Showing papers in "The Historical Journal in 2004"
TL;DR: The authors explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights.
Abstract: This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.
200 citations
TL;DR: In a survey of attitudes towards Catholicism and in their treatment of Catholic patients, this article showed how French psychiatrists and neurologists were deeply indebted to religious iconography and experience, despite their vehement anti-clericalism.
Abstract: In nineteenth-century France, science and religion have often been portrayed as irredeemably opposed to one another. This article seeks to revise this interpretation by showing how these apparently dissonant views intermingled in the study of hysteria. Through a survey of attitudes towards Catholicism and in their treatment of Catholic patients, the article shows how French psychiatrists and neurologists were deeply indebted to religious iconography and experience, despite their vehement anti-clericalism. Because of their hatred of the church, they focused on the treatment of female hysterics who manifested ‘religious’ symptoms – demonopathy, mystical states, and stigmata – in order to amass conclusive evidence of Catholic ‘superstition’. Their preoccupation with such patients meant, however, that they paradoxically re-embedded Catholicism into their scientific practice by incorporating religious motifs, bodily poses, and iconography into their diagnosis of hysteria. At the same time, their disdain for the Catholic religious imagination meant that they refused to explore the fantasies of their subjects. For physicians like Jean-Martin Charcot and the more subtle Pierre Janet – a contemporary and competitor of Sigmund Freud – fantasies of bodily suffering, unearthly physical perfection, and an array of Catholic maternal fantasies associated with images of Mary and Christ were all nothing more than delusions, not the stuff from which an appreciation or understanding of the ‘unconscious’ could emerge. The result was that French physicians offered no psychodynamic transformation or symbolic reinterpretation of their words or physical symptoms, a resistance that was one reason among many for their hostility to psychoanalysis.
74 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the reported phenomena associated with the best-known Victorian medium, Daniel Dunglas Home, and suggest that such reported phenomena were less the result of a crisis of faith than the cause of a crises of evidence, the implications of which were deemed scientific rather than religious.
Abstract: Historians writing on Victorian spiritualism have said little about the reported phenomena of the seance room, despite such events having been the primary reason given by spiritualists for their beliefs. Rather, such beliefs have been seen as a response to the so-called ‘crisis of faith’, and their expression as part of a broader scientific and cultural discourse. Yet the debate about seance phenomena was significantly problematic for the Victorians, in particular the reported phenomena associated with the best-known Victorian medium, Daniel Dunglas Home. In the attempt to provide a natural explanation for Home's phenomena, two groups of experts were appealed to – stage conjurors and scientists – yet it seems clear that the former were unable to explain the phenomena, while scientists who tested Home concluded his phenomena were real. The overwhelming rejection of supernatural agency, and the nature of the response from orthodox science, suggests that such reported phenomena were less the result of a crisis of faith than the cause of a crisis of evidence, the implications of which were deemed scientific rather than religious.
60 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a detailed examination of the private papers of the English landed elite, argues for the important place of anger in early modern society and investigates the verbal expression of rage, from irritation to fury, in men and women: why it was aroused, how it was articulated, its effects and in what circumstances anger was regarded as a legitimate response.
Abstract: This article, through a detailed examination of the private papers of the English landed elite, argues for the important place of anger in early modern society. It investigates the verbal expression of rage, from irritation to fury, in men and women: why it was aroused, how it was articulated, its effects, and in what circumstances anger was regarded as a legitimate response. Anger was a forceful invitation to renegotiate unsatisfactory aspects of relationships. It spotlighted deficiencies in duty, unacceptable conduct, disrespect, broken promises, and frustrated expectations. The article also challenges the prevailing approach to the history of emotions and suggests that we move from a model of linear repression to one of situated experience. Rather than postulating the gradual suppression of unacceptable emotions, historians should examine the conventions governing the expression of emotions in context, as well as the many perspectives on what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. Focusing on the situated use of emotions brings to light the different emotional mentality of the seventeenth century which linked emotions in unfamiliar ways. It also enables to us to uncover the interaction of emotions and how individuals engaged in daily life with cultural scripts, as well as bringing us closer to unravelling the emotional system of early modern England.
57 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that conceiving of empire as a set of networks through which knowledge and ideas were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded, and people travelled is an avenue worth pursuing in the project to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire.
Abstract: Historians face the problem of how to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire. How can the history of Britain and the history of its empire be brought together? Recent research has demonstrated the value of employing the idea of networks to describe the interrelatedness of empire. In the history of science and economic history such a notion has been quite thoroughly articulated, particularly in relation to the exchange of botanical knowledge and the transaction of goods. Here it is argued that conceiving of empire as a set of networks through which knowledge and ideas were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded, and people travelled is an avenue worth pursuing in the project to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire.
57 citations
TL;DR: The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality as mentioned in this paper, which was defined as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.
Abstract: Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.
54 citations
TL;DR: The relationship between the consumer and the citizen from the eighteenth century to the present in Europe and the United States is examined in this article, where the authors highlight the political narrative underlying the opposition between courtly consumption (absolutism) and the inconspicuous consumption of the middling sorts, and explore early formulations of the relationship between consumption and democracy.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between the consumer and the citizen from the eighteenth century to the present in Europe and the United States. Part I highlights the political narrative underlying the opposition between courtly consumption (absolutism) and the inconspicuous consumption of the middling sorts, and explores early formulations of the relationship between consumption and democracy. Part II looks at the first half of the nineteenth century, defined by the opposition between consumers (coded feminine, and as ‘despised’) and citizens (coded masculine, and as ‘restrained’). Part III goes from the 1860s to the 1930s. American historians have emphasized the positive political agency of consumers in this period, and their contribution to the notion of social citizenship. This article emphasizes the less democratic aspects of consumer politics, and the contributions of anti-liberal movements on the extreme left and right to a stronger tradition of social citizenship in Europe. Part IV takes Lizabeth Cohen's claim that a ‘Consumers' Republic' was forged in the US in the post-war period, and casts the Marshall Plan and the Cold War as the context that gave rise to an international negotiation over the relationship between consumption and democracy that continues to the present.
49 citations
TL;DR: In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue.
Abstract: In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to mutual benefit.
48 citations
TL;DR: This article showed that Mazel's translation, the Du gouvernement civil, provided the Francophone readership with an anti-absolutist critique of the French regime, and that it emanated from the circle of Locke's closest friends.
Abstract: The recent advances in Locke scholarship have given us a vivid description of the context in which Locke drafted the Two treatises of government. Yet, inadvertently, the result has been a skewed perspective on his concerns. As the focus has been on the English crisis in 1679–83 as the specific context from which Locke's theories emanated, the contexts in which they were published have attracted less attention. Redressing the balance, this article brings out Locke's participation in Francophone discussion in the context of a European crisis. After the Revolution of 1688–9 Locke's ‘Second treatise’ was translated into French by David Mazel, a Huguenot cleric. The article shows that Mazel's translation, the Du gouvernement civil, provided the Francophone readership with an anti-absolutist critique of the French regime, and that it emanated from the circle of Locke's closest friends. It was through the intermediary of a handful of Francophone Protestants that the Continental audience became aware of Locke's arguments and that he became known, not only as a theoretical philosopher, but also as a political theorist – as the author of, not the Two treatises, but the Du gouvernement.
42 citations
TL;DR: The authors examined the development of the idea of the "superwoman" among British Edwardian feminists and contextualized it within the aristocratic political thought of the day, arguing that the focus of political change was firmly located within women themselves.
Abstract: This article examines the development of the idea of the ‘superwoman’ among British Edwardian feminists and contextualizes it within the aristocratic political thought of the day. I examine the idea of the ‘genius’ and the ‘superman’ in order to shed light on why, for some Edwardian feminists, the ideal feminist agent was to be an elite, discerning, remote figure. I argue that Edwardian feminism witnessed an ‘introspective turn’, marked by an interest in character, will, and personality as the key components of emancipation. The focus of political change was firmly located within women themselves. This belief was widespread, even though only a minority chose the language of the ‘superwoman’ to elaborate it. References to the ‘superwoman’ indicates the impact of Nietzschean and egoist ideas upon the women's movement. The ‘superwoman’ was used to position feminism as a movement not just for political rights but for wider social regeneration, and represents a characteristically Edwardian belief in the power of the ‘exceptional individual’ to promote social change.
37 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The history of reading can link intellectual and cultural developments with social or political change in the eighteenth century as discussed by the authors, and there is a need for a new synthesis that combines the new evidence of reading practice with textual analysis to explain continuity and change across the century.
Abstract: The history of reading can link intellectual and cultural developments with social or political change in the eighteenth century. Historians of the book increasingly argue that an understanding of historical reading practices is essential if we are to understand the impact of texts on individuals and on society as a whole: textual evidence alone is inadequate. Recent work on eighteenth-century readers has used sources including book trade records, correspondence, and diaries to reconstruct the reading lives of individuals and of groups of readers. Such sources reveal the great variety of reading material many eighteenth-century readers could access, and the diversity and sophistication of reading practices they often employed, in selecting between a range of available reading strategies. Thus, any one theoretical paradigm is unlikely to capture the full range of eighteenth-century reading experience. Instead, we can trace the evolution of particular reading cultures, including popular and literary reading cultures, the existence of cultures based around particular genres of print, such as newspapers, and reading as a part of social and conversational life. There is now a need for a new synthesis that combines the new evidence of reading practice with textual analysis to explain continuity and change across the century.
TL;DR: The field of gender and colonialism has been faced with two significant challenges as discussed by the authors : whether the concerns of the gender and colonial history have affected older fields in history, such as economic, political, labour, and military histories; recent assessments of imperial history suggest that gender is considered a marginal category of analysis.
Abstract: Hardly two decades old, historians of gender and colonialism might well claim to have invented a whole new field of scholarship: gender and colonialism specialists draw as much of their intellectual inspiration from each other as they do from the nation- or region-bound fields in which they research and teach. As the field of gender and colonialism has developed and expanded, it has been faced with two significant challenges. One is whether the concerns of gender and colonial history have affected the concerns of older fields in history, such as economic, political, labour, and military histories; recent assessments of imperial history suggest that gender is considered a marginal category of analysis. Another challenge is how to define and study gender and colonialism so that it does not replicate the inequalities and hierarchies of colonialism, so that we study colonizing and colonized societies in equal measure.
TL;DR: The importance of the religious dimension of English republicanism has been highlighted in the history of republicanism as mentioned in this paper, and the need to recover the radical protestant republican religious agenda is to explain why, when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution.
Abstract: The historiography of English republicanism is dominated by the concept of classical republicanism. Its greatest shortcoming has been neglect of that subject's religious dimension. The consequent need is not simply to recover the radical protestant republican religious agenda. It is to explain why, when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution. One context for the answer lay in Christian humanism. Another was the reformation, both magisterial and radical. Both informed the practical identity of the republican experiment as an attempted reformation of manners. So did the rational Greek moral philosophy, as indebted to Plato as to Aristotle, common to certain humanist and Christian political languages. In addition many of the themes of republican writing reflect the struggle by a traditional society to respond to unsettling forces, not only of political and religious, but also social and economic, change. Drawing upon all of these contexts, republican writers attempted to oppose not only private interest politics, embodied by monarchy or tyranny, on behalf of the public interested virtues of a self-governing civic community. This was part of a more general critique of private interest society; a republican attempt, from pride, greed, poverty, and inequality, to go beyond the word ‘commonwealth’ and reconstitute what Milton called ‘the solid thing’.
TL;DR: The authors examines the relationship between religious debate and constitutional conflict in the 1590s, focusing on the status of ecclesiastical law and the right of the church courts to impose ex officio oaths upon English subjects.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between religious debate and constitutional conflict in the 1590s, focusing on the status of ecclesiastical law and the right of the church courts to impose ex officio oaths upon English subjects. It argues that Richard Cosin, a client of Archbishop Whitgift and the leading apologist for the government's use of ex officio oaths, used the issue to make a series of aggressive and controversial assertions of state power. These theoretical claims did not involve sovereignty or the powers of the monarch – the issues usually addressed by historians of political thought – but rather the much more theologically charged question of the line between public authority and private conscience. As such, Cosin and his supporters transformed the raw materials of conformity and anti-puritanism into a view of the state and its coercive powers that seemed to threaten both the common law and the Elizabethan regime's own claims that it did not make ‘windows into men's souls’.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors re-examine the German paradigm of book and Reformation in the light of two recent bibliographical projects and find that the different regional print cultures that made up the European book world were organized in radically contrasting ways.
Abstract: Perceptions of the role of the book in the Reformation are shaped by our knowledge of the German print world during the first decades of Protestant expansion. All indications point to evangelical domination of the press in the years when Luther first became a public figure, when the printed book undoubtedly played a crucial role in the dissemination of the evangelical message, and printing enjoyed a period of exuberant growth. But it is by no means certain that assumptions derived from this German model hold good for other parts of Europe. This article re-examines the German paradigm of book and Reformation in the light of two recent bibliographical projects. The first, a trial survey of publishing outputs throughout Europe, demonstrates that the different regional print cultures that made up the European book world were organized in radically contrasting ways. These structural differences were highly significant from the point of view of assisting or impeding the output of controversial literature. The lessons from this survey are then applied to an individual case study, France, which, it emerges, deviated from the German model in almost every particular. Together these two sets of data force us to call into question the natural affinity between print and Protestantism suggested by the German paradigm.
TL;DR: In this paper, a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing is presented, which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level.
Abstract: This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second section provides a detailed narrative of attempts by agents of the Restoration monarchy to regulate or indeed suppress the coffeehouses at the national level. The political survival of the new institution is attributed to the ways in which public house licensing both regulated and also legitimated the coffeehouse. The rise of the coffeehouse should not be understood as a simple triumph of a modern public sphere over absolutist state authority; it offers instead an example of the ways in which the early modern norms and practices of licensed privilege could frustrate the policy goals of the Restored monarchy.
TL;DR: This paper examined the policies towards graduates of three large professions, those of schoolteachers, solicitors, and accountants, examining the relationship between professional society and the growth of new uni- versities in England from the later nineteenth century.
Abstract: The relationship between the 'growth of professional society' and the growth of new uni- versities in England from the later nineteenth century is more often asserted than examined in detail. This article examines the policies towards graduates of three large professions, those of schoolteachers, solicitors, and accountants. The crucialfirst stage was the growth of an examining society during the second half of the nineteenth century; exams were necessary for almost everything and middle-class children, girls as well as boys, stayed at school longer to take them. This process provided the students both for women's colleges and for the new universities. However, graduate employment remained a problem: solicitors resisted large-scale graduate entry until well into the Ir95s, accountants for a decade longer. Teaching was exceptional as a large profession that accepted graduates in large numbers. As a result, the secondary school system produced teachers, who produced university students, many of whom had little option but to return to teaching. This applied to Science as well as Arts students, male as well asfemale. Secondary school teaching rapidly became a graduate profession, while interwar elementary school teaching moved quite rapidly in that direction. The restricted occupations availablefor graduates created a vicious circle that significantly restrained the Redbrick universities' opportunities for expansion from their foundation until after 1945. Thereafter, with their traditional intake now going to university, solicitors and accountants were increasingly compelled to accept graduates in large numbers. The post-war growth in student numbers was bound up with a widening of social access to universities, particularly within the middle classes.
TL;DR: Wagner was determined to restore the dignity of art, a dignity he believed to have been lost in the pursuit of base, commercial considerations; but this determination should not be confused with the idea of art for art's sake as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This article outlines Richard Wagner's conception of music-drama during the period in which he formulated his intentions for composition of the epic Ring of the Nibelung. Attempting to renew rather than to restore the communal, political nature of Attic tragedy, he wished to transform that model from celebration of the Athenian political order into a savage critique of the contemporary political order, indeed into an incitement to and celebration of revolution. Wagner was determined to restore the dignity of art, a dignity he believed to have been lost in the pursuit of base, commercial considerations; but this determination should not be confused with the idea of art for art's sake. Instead, he wished to renew art in a socialist, even communist, sense as the paradigm of free, productive activity. The direct revolutionary experience of participation in the Dresden uprising of 1849 bolstered his conviction of the necessity of such a transformation. With his magnum opus, Wagner wrote, he intended to ‘make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’.
TL;DR: For instance, this paper argued that all Englishmen are free-born, and that this free status is to be seen as political status, and the phrase "free-born Englishman" comes to be a signifier of a uniform and inclusive citizenship.
Abstract: John Lilburne's extensive writings were a major part of the pamphlet output of the Leveller movement. The apparent traditionalism of his language has obscured the extent to which he developed a radical line of thought. For Lilburne, all Englishmen are ‘free-born’; his radicalism lies in his assertion that this free status is to be seen as political status. The phrase ‘free-born Englishman’ comes to be a signifier of a uniform and inclusive citizenship, and the word ‘subject’ drops out of Lilburne's vocabulary. He reinterprets the language of the English legal tradition – following the lead of Sir Edward Coke – to make a collection of ‘liberties’, ‘franchises’, and ‘privileges’ into a uniform set of citizen entitlements. His writing suggests varying and sometimes incompatible grounds for this citizen status: historical arguments, and arguments depending on different notions of positive law, are employed alongside appeals to divine or natural law. However, Lilburne's attachment to the English legal tradition persists, and is an effective vehicle for the politicized vision of the English nation which he wants to convey.
TL;DR: The authors examined the wide array of policy changes that flowed from the British government's adoption in the early 1960s of an explicit target for higher growth and found that the principal reasons for the failure of these policies can be found in the fragmentation and interdependence of Britain's economic institutions.
Abstract: In explaining Britain's post-war relative economic decline, contemporary historians have concentrated upon ‘government failure’: not enough, too much, or too much of the wrong sort of government intervention. Implicitly, such explanations conceive the British state as both centralized and powerful. Recent developments in political science have questioned this traditional view. Using this insight to structure its historical analysis, this article examines the wide array of policy changes that flowed from the British government's adoption in the early 1960s of an explicit target for higher growth. It finds that the principal reasons for the failure of these policies can be found in the fragmentation and interdependence of Britain's economic institutions – the source of which lay in the particular historical development of Britain's polity. These issues of governance required new conceptions of both policy making and policy implementation able either to strengthen the power of the centre to impose change, or to promote consensus building. However, lacking a sufficient shock to the system, and imprisoned in a mindset in which the British state was conceived as both centralized and powerful, elites saw little need for fundamental institutional change.
TL;DR: The authors argued that the British press acted as a key mechanism for the transmission of political ideas through the permeable internal boundaries of empire and argued that political groups in Britain and Canada used the press to forge alliances with each other and work together on a specific issue.
Abstract: This article builds on the recent willingness among British, Canadian, and imperial historians to question older national histories, and to re-examine how the divergent societies, economies, and polities of the empire once interacted in a wider ‘British world’. It argues that the press acted as a key mechanism for the transmission of political ideas through the permeable internal boundaries of empire. This is demonstrated through analysis of contemporary debate over the Canadian–American reciprocity proposals of 1911. This controversy provided an opportunity for political groups in Britain and Canada to use the press to forge alliances with each other and work together on a specific issue. Two key forces made this possible. In Britain, constructive imperialists had since 1903 sought to rally Dominion support for tariff reform, initially with limited success. In Canada, neither western farmers nor eastern manufacturers seemed interested in imperial preference. It was the reciprocity proposals that changed the situation, providing the second driving force. Canadian manufacturing interests, seeking to prevent the lowering of tariff barriers against United States rivals, began to court British constructive imperialists. As a result political conflict was reshaped both in colony and metropole.
TL;DR: This article explored the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, and found that the family religion was a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century.
Abstract: In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.
TL;DR: The meaning of material culture in early modern Italian convents is discussed in this article, where the authors explore the circulation of objects, money, and goods, and get an interesting picture of how female monastic institutions worked internally and interacted with the city.
Abstract: This article discusses the meaning of material culture in early modern Italian convents. Although nuns were required to give up private property rights and embrace religious poverty, many of them brought into the convent a vast range of material objects and goods for their personal use. These goods could also be given away, exchanged, or lent to others within the monastic community and even outside it. By exploring the circulation of objects, money, and goods, we get an interesting picture of how female monastic institutions worked internally and interacted with the city. We also gain a better understanding of the role of objects in articulating religious discipline and regulating the networks of interpersonal relations within cloistered communities.
TL;DR: In fact, a more dispassionate analysis would suggest that Carter was neither a do-nothing president nor a throwback to the past in terms of economic policy as mentioned in this paper, because in seeking solutions for stagflation his administration laid the foundations of a new political economy that the next Democratic president would build upon.
Abstract: Jimmy Carter's response to stagflation, the unprecedented combination of stagnation and double-digit inflation that afflicted the American economy during his presidency, made him the subject of virulent attack from liberal Democrats for betraying New Deal traditions of activist government to sustain high employment and strong economic growth. Carter found himself accused of being a do-nothing president whose name had become ‘a synonym for economic mismanagement’ like Herbert Hoover's in the 1930s.1 Liberal disenchantment fuelled Edward Kennedy's quixotic crusade to wrest the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination from Carter. ‘[H]e has left behind the best traditions of the Democratic Party’, the Massachusetts senator charged, ‘We are instructed that the New Deal is old hat and that our best hope is no deal at all.’2 A quarter-century later a more dispassionate analysis would suggest that Carter was neither a do-nothing president nor a throwback to the past in terms of economic policy. Far from being the ‘Jimmy Hoover’ of liberal obloquy, Carter was really ‘Jimmy Clinton’ because in seeking solutions for stagflation his administration laid the foundations of a new political economy that the next Democratic president would build upon.
TL;DR: The authors discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stow's Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.
Abstract: Recent writing on early modern London offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics. Interest in the literary and cultural is particularly strong, and much attention has been given to John Stow, London's sixteenth-century historian. This review discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stow's Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.
TL;DR: This article examined how these authors' writings might reflect their personal religious beliefs and found that Marshall was likely a Lutheran and used the press to promote doctrinal Protestantism in England, and when these books got Marshall into trouble, Cromwell protected him.
Abstract: Thomas Cromwell's association with various writers has long been noted, but how these authors' writings might reflect his personal religious beliefs has not been closely studied. An examination of one such author, William Marshall, and of his work, reveals not only that Cromwell was likely a Lutheran, but that he used the press to promote doctrinal Protestantism in England. Through Marshall, Cromwell sponsored English translations of doctrinally radical texts by Martin Luther, Joachim von Watt, and Martin Bucer. And when these books got Marshall into trouble, Cromwell protected him. The picture that emerges substantiates John Foxe's description of Cromwell as a ‘valiant soldier and captain of Christ’, but also the charge made in his bill of attainder, that he had circulated heretical books.
TL;DR: The authors examined the role of graphic satire as a tool of agitation and criticism during the early 1640s, taking as its case study the treatment of the archbishop of Canterbury and his episcopal associates at the hands of engravers, etchers, and pamphlet illustrators.
Abstract: This article examines the role of graphic satire as a tool of agitation and criticism during the early 1640s, taking as its case study the treatment of the archbishop of Canterbury and his episcopal associates at the hands of engravers, etchers, and pamphlet illustrators. Previous research into the political ephemera of early modern England has been inclined to sideline its pictorial aspects in favour of predominantly textual material, employing engravings and woodcuts in a merely illustrative capacity. Similarly, studies into the contemporary relationship between art, politics, and power have marginalized certain forms of visual media, in particular the engravings and woodcuts which commonly constitute graphic satire, focusing instead on elite displays of authority and promoting the concept of a distinct dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and their consumers. It is argued here that the pictorial, and in particular graphic, arts formed an integral part of a wider culture of propaganda and critique during this period, incorporating drama, satire, reportage, and verse, manipulating and appropriating ideas and imagery familiar to a diverse audience. It is further proposed that such a culture was both in its own time and at present only fully understood and appreciated when consumed and considered in these interdisciplinary terms.
TL;DR: In one fundamental sense, a British post-war consensus certainly existed: repudiation and denigration of interwar governments and their leaders and Stanley Baldwin was the chief victim, as it became widely believed during the 1940s that he had failed to rearm the nation in the 1930s.
Abstract: In one fundamental sense, a British post-war consensus certainly existed: repudiation and denigration of interwar governments and their leaders. Stanley Baldwin was the chief victim, as it became widely believed during the 1940s that he had ‘failed to rearm’ the nation in the 1930s. Examination of the history of Baldwin's reputation after his retirement – precisely why and how it collapsed – reveals a striking case of the contingent construction of historical interpretation. Partisan politics, legitimation of a new regime, a Churchillian bandwagon, self-exoneration, and selective recollection together reinforced hindsight and a wartime appetite for scapegoats to create a public myth, which despite manifest evidence to the contrary was accepted as historical ‘truth’ by historians and other intellectuals. The main indictment was accepted even by Baldwin's appointed biographer, who added a further layer of supposed psychological deficiencies. Attempts to establish an effective defence were long constrained by official secrecy and the force of Churchill's post-war prestige. Only during the 1960s did political distance and then the opening of government records lead to more balanced historical assessments; yet the myth had become so central to larger myths about the 1930s and 1940s that it persists in general belief.