (1600–1800). The paper argues that observable continuities and changes in rig, in hull design, and in defensive armament were responses to risks posed to owners, builders, and crews. I state that ‘risk mitigation’ was the main policy of the actors involved in the business, thus suggesting an innovative research path to assess decisions to innovate and decisions not to. This can thus contribute to a better understanding of Atlantic and technological history, as well as to an understanding of risk mitigation as a driving force in business and technology, beyond the more commonly used concept of disruptive innovations. Naturally, changes did take place, and investigate why that is helps us understand the continuity more fully, and ship technology more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the stores of the British Museum are three exquisite springs, made in the late 1820s and 1830s, to regulate the most precise timepieces in the world. Barely the thickness of a hair, they are exquisite because they are made entirely of glass. Combining new documentary evidence, funded by the Antiquarian Horological Society, with the first technical analysis of the springs, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum, the research presented here uncovers their extraordinary significance to the global extension of nineteenth century capitalism through the repeal of the Corn Laws. In the 1830s and 1840s the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy; the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort; and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, collaborated with the virtuoso chronometer-maker, Edward John Dent, to mobilize the specificity of particular forms of glass, the salience of the Glass Tax, and the significance of state standards, as means to reform. These protagonists looked to glass and its properties to transform the fiscal military state into an exquisitely regulated machine with the appearance of automation and the gloss of the free-trade liberal ideal. Surprising but significant connections, linking Newcastle mobs to tales of Cinderella and the use of small change, demonstrate why historians must attend to materials and how such attention exposes claims to knowledge, the interests behind such claims, and the impact they have had upon the design and architecture of the modern world. Through the pivotal role of glass, this paper reveals the entangled emergence of state and market capitalism, and how the means of production was transformed in vitreous proportions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the sub-disciplines of transport history, migration history and mobilities studies too rarely interact directly with each other, and that there is much to be gained from the integration and cross-fertilisation of different approaches. Migration historians rarely directly consider the modes of transport used to travel, and although there has been increased interaction between transport historians and mobilities scholars in recent years the full potential of such interactions is yet to be exploited. The experience of travelling, and the convenience of the modes of transport used, can significantly influence later decisions about migration and mobility. This paper calls for a greater focus on such topics and explores some of the potential benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the rise of synthetic nitrogen in Great Britain and its empire, from the First World War to the aftermath of the Second World War. Rather than focus solely on technological innovations and consumption statistics, it seeks to explain how nitrogen was a central element in the expansion of a form of agricultural governance, which needed simplified, stable, and seemingly universal input/output formulae. In the first half of the twentieth century, nitrogen was thus gradually constructed as a global indicator of development, as it was particularly adapted to scientific and political regimes increasingly relying upon abstraction and quantification. Yet, the history of nitrogenous fertilizers in the interwar years also shows that this cannot be reduced to a simple story of triumphant modernity, as their development and globalization was imperfect, unstable, accompanied by resistance and the resilience or emergence of other models. Rather than assuming an all-powerful "state" project, the paper thus seeks to recover the multiplicity of actors, and attempts to account for the rise of nitrogenous fertilizers; not just as the progressive application of a technological breakthrough, but as a difficult process embedded in technological, financial, and military constraints, corporate strategies, political imperatives, and the changing institutional framework of agricultural research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociologists in Britain have debated the nature of their field's relationship with biology since the late nineteenth century, interest in the full range of responses has only grown in recent years. This paper contributes to the spirit of historical revisionism by turning to the work of the biologist and first director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley (1887–1975). Paying particular attention to the doctrine he called ‘scientific humanism’ and his ideas about a biosocial agenda separate from the priorities of biology itself, the paper uses historical tools to address a concern that has frequently cast a shadow over debates about biosocial science: does it interfere with the progressive agenda sociologists have traditionally seen themselves as contributing to? The paper argues that Huxley's work is evidence that biosocial science is compatible with progressive goals and that recent developments in biology mean it may be the ideal time to reconsider long-standing attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anderson Gray McKendrick's 1926 paper, 'Applications of mathematics to medical problems', was the earliest reference cited in Dempster et al.'s 1977 paper that defined and popularized the EM algorithm. McKendrick's paper was prominently featured by Joseph Oscar Irwin in his 1962 inaugural address as the President of the Royal Statistical Society (in the UK), entitled 'The place of mathematics in medical and biological statistics'. The link of McKendrick's work to the EM algorithm is due to an improvement made by Irwin on a novel method McKendrick used for estimating an infection rate when the observed data do not distinguish between those individuals who are not susceptible to the infection and those who are susceptible, but do not develop symptoms. This article examines this link, along the way illustrating the central ideas underlying the EM algorithm as well as its properties; the examination also suggests a profiling strategy for speeding up EM, which may be worthy of general investigation. McKendrick's data on an epidemic of cholera are used for illustration and to compare EM with Irwin's method as well as the Newton-Raphson algorithm. Issues beyond computation are also discussed whenever appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the first reptile house (1849) at the Zoological Gardens in London as a novel site for the production and consumption of knowledge about snakes, stressing the significance of architectural and material limitations on both snakes and humans. Snakes were familiar and ambiguous, present at every level of British society through the reading of Scripture and as recurrent characters in imperial print culture. For all that snakes engendered feelings of disgust as the most distinctive representatives of a lowly class of animals, they exerted an equivalent fascination over diverse publics spanning the social spectrum. Building on work showing a consideration for the multi-sensory nature of visits to menageries, this paper considers animal display beyond the visual. It explores the emotional economy of encountering snakes in person and the bodily phenomena this engendered. Vicarious visits were offered up to readers of periodicals and newspapers and the reptile house was harnessed as a controversial pedagogical resource for teaching moral, as well as scientific, lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, event-based narratives have become a norm in discussions of the British Neolithic. Statistical analyses of radiocarbon dates, combined with a detailed approach to individual contexts, have produced chronological resolutions that have enabled a greater understanding of the construction and use of some monuments. While these have been informative, they sometimes manifest exclusionary nomenclature, with terms such as ‘outliers' and ‘residuality' applied to data that does not agree with other data. In addition, theoretical approaches have seen a similar turn to examine individual contexts and artefacts with which to describe Neolithic life. This paper argues that the current dominance of event-based narratives, extrapolated from small-scale action, is inadvertently ignoring evidence of wider cultural understandings. In particular, evidence of the deliberate inclusion of already old bone in Neolithic deposits has been identified. It is argued that this bone represents a particular past focus on already old material that may have had social currency in British Neolithic symbolic practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The categorization of displaced people is grounded in criteria enshrined by international and regional conventions as well as receiving states’ asylum and immigration policies. However, drawing distinctions between displaced people remains a controversial issue because the causes of displacement are more diverse than the categories assigned. Whilst various categories confer different rights and entitlement, the forcibly displaced are often obliged to aspire to particular identities driven by their resettlement livelihood objectives. This paper is based on a study carried out in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo and Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. The paper argues that the institutional and policy environments in the locations where resettlement is sought determine the way displaced people identify themselves in displacement and how they appraise their circumstances and their consequent adaptive livelihood reconstruction strategies. Furthermore, it is shown here that formalized displacement categorization adds complexity to the way displaced people must deal with their circumstances and negatively impacts on livelihood adaptation. Whilst categorization may serve perceived institutional needs, this study finds that displaced people’s self-identification makes them resilient and enables survivability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Attempts to revitalize trade unions in the UK have had mixed results, leading to calls for more radical organizing strategies. This paper examines a recent organizing campaign in the UK public sector that involved a shift from an approach that focused on the development of rank-and-file leadership and worker engagement to one that prioritized member recruitment. The paper argues that a focus on recruitment is not necessarily inimical to union revitalization, but this depends on the extent to which it is used to develop new activists and to strengthen the ability of local unions to provide effective representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Erin O’Connor recently noted, “Asiatic cholera exposed the frailties of England’s urban industrial structure,” and it provided the most serious test of the old Poor Law system in Birmingham. This paper intends to explore the response of the medical, political, and religious authorities of Birmingham to the outbreak of cholera in 1832 as well as the popular reaction to this response. It also seeks to explain why, in Asa Briggs’ words, “Birmingham was almost untouched . . . in the cholera outbreak of 1832 (when there were only twenty-one deaths)” by analyzing the geography, social and political structures of the town, and the medical and moral pathology of the disease. By using the minutes of the Birmingham overseers and guardians of the poor, together with contemporary newspaper reports, the paper seeks to uncover the dramatic and entirely unexpected course of events in Birmingham. It offers an analysis of the city’s response to the disease that challenges interpretations of the unreformed Poor Law as passive and unsympathetic and the unincorporated local authorities as chaotic and corrupt. The episode also sheds light on competing cultural attitudes toward death and disease among the communities that made up early nineteenth-century Birmingham. The only areas where the authorities’ actions were significantly interfered with were those where the poorest (including the Irish) lived. Here, swift removal of corpses clashed with traditional funeral practices and the widespread fear of “burking” by anatomists provoked serious disturbances. The paper concludes that Birmingham was spared the pandemic by the happy combination of location (far from the sea in the pre-railway age), infrastructure (with deep artesian wells supplying most drinking water, in contrast to the reliance on streams and rivers elsewhere in Britain) and the uniquely well-organized response to the epidemic by the overseers and guardians of the poor, the town’s medical practitioners, and the Board of Health, chaired by Samuel Galton. The paper concludes that it was to the country’s detriment that the city’s effective response to the disease was largely overlooked at the time and that it took until 1854 when Jon Snow was able to compare those drinking contaminated and uncontaminated water and draw the conclusions that led to the provision of an effective response to the problem of cholera in the cities of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Military service tribunals were established in Britain following the passing of the first Military Service Act 1916, to consider applications for exemption from men deemed thereby to have enlisted. The few that were stated upon the ground of conscience have attracted the most, and the most subjective, attention. Modern empathy with pacifist principles has made almost mandatory the depiction of the conscientious objector as a victim of, and even martyr to, the then-prevailing spirit of militarism. By the same token, posterity has judged the tribunals' record as a whole predominantly upon their treatment of these men. Fuelled by the early propaganda of the No-Conscription Fellowship and its successor, the No More War Movement, they emerge as the pharisaic civilian arm of the British establishment at war. The paper tests the sustainability of this perspective by reference to the tribunals' record in one county, Northamptonshire. Unusually, most of the papers relating to the county's appeals tribunal have survived. Together with reports carried in local newspapers, which maintained a voracious interest in tribunals' proceedings throughout the conscription period, they provide valuable insights into the dynamics of a system that has received relatively little, and selective, attention to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Sarah Siddons’s cross-gender performances as Hamlet in relation to critical fascination with the character’s interiority in the early Romantic era. An examination of the responses to Siddons’s Hamlet in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century studies of the play reveals that Siddons’s contemporaries saw the actress’s femininity and acting methods as particularly effective for conveying the sensibility and irresolution that became increasingly associated with Hamlet in literary criticism of the period. In particular, the responses to Siddons’s performances emphasise Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s Ghost, a scene often considered the focal point of definitive performances by actors like Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, and Siddons’s brother, John Philip Kemble. The fact that these commentators describe Siddons’s Hamlet as superior to her brother’s and praise her reactions in the Ghost scene suggests that Siddons succeeded in creating a dramatic interpretation of the character that aligned with the Romantic focus on Hamlet’s inner life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically an exclusive, upper-class entertainment, private theatricals became a widespread, primarily middle-class pastime in the course of the nineteenth century. To the emerging bourgeoisie, play-acting represented an important way to negotiate class identity by emulating the habits of social elites. The foremost raw materials for private stagings of drama were the acting editions of plays published most prolifically in the second half of the century by T. H. Lacy and Samuel French, consecutively. This paper examines Lacy’s and French’s publication and marketing strategies by placing side by side guide literature and play series issued by them, to illuminate the impact these strategies had on the dramatic marketplace, and the way that Lacy, in particular, engaged social anxieties about the theatre in establishing his business concept. It then traces the changing composition of Lacy’s and French’s Acting Editions to highlight a significant increase in plays by women from the 1880s onwards. I argue that this increase expresses the evolution of amateur theatricals into a distinctly middle-class social practice because the female dramatists that French’s favoured, produced work congruent with bourgeois interest in morally sound, domestic topics and educational value, and recommended themselves through the respectable public personas they created for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puerperal insanity has been described as a nineteenth-century diagnosis, entrenched in contemporary expectations of proper womanly behaviour. Drawing on detailed study of establishment registers and patient case notes, this paper examines the puerperal insanity diagnosis at Dundee Lunatic Asylum between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the study aims to consider whether the class or social status of the patients had a bearing on how their conditions were perceived and rationalized, and how far the puerperal insanity diagnosis, coloured by the values assigned to it by the medical officers, may have been reserved for some women and not for others. This examination of the diagnosis in a Scottish community, suggesting a contrast in the way that middle-class and working-class women were diagnosed at Dundee, engages with and expands on work on puerperal insanity elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the buildings, spaces and interiors of Bangour Village public asylum for the insane, near Edinburgh, and compares these with an English asylum, Whalley, near Preston, of similar early-twentieth-century date. The village asylum, which developed from a European tradition of rendering the poor productive through 'colonisation', was more enthusiastically and completely adopted in Scotland than in England, perhaps due to differences in asylum culture within the two jurisdictions. 'Liberty' and 'individuality', in particular, were highly valued within Scottish asylum discourses, arguably shaping material provision for the insane poor from the scale of the buildings to the quality of the furnishings. The English example shows, by contrast, a greater concern with security and hygiene. These two differing interpretations show a degree of flexibility within the internationalized asylum model which is seldom recognized in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an insight into the complex relationship between Britain’s amateur cavalry regiments – the Yeomanry Cavalry – and their political and military masters during the reforming of the Territorial Army in the early 1920s. It discusses the force’s use of its influential political lobby to shape its future in the face of a determined restructuring exercise of the whole Territorial Army, but argues against the suggestion it was simply reactionary or anachronistic in its approach. As a county institution with a pedigree stretching back more than 125 years, the Yeomanry was naturally opposed to the fundamental changes being forced upon it: being dismounted to rebalance the Territorial Army with more artillery and a number of armoured car regiments. However, despite the interference of powerful advocates and elements of the force itself, and the eventual minor alterations to the original General Staff plan, the vast majority of regiments converted successfully to new arms, with only one voluntarily disbanding. This analysis finishes by highlighting the considerations that have always limited political interference with the Territorial Army, providing a cautionary historical example of the dangers of asking too much from the voluntary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until around 1979, ‘confused’ or mentally unwell people over 65 years of age tended to be labelled as having ‘senile dementia’. Senile dementia was usually regarded as a single, inevitably hopeless condition, despite gradually accumulating clinical and pathological evidence to the contrary. Specific psychiatric services for mental illness in older people began to emerge in the 1950s, but by 1969 there were fewer than 10 dedicated services nationally. During the 1970s, ‘old age psychiatrists’ established local services and campaigned nationally for them. By 1979, about 100 old age psychiatrists were leading multi-disciplinary teams in half the health districts in England. This paper explores the tortuous development of these new services, focusing on provision for people with dementia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last decade, trauma care has become its own speciality. The creation of major trauma centres across the UK highlighted a clear clinical need to advance services for multiple injury patients who are known to have poor prognostic outcome. The story of trauma care development goes back well before the creation of the National Health Service (NHS). Although originally grouped with emergency medicine, the two have developed into their own distinct branches. This paper highlights key milestones and relationships in the development of trauma medicine alongside emergency medicine, from ancient times to present day, as well as the factors that have made them distinct. Reviewing the past can help medicine move forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite his ambitions to be considered among the greatest actors in the world, Richard Mansfield only appeared as a starring performer outside of North America in one tour. Drawing on Pascale Casanova's notion of the 'world republic of literature', this paper analyses his London residency of 1888-89 and its financial and critical failure, characterising these as evidence of a transatlantic cultural system by which late-Victorian acting was accorded aesthetic value based on the judgment of professional critics in metropolitan centres like London. Mansfield's choices of repertoire are seen as part of his conscious desire to emulate, and compete with, Henry Irving, then the English world's most prominent actor. Ultimately, failure in London made Mansfield, a British citizen by birth, choose to embrace an identity as a distinctly American actor-manager. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a five-year provincial tour, the popular actor-comedian Charles Collette acquired the lease of the Torquay Theatre Royal in August 1885 only to be declared bankrupt little more than one year later. This paper examines the circumstances surrounding his failure as a model case for analysing insolvency in the Victorian theatre, set against the backdrop of the changes in legislation that characterise the period. This study also emphasises that for the correct historical understanding and interpretation of theatrical insolvency and its complex relationships, a methodology and theoretical framework is essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that working-class widening participation in education is not necessarily new. While it can be argued that it was established in the late twentieth century as a concept and government strategy, aspects of its origins can be traced back to movements such as the mechanics' institute movement, first established by the 1850s. Such developments provide some evidence of working-class individuals accessing general, vocational, elementary, and even higher education which would otherwise have been denied to them. However, what this paper argues is that, whilst there were some comparable features between the two centuries, others reveal a policy environment and discourse in the twenty-first century that serves to maintain the position of working-class individuals, rather than supporting social mobility. Adult, informal and vocational courses at various levels can provide alternative routes to that of higher education. It also provides an example of how awareness of historical developments can be illuminating of today's policy discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by exploring the censorship of The Song of Songs (1909), the first English translation of Hermann Sudermann’s Das Hohe Lied (1906).1 While the novel’s British reception is contextualized by the perceived social dangers of sexual representation in foreign literature, the essay demonstrates that Sudermann’s novel not only inscribes a critique of moral censure and the aesthetic idealism that often underpinned it, but also parodies the Naturalist novel which itself was believed to radically challenge sexual reticence in British fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Great Western Railway's (GWR) interwar marketing strategy. Using the company's promotional photographs, a collection of sources overlooked by historians, it argues for the GWR's developed attitude to customers. The company's photography was never merely illustrative or secondary to more commonly analysed pictorial posters; the taking and publication of photographs was closely supervised by individuals with a developing approach to marketing. It argues, however, that this qualitative analysis can be supplemented and corroborated with information on the production context-rare written glimpses of corporate strategy. It therefore forwards an enhanced methodology for exploring the railways' abundant visual marketing. The resultant 'picturing process', which made full use of passenger scrutiny, highlights that the GWR developed its own approach to what is now termed 'marketing'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of those considered to be insane in the past were regarded as paupers and so came within the ambit of the poor law. Little work has yet been published on the ways in which the poor law dealt with the psychologically disturbed during the era of the old poor law (c.1601–1834). The present paper outlines the old poor law which said very little about madness as a specific problem, with the general implication that they were to be dealt with in the same way as others considered to be in need of relief. It appears that this was generally the case with the exception that the insane were sometimes sent to asylums. They were also liable to be treated as vagrants. Some limitations and problems with primary sources are also noted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented which discusses the history of the British scientific periodical "Nature" from 1869 to 1900. The founding of "Nature" by British astronomer and British government clerk J. Norman Lockyer is discussed. An overview of the periodical's role in inspiring the publication of scientific journals and in forming a scientific community in Great Britain during the Victorian Age is also discussed. The debate over the age of the Earth within "Nature" is presented.

This article uses a range of primary and secondary sources to analyse the work of the Irish Railway Commission 1836–39 and its challenge to the predominantly laissez-faire approach to railway development in Britain. The commission produced a model for developing railways with the state and public interest at its heart, and it advocated railways as a system that was planned to deliver specific political and economic objectives. It thereby threatened railway interests in Britain and mobilised senior political advocates of laissez-faire to defeat the commission. Nonetheless, its work was a substantial contribution to understanding Ireland and the weaknesses of nineteenth-century railway regulation that deserves a more prominent place in the history of the relationship between technology and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts from the standpoint that academic freedom is a necessary precondition to sociological imagination that challenges and defies the status quo. In the introduction, we consider the legacy of sociology as praxis - intended not merely to understand, but to change the world. We then move on to conceptualise academic freedom as requiring formal, infrastructural and psychic freedoms. We then chart the genealogy of universities from academically free, but socially exclusive, institutions to their present state, using the history of higher education in the UK as a case study to consider the prospects for universities and academics within them to contribute to a vibrant and sustainable defiant sociological research imagination and the consequences of their failure to do so. We finish with a manifesto for the reinvigorating of a defiant sociological imagination building on the radical traditions we have referred to above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the aims and outcomes of the Nottingham and Midland Counties Working Classes Industrial Exhibition of 1865-1866. The event ostensibly promoted the achievements of local working class residents and the paper analyses the presence and influence of those residents and the role that the Exhibition played within the town. In particular, Sutherland addresses the process by which the venue and its contents - including a versatile musical repertoire - were housed within a developing cultural quarter financed and approved by local government and industry leaders, a space that promoted rational cultural activity and modified contributions by individual exhibitors and performers, to produce an advertisement of stable civic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a statistical and qualitative analysis of the hierarchical coverage of politics by UK Television news. It finds that there is a rigidly structured hierarchy of political access and focus, whereby the Prime Minister dominates over the cabinet, the cabinet dominates over ordinary MPs, the governing party dominates over the opposition, the three main parties dominate overwhelmingly over smaller parties, and the political elites dominate over ordinary members of the public. The paper also provides a framing analysis of TV news both during and after an election campaign period, and finds a skew towards 'horse race' and personalization coverage which both outweigh 'policy' issues. Thus television news is characterised by a hybrid of hierarchical and exclusive coverage of politics, combined with a narrowly expressed 'cynicism' or populist antagonism towards politics that is personalized and anti-systemic in its focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper was to discusses historical developments of sexually transmitted disease (STD)/HIV sexual health policies in Britain, principally from the 19th to the 21st century. Repeating trends were identified and a consideration of how history addresses today's urgent need for better management of sexual health is discussed. In January 1747, the first venereal disease (VD) treatment was established at Lock Hospital, London. As the 19th century passed, sexuality emerged from a conspiracy of silence and became part of social consciousness. In Victorian times, prostitution was regarded with revulsion. Renewed medical interest in VD was brought about by improvements in medical knowledge from 1900–10. In the period 1913–17, there was a significant change in sexual health policy. From 1918, treatment centres increasingly recognized the difficulties in persuading attendees to return for a complete course of treatment. AIDS in Britain wrecked havoc in the period 1981–86 with incidences of infection in several widely differing groups and public alarm fuelled by the media. In conclusion, education, advertising and public health counselling need to be moulded effectively so that the public recognize the real risks associated with unprotected sexual intercourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large scale, open immigration of unaccompanied dependent children to Canada did not commence until 1869, but it had been advocated for decades and some such immigration to the British North American colonies took place earlier in the century. The first systematic emigration of destitute British children was organized in the 1830s by the Children's Friend Society, which sent about 141 children to the Canadas from 1833 to 1836, at least 70 of whom went to Upper Canada. While the emigration scheme was short lived, it established that such children would be welcomed and that homes and work would be available for them, and it probably helped pave the way for a new wave of older juvenile immigrants in the 1850s, and for the high profile, large scale immigration of young dependent children that began in 1869 and continued for more than half a century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the history of psychiatry for old people in Great Britain. In the 1940s, some of the renowned psychiatrists such as David K. Henderson and Aubrey Lewis were taking an active interest in the well being of older people. Spurred on by the fears of a rising population of older people, overcrowding in mental hospitals, social changes and an awareness of the lack of knowledge of older people's mental illness, they and others began to explore further the mental health needs of older people. The establishment of the new specialty of geriatric medicine and inception of the National Health Service gave further impetus to service development.

This paper summarizes the development of cable systems and cable policy in Britain from the 1920s into the late 1980s. It links the course of cable system development to four general types of factors: (1) the strength of organized interests in support of and in opposition to cable; (2) the pragmatic ability of a new service such as cable to meet reasonably the expectations of major actors; (3) supports and constraints within the legal-institutional framework, including the nature of cable policy itself and (4) the role of both positive and negative symbols surrounding this particular innovation. The case suggests ways in which the faltering development of cable television in Britain reflects the unique historical circumstances of cable and broadcasting in this nation. But since the same forces may be at work in other national settings, this typology of factors and, particularly, the role of symbolic politics is offered as a framework for comparative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions on learning in the British army of the First World War centre on the Western Front with a focus on the outcome rather than the process. This article redresses this imbalance by examining how the British army shared knowledge between its operational theatres. It illustrates that, as the British army expanded and its commitments increased, it could no longer rely on purely ad hoc methods for learning. Instead, it had to adopt increasingly bureaucratic methods when sharing knowledge across tactical and geographic boundaries, which forced it to realign its pre-war learning ethos to accommodate the challenges of modern war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have argued that, between 1912 and 1914, Britain’s naval leadership projected a so-called ‘intermediate blockade’, a line of vessels strung across the mid-North Sea. This strategy has been widely criticized as impractical and unrealistic. However, this article demonstrates that the Admiralty never projected such an approach. Rather, the naval leadership intended to adopt a system of mid-North Sea patrols during this period. By misunderstanding Admiralty policy before 1914, historians have been unable to ascertain that these patrols were resurrected in late 1914 and played an important part in the Royal Navy’s wartime strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a history of news development and publication in Great Britain. Topics include the history of long-form narrative reporting and the works of journalists Denis Hamilton, Ron Hall, and Jeremy Wallington in the newspaper "Sunday Times." Also discussed are the topics of some published news stories including the Profumo affair, a property issue involved by developer Peter Rachman, and the Tory politics.

The operation of the Comet, Britain's first commercial steamboat, on the Clyde in 1812 led to a period of rapid steamboat development. Drawing on little utilised sources, this study examines the impact of the steamboat in its first decade. Diffusion was rapid and relatively nationwide embracing river, coastal and short sea services. The impact in terms of services, mostly passenger orientated (but also including towage), was considerable and contributed to a new, popular appreciation of steam technology and changes in lifestyles. How the press and government responded to this new technological advance is also considered. A brief conclusion points to the special nature of the steamboat's immediate impact in a wider context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on the emergence of the principles of war in British military thought there has been a failure to examine the reaction of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force to the appearance of the first list of principles in the army’s 1920 Field Service Regulations. By considering correspondence, articles, books, field manuals, and staff college lecture scripts, this article demonstrates that there was a debate on the principles of war between the world wars which involved all three armed services. The acceptance of the principles into the doctrine of each of the services represented a fundamental shift away from Jomini and the final acceptance of Clausewitzian approaches to the theory of war. The debate also contributed significantly to the emergence of a ‘common language’ between the services, thus laying the basis for a tri-service ‘strategic culture’ which was attuned to the challenges of joint operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Holding therapy, an intervention often used in the treatment of foster and adopted children, has been rejected by professional groups on grounds of lack of evidentiary support and of potential harmfulness. Nevertheless, some British proponents have continued to advocate its use. Is this support brought about by the familiarity of concepts used in this treatment? This article reviews the history of related concepts and methods in Britain. It is concluded that a long history of British involvement with related ideas may have encouraged approval of holding therapy, but that ethical concerns argue against its use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses English economist, scientist and philosopher William Petty, focusing particularly on his political arithmetic, a seventeenth-century form of quantitative analysis applied to economic, social, or demographic situations. The findings of such studies resulted in information was generally used to justify political decision making. It focuses on Petty's use of questionnaires to quantify the experiences of travelers, especially those who went abroad to visit Great Britain's expanding colonial possessions. Other topics include the Republic of Letters, the British Royal Society, and the 1686 “Quaeries concerning the nature of the Natives of Pensilvania” which contained fifty-five questions related to the demographic qualities of Indians of Pennsylvania.

The First World War is often identified as a great industrial and technological struggle. However, in the course of explaining the Allied victory in 1918, scholarly opinion is divided over the extent to which the British army made the most effective use of the technology available to it. While much of the debate has centred on the more ‘lethal’ technologies, such as aeroplanes, tanks, and poison gas, very little analysis has been made of the interaction between British commanders and communications technology. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by assessing the extent to which British commanders embraced the latest communication device of the period – wireless – and whether they harnessed its full military potential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Brought to fame by a 1994 World Bank report, the idea of pension pillarization has become part of the orthodoxy of pension reform. Yet scholars have neglected both the national origins and the pre-1994 diffusion of the ‘three-pillar doctrine’. This article presents a critical history of the transnational diffusion process that led to the adoption of this concept at the World Bank. My analysis retrieves the Swiss roots of the doctrine during the late 1960s, as well as its gradual adoption and mainstreaming during the 1970s and early 1980s by a transnational epistemic community of life insurers and pension consultants. By 1990, the doctrine was widely used without reference to its national origins: a Swiss trademark had become a generic reform idea that framed controversies on the future shape of old-age provision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tim Hewat was celebrated during his tenure at Granada Television as one of the most influential journalists working in Britain in the second half of the 20th century, but then largely forgotten for 30 years. This is explained as a function of the specific historicization of journalists, reflecting both academic prejudices and occupational values. The history of journalism is largely devoid of the lived experiences of the majority of its practitioners. Hewat's case indicates that journalists disappear from history when they step outside the domains of valorized media institutions and journalism hierarchies that contribute to notions such as the Fourth Estate. Mobilizing Paul Thompson's category of 'underclasses', this article argues that this reductionism has largely rendered the majority of journalists historically invisible and classified them as unter-journalists, a kind of subcategory which does not comply with a priori norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary reaction to the arrival of the first professional actress on the English stage in 1660 is thin. The longest and most sustained discussion is in a largely ignored document called Io Ruminans: or, the repercussion of a triumph celebrated in the palace of Diana Ardenna, (1662), by Richard Walden. This document acts as both a praise and a defence of the new phenomenon. This paper examines Walden's text and argues that Walden's poems in praise and defence of the actress acts to provide templates for both a new kind of virtuous professional and a new kind of virtuous theatre [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measured by psychologists, conceived in critical terms, popularised as satire, and exploited by politicians, meritocracy is a dilemmatic concept that has changed its meanings throughout history. Social psychologists have conceptualised and operationalised meritocracy both as an ideology that justifies inequality and as a justice principle based on equity. These two conceptualisations express opposing ideas about the merit of meritocracy and are both freighted ideologically. We document how this dilemma of meritocracy's merit developed from meritocracy's inception as a critical concept among UK sociologists in the 1950s to its operationalisation by U.S. and Canadian social psychologists at the end of the 20th century. We highlight the ways in which meritocracy was originally utilised, in part, to critique the measurement of merit via IQ tests, but ironically became a construct that, through its psychologisation, also required measurement. Through the operationalisation of meritocracy, social psychologists obscured the possibility of critiquing meritocracy and missed the opportunity to offer alternatives to a system that has been legitimised by their own work. A social psychology of meritocracy should take into consideration the ideological debate around its meaning and value and the implications of its measurement and study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 extended the principle of legal deposit in the United Kingdom to the non-print world. This paper considers the Act particularly from the perspective of the British Library, which, since its formation in 1973, has led the campaign to reform legal deposit legislation. After a brief review of the history of legal deposit since 1610, the build-up to legislation during the years 1974-2002 is considered. There follows a detailed account of the passage of the Legal Deposit Libraries Bill through Parliament in 2002-3, and a summary of the provisions of the measure, as finally amended, as it has entered the statute books. Early progress towards implementation is described, following both statutory and voluntary routes. Finally, an assessment is offered of some of the key issues which surfaced during the Parliamentary debates, and a number of critical success factors identified. The Act itself is reproduced in the Appendix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the history of manufacturing and the impact of Industrial Revolution on Great Britain and on India. The author fails to see the logic in the theory of swift, even flow. The author argued how can swift, even flow be an outcome of industrialization forces unless it was specifically sought, unless it was the object of that technology, industrialization, and management. The author does not view just-in-time manufacturing principles as a natural outcome of forces acting on Japanese business. The string of invention and management practice that characterized the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere has been testimony to making things faster and better for larger and larger markets. And, the companies that ran the fastest and with the least variation were in the vanguard. The author said that Britain's military did not spin the yarn or weave the cloth. Nor did it invent or produce the technology that was the hallmark of the factory system. Success did not come from the barrel of a gun.