Scholars have long known of the proposed marriage in 1630 of John Dryden, grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, and Elizabeth Isham, eldest child of Sir John Isham. All knowledge of this proposed marriage came from correspondence revealing that, having reached a financial impasse, the two families aborted the proposed match. At first glance, such a case seems rather unremarkable, since similar stories abound of other contemporary families and in more detail. The Dryden–Isham match, however, takes on increased importance with the recent discovery of Elizabeth Isham's 60,000-word spiritual autobiography. Unlike the correspondence that mainly deals with the economic aspects of the match, Elizabeth's autobiography provides a more personal and emotional account, revealing the importance that familial love and honour played in the arrangement. In addition, the autobiography shows that the failed match caused Elizabeth to have a religious aversion to marriage, leading her to choose singlehood for the remainder of her life. Her experience forces scholars to recognize the significance that familial love, honour, and personal piety could have on marriage formation in the seventeenth century, and it illustrates the lasting impact that a failed match could have on a woman in early modern England.

From 1670 there were sustained attempts to use excommunication as a tool to influence parliamentary elections. Excommunicants could not qualify for membership of municipal corporations under the Test and Corporation Acts. Towards the end of Charles II's reign, as fear of protestant dissent grew, excommunication was, however, used to deny voters the right to exercise their franchise. There was a concerted attempt, encouraged by the king, to ensure the election of a compliant tory parliament through the use of excommunication in elections in borough seats. The attempt, reliant on bishops and spiritual courts, represented the high water mark of the ‘confessional state’. Of questionable legality, the exclusion of excommunicants from the right to vote was short-lived. The accession of James II, and his Catholicizing policies, created new alliances between Anglicans and dissenters and eroded the willingness of bishops to use excommunication as an electoral instrument. In 1689, the Toleration Act removed the principal cause of the persecution of dissent. The use of excommunication, nevertheless, represented an important attempt to unite the church and state for electoral reasons.

In 1808, an Estate of the lesser nobility of the Lower Austrian diet approved a statute barring from membership persons of Jewish descent in the ‘third degree’ regardless of confession. It is the only documented instance in Europe for the revolutionary era of such a paragraph that, in its rejection of Jewish ancestry in both the paternal and maternal lines, resembled the early modern Spanish statutes of ‘blood purity’ and the twentieth-century Nuremberg laws. The Josephian patent of toleration of 1782 had not allowed Jews to become members of the corporate nobility (the first Jew was only ennobled in 1789), but had relieved some of the worst aspects of discrimination. By the early nineteenth century, the archduchy of Lower Austria (including the imperial capital at Vienna) contained the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident Jewish community in the Hapsburg Monarchy. The statute of 1808 was a reaction to Jewish acculturation to the upper class (including conversion, intermarriage, concessions of property-rights, the existence of salons in which Jews and new Christians mixed with the nobility) that presented a perceived threat to the status of its marginal members (lesser landed nobles, ennobled officialdom, and ennobled professionals). The statute was also a product of the politically and nationally charged atmosphere in Vienna between the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and the renewed war against France (1809). No simple ideological continuum connects the Lower Austrian paragraph to either the early modern Spanish or the late modern Nazi ordinances. But it was the first such statute to take shape in a political context fraught with recognizably late modern concepts of ‘nation’. The statute of 1808 furthermore evidences the continuing fractured nature of public authority and lack of thorough-going state-formation in Austria.

From the age of twenty-three until his death at the age of sixty-eight, Lord Acton was or sought to be a member of the United Kingdom parliament. Although Acton remains a subject of scholarly interest, his political career has received relatively little attention. This article examines Acton's search for an Irish parliamentary seat, a search which was twice unsuccessful in 1857, but which resulted in May 1859 in Acton's return as the member for Carlow borough. Although Acton was pushed towards parliament by his family – and particularly his stepfather, Lord Granville – a close examination of Acton's campaigns reveals more dedication to a political career than has previously been accepted.

Using Bury as a case study, this article reassesses the mechanism of the formation of political opinion in Lancashire factory towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subject has heretofore been dominated by sociological explanations of the 1970s and early 1980s. A re-examination of the ‘Three Lancashires’ paradigm, the socio-economic model that has underpinned most Lancashire studies for this period, demonstrates that the socio-economics of urban Lancashire were more diverse than previously thought. From this basis, the article challenges the empirical basis of one of the most enduring tenets of Lancashire politics: the deferential ‘factory politics’ model. To provide an alternative explanation, this article reasserts the importance of ‘issues’ to the debate, and underlines the contingent nature of the relationship between representative and constituents. An important strand is whether political activists integrated their plebeian rank and file into new party structures, thus neutralizing threats to status quo. This interpretation has been central to much recent revisionist history; however, this article demonstrates that the ‘rise of party’ during the mid-Victorian period was contingent upon political activists acquiescing to certain requirements of their followers.

It will be fifty years in 2008 since Oliver MacDonagh suggested that the adoption of new responsibilities by the state in the early nineteenth century was an inevitable response to the social consequences of the industrial revolution, and impervious to ideological and philosophical influences. This article revisits MacDonagh's model by examining the emergence of occupational health reform in the British mining industry in the early twentieth century. Until the introduction of statutory measures in 1905 to protect miners against developing silicosis and basic sanitation provisions to prevent cross-contamination of disease, state regulation of working conditions prioritized the prevention of accidental injuries. It is argued that this decisive shift in the scope and nature of government intervention can be understood as part of a process of institutional expansion of mining regulations that broadly parallels MacDonagh's model. Yet the precise details of when, and how, health reform emerged and the nature of these specific regulatory controls were influenced by a variety of factors, including visibility of risk, human agency, economic performance of the industry, and contemporary thinking in political economy.

Between 1957 and 1977 the University of Leeds engaged in a massive programme of rebuilding. Employing the architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, Leeds transformed itself – becoming, in the words of one commentator, ‘Our first contemporary urban university’. Previously ignored by historians, this development in the history of the university illustrates a number of important themes. In the first place, it exemplifies the significance of architecture in defining higher education. Secondly – and more particularly – it shows how both academics and architects hoped to use Brutalist architecture to express the modernity of the University of Leeds. Thus the decision to employ avant-garde designers in the late 1950s and the resolution to dismiss them twenty years later both came from the same modernizing impulse. Thirdly, it shows how personal connection secured architectural patronage in this period. The Development Plan also highlights the way in which architects of the British modern movement used universities as laboratories in which to experiment with ideas about community and proper urban design. The modernist moment at Leeds, then, can be seen as representative of wider trends in British building, not least because it lasted for such a short period of time.

For some years now, the repression of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) by the Paris police on 17 October 1961 has been a subject of controversy. This is despite the fact that those who have written about this incident are in agreement about its magnitude (more than 14,000 people arrested in two days) and its senseless violence. Yet there remains disagreement over the emotive question of the number of people killed. The recent publication of a study by Jim House and Neil MacMaster provides an opportunity to return to this issue, and to raise important questions about the methodologies and standards of research that have been used.

In the General Introduction and Conclusion to our book, Paris 1961: Algerians, state terror, and memory, we argue that the time has come to move beyond the current phase of political battle, the fixed-position trench warfare, over the events of ‘17 October’ for a more open history that can begin to address some wider and more fruitful questions. At the core of the polemic during the last decade has been the almost obsessive ‘battle of numbers’ that has raged between the maximalist Jean-Luc Einaudi (200–300+ deaths at the hands of the police) and the minimalist Jean-Paul Brunet (at most 30–50 deaths, but only 13 conclusively ‘proven’). In replying to Jean-Paul Brunet, we shall discuss two substantive issues: the nature of the evidence and its interpretation, and inevitably the question of the number of fatalities.

This review considers, first, current work on the Napoleonic Empire dealing with Switzerland, the three parts of ‘Germany’ (the Rhineland, the ‘Third Germany’, Prussia), Spain, and the so-called ‘national’ question(s) in these countries and regions. It next focuses on recent work on the three parts of ‘Italy’ (the Kingdom of Italy, the départements réunis, and the Kingdom of Naples). But the main body of the review concentrates on the work of Michael Broers: not only his new and remarkable conceptualization of the Empire as containing ‘inner’, ‘outer’, and ‘intermediate’ zones, but also his creative if controversial application of post-modern colonial theory to an analysis of the French in Italy. The review suggests that Broers, for all his brilliance and mastery, has perhaps pressed his arguments and conclusion beyond his evidence base. The latter, while extensive, is too limited to just French perceptions of Italians before 1815, and does not extensively consider Italian reactions to the French presence; nor does it provide significant evidence to buttress Broers's far-reaching conclusions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy.