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According to the cultural historian Peter Burke, cultural history concentrates on the 'symbolic element in all human activities'. Building on Burke's remark, this essay examines how a particular set of metaphorical ideas shaped new approaches to material and visual culture in the eighteenth-century. The analysis applies a methodologically innovative approach, that of conceptual metaphor theory. This approach is generally used to analyse the hidden ideology found in contemporary political discourse, which finds that the use of similar metaphors by an 'in' group not only reinforces their own ideology, but also serves to create a sense of the 'other', or outsider, and so embodies a power imbalance. The results of my analysis suggest that Whig writers used the metaphor of ancient Greece to create an exclusionary discourse, defined against what they saw as negative values held by an oppositional 'other', in this case Catholic Europe. Whig writers mapped the metaphor of ancient Greece on to their interpretation of political liberty, and this same linguistic patterning shaped concepts of visual and material taste within Whig culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the rise of the Scottish Patriot movement in the 1720s and 1730s, asserting that Patriotism provided a partisan channel for Scots who supported the British union, but took issue with the English Whig ministry and its disregard for their nation's political and economic needs. It traces three events critical to the development of Scottish Patriotism: the malt tax crisis of 1724-5, the election of 1734 and the Porteous crisis of 1736-7. These moments of political confrontation gave Scottish Patriots an opportunity to advance a platform that included the reform of Britain's tax structure, investment in Scottish manufactures and an interventionist American-focused foreign policy. First and foremost, Scottish Patriots sought to create a more equitable British political system, in which Scotland's rights and institutions were accorded the same value as England's. The Patriot's message proved attractive to Scotland's political elite and urban commercial classes, giving rise to new partisan alignments and new ideas about Scotland's future within the British state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nottingham workhouse case was a test of the resolve both of the Poor Law Commissioners appointed to administer the post-1834 New Poor Law, and of the strength of the Whig interest in the town’s municipal and parliamentary elections. All eyes were on the implementation of the legislation in Nottingham, partly because of the influential thinking of local administrators such as Absolem Barnett, and partly because the government needed evidence that the system of unions and workhouses set up after 1834 would actually work in industrial towns. The Nottingham case showed only too clearly that the key issue was the trade cycle, and fluctuations in the town’s hosiery and lace trades made it almost impossible to implement the terms of the legislation fully. The key battle was fought over the decision to build a new workhouse, which the Whigs favoured and the Tories resisted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the nature and limits of provincial political support for the Whigs during the 1830s and 1840s by investigating the relationship between Whigs and liberals in the West Riding. In the wake of the 1832 Reform Act, the region’s reformers came to see the Whigs (both locally and as a national governing force) as part of a broader ‘Liberal party’, defined by its commitment to an inclusive, disinterested style of government. Buttressed by conflict with the Conservatives, this party identity helped to sustain the alliance between Whigs and liberals until the late 1830s. Thereafter, however, frustrations with the apparent timidity of the Whigs in government led liberals to drift away from party politics and direct their energy into extra-parliamentary campaigns, most notably that of the Anti-Corn Law League. Moreover, there were significant differences within the Liberal party over the proper role of the State in religious life, tensions which worsened as a result of the social reform policies of Lord John Russell’s administration. In charting these developments, this study challenges the classic but now dated articles on West Riding politics by F.M.L. Thompson and Derek Fraser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the polemical context in which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote "The Scarlet Letter." It pays particular attention to the Whig movement for moral reform in antebellum America, which sought to merge church and state. Democrats like Hawthorne took exception to this attempt to establish "moral government" in America. His novel argues for an ideal of personal freedom in moral matters and criticizes the Whig attempt to impose restrictive moral norms on human, especially sexual, proclivities that Democrats such as Hawthorne felt were embodiments of spirituality in nature. The novel refers obliquely to contemporary religious debates that have been ignored by scholars, such as that concerning Horace Bushnell's "God in Christ," a book whose presence in Hawthorne's novel is palpable. Bushnell was put on trial for heresy in 1849, as Hawthorne was composing his novel. In the novel, Hawthorne enters those debates and takes the side of natural religion against the Whig ideal of moral government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]