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.

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.

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.

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.

Historians writing on Victorian spiritualism have said little about the reported phenomena of the séance 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 séance 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.

The French have had an ambiguous relationship with liberal democracy, doing much to pioneer it since 1789, but also harbouring substantial minorities hostile to it. This article seeks the historical roots for this relationship in a critical period for the democratization process in France between the 1830 Revolution and the consolidation of the Third Republic late in the nineteenth century. It takes the textile town of Troyes as a case study. In particular, it takes a ‘grass-roots’ approach to the problem, as opposed to the usual focus on ideologies and attitudes to democratization among the elites. The general contention is that the population of the town faced a number of obstacles as it attempted to develop a ‘democratic culture’. The analysis highlights the varying approaches to popular participation in politics taken by successive regimes between 1815 and the 1870s, the slow emergence of a civil society in the town, and the problems faced by militants as they operated under the constraints of universal manhood suffrage.

The relationship between the ‘growth of professional society’ and the growth of new universities 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 crucial first 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 1950s, 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 as female. Secondary school teaching rapidly became a graduate profession, while interwar elementary school teaching moved quite rapidly in that direction. The restricted occupations available for 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.

Historiographical accounts of Harry Truman's recognition of Israel have placed undue importance on this apparently sudden act on 14 May 1948. US Palestine policy has not been placed in the correct historical context of the Cold War. As a ‘Cold War consensus’ developed in Washington in the early post-war period, Palestine emerged as a secondary issue to the major concern that was the ‘Northern Tier’ of Greece, Turkey, and Iran. The US was guided by broad but clear objectives in Palestine: the attainment of a peaceful solution, a desire not to implicate US troops, and the denial of the region to the Soviets. Disagreements between the White House and the State Department were all expressed within these broad policy objectives. Israeli sources have been significant by their absence in the existing historiography of recognition. These sources reveal that for the Jewish community in Palestine, diplomatic victories were of secondary importance to the practical achievement of statehood. From both a Washington perspective, and the perspective from Palestine, US recognition was not regarded as a crucial issue at the time. It was a decision taken within the context of broad US objectives in Palestine, and it did not influence the decision of the Yishuv to declare statehood.

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.

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.

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.

The alcoholic empire: vodka and politics in late Imperial Russia. By Patricia Herlihy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. vi+244. ISBN 0-19-513431-1. £25.00.

Nikolai Sukhanov: chronicler of the Russian Revolution. By Israel Getzler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xix+226. ISBN 0-333-97035-7. £45.00.

Making war, forging revolution: Russia's continuum of crisis, 1914–1921. By Peter Holquist. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+359. ISBN 0-674-00907-X. £29.95.

The Russian Civil War: primary sources. Edited by A. B. Murphy. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+274. ISBN 0-333-77013-7. £45.00.

Homosexual desire in revolutionary Russia: the regulation of sexual and gender dissent. By Dan Healey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+392. ISBN 0-226-32233-5. £25.00.

These five volumes under review each address different aspects of Russia's experience of modernization and revolution from the 1880s to the 1930s. Our understanding of the scale and complex nature of the changes wrought during these years has been immeasurably enriched by two important factors: first, the recent opening of the former Soviet archives and the detailed case studies that their contents have facilitated; secondly, a mounting reluctance to see 1917 as a radical break with the past and hence an increasing tendency to reinsert the Revolution into a broader series of dynamic and momentous changes that rocked Russia during the period. The rapid expansion of cultural history in the discipline has prompted many scholars to rethink central features of the revolutionary period and to open up new fields of study. Over the last decade, attention has turned to the dynamism and diversity of late tsarist and early Soviet culture embracing topics as wide-ranging as crime, popular religion, the natural and social sciences, and representations of sex.1 Another recent focus has been the experience of conflict across the years of the Revolution and Civil War and its impact on prospects for democracy in Russia.2 The rise to prominence in the historiography of the term ‘modernity’ is an obvious feature of a more comparative analytical framework that has sought to re-insert Russia's revolutionary experience into a pan-European perspective.