While non-German biographers of Bismarck have usually kept a healthy distance from their subject, German biographers have often allowed their political and religious views to influence their portraits. Most German historians of the ‘long nineteenth century’ were fascinated by, as Hegel would have called it, the genius of such a ‘world historical individual’. Their work greatly influenced the images of Bismarck during the time of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s, however focused critically on the ‘impersonal’ movements of the Bismarckian empire. These, Marxist influenced, analyses did not include any biographies. It was only in the 1980s that three biographers achieved a politically detached evaluation of the chancellor's personality. With the centenary of Bismarck's death in 1998, a return to the pre-1980s views can be noticed in biographies of the chancellor. They threaten to oversimplify Bismarck's personality and government technique again.

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.

The historical circumstances which surround the publication of Burke's third and to that date most important pamphlet, the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, are familiar to every historian of George III's reign. The first decade of the young King's reign was marked (or marred) by a progressive growth in political instability. Despite the advantages enjoyed by George at his accession—the military success of his Government, the political unity of the nation, the absence of a Prince of Wales and the insignificance of the Pretender as a source of opposition—the early promise of the reign, so often commented upon by contemporaries, was not fulfilled. By 1770, and for reasons which have been a great occasion of dispute, an apparendy stable political order had collapsed. After the disintegration of the war coalition, the King was unable to form a stable administration from the fragmentary groups that remained: by the end of the decade five new ministries had tottered to a rapid and precipitate downfall. Nor did die situation out-of-doors appear any more healthy than in Parliament. The organs of dissent—pamphlets, newspapers and prints—had grown in number and scurrility to a level not sustained since the opposition to Walpole, while the presence of deeper fissures could be seen in the eighty-four riots that occurred in England and America during the years 1765–70.

The C.I.A. was taxed with five major intelligence failures by the influential New York Herald Tribune on 2 August 1950. This newpaper article was only part of a widespread campaign to reorganize the C.I.A. The concern of the C.I.A. director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, over the allegations was so acute that on the following day he prepared an apologia sent to President Truman. Three of the alleged failures of prediction concerned the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists, events in Palestine and the 1948 Bogota conference – the last now largely forgotten but the cause of great contemporary scandal when Secretary of State Marshall was attacked by a mob. The other two were in Europe. They were the inability to predict the fall of Czechoslovakia and the defection of Tito. Blaming the C.I.A. for not predicting the communist coup in Czechoslovakia was unfair, but there was more substance to the accusation concerning Yugoslavia.

The Northern Risings of 1663 are remarkably little-known episodes, scarcely a postscript to the triumph of the Restoration. As with most rebellions that dissolve before properly beginning, their historical significance is generally dismissed. Yet twenty-six rebels were condemned to death; sixteen of them were hanged, drawn, and quartered at York on one morning, providing a spectacle on a scale unseen in the city for nearly a century. Nearly all of those executed were West Riding men involved in the rebel muster at Farnley Wood; the government was conspicuously lenient towards the rebels of the North Riding, Durham, and Westmorland. This is an investigation into the background of the risings, in particular the West Riding episode. It tackles the wider question of the Restoration's impact on local communities that had been strongly parliamentarian, and in so doing, examines how the gentry's relationship with those of lower social status was transformed by the experience of civil war and interregnum.

Recent scholarship across a range of historical sub-disciplines shows that uplands are where many forms of modernity are both crafted and overwhelmed. Maintaining multiple tensions – between assimilation and distinction, between projections of power and material and human resistance, and between knowledge and elusiveness – is essential to the modernities crafted in mountain spaces. This review highlights a number of common threads running through recent writings on modern mountains. These include heightened attention to the importance of mountains as arenas for the performance of gendered, racial, national, and class-based subjectivities, and the persistence of earlier attitudes and activities in avowedly disenchanted modern visions of uplands. For all of the successes of recent scholarship, more work remains in order to consider mountains in global contexts and to come to terms with our continued entanglement in modern ways of understanding and acting in high places. Looking ahead, it is vital that historians think with and about mountains in order to contribute positively and persuasively to discussions on the human and environmental impacts of global change.

Conservatives usually play down their intellectual credentials because it provides them with an effective means of distancing themselves from the ‘doctrinaire’ or the intellectualized politics of the left. But this approach was challenged by a significant group of Conservative MPs and intellectuals during the interwar period. Conservatives wrote articles for a range of periodicals, which were still important channels of communication for the sharing of political ideas between the wars. Stanley Baldwin banned government ministers from publishing independent journalism, which meant that it was mainly young, ambitious, or marginalized Conservative MPs who wrote for periodicals. When left-wing sentiment started to swell up during the Second World War, some Conservative supporters started to question the interwar leadership's neglect of the party's intellectual and publishing culture. It was now thought that the Conservative party lacked a convincing media-based popular ideology to compete with the left. But if Baldwin prioritized other aspects of the interwar party's appeal, the intellectual culture of Conservatism still acted as an important barrier to communist and fascist thought in elite political circles. This culture also had important resonances for the party in the post-war period because it contributed to its self-evaluation and policy restatements after 1945.

Street vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe.

Hamburg's Bismarck memorial, unveiled in 1906, is considered to be one of the greatest expressions of Imperial Germany's Bismarck cult and an important development in the history of German memorial art. This article looks beyond these contextual categories to focus on the political and cultural exigencies specific to Hamburg which gave birth to the memorial. It suggests it was born of the desire of Hamburg's patrician classes to defend their political privileges in the face of dramatic social change and attendant demands for political reform. To those who presided over its construction, it was also a means of asserting Hamburg's cultural aspirations and of shrugging off a reputation as a city hostile to the arts. The article examines some of the memorial designs submitted to a competition as a means of illustrating the functions it was intended to fulfil, but argues that it failed to fulfil both. Meeting widespread disapproval among the working classes, the memorial could not stay their increasing support for the Social Democrats. Although widely admired, the monument did not stimulate further significant patronage of the arts in Hamburg.

Histories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of value and social relations. This article argues that the reception framework encourages us to mistake the real sources of the analytic revolution in post-war philosophy. These are to be found in debates about intentional action and practical reasoning – debates in which ‘normative’ questions of value and social action were in fact central. Discussion of these topics took place within a transatlantic community of Wittgensteinians, ordinary languages philosophers, logical empiricists, and decision theorists. These different strands of ‘analytical’ thinking were bound together into a new philosophical mainstream not by a positivist alliance with logic and physics, but by the rapid development of the mathematical and behavioural sciences during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. An illustrative application of this new framework for interpreting the analytic revolution is found in the early career and writings of Donald Davidson.

The entrance of women into the male-dominated spheres of the professions and the arts has been a major theme of women's and gender history in nineteenth-century Britain. In general, historians have located this development primarily in the second half of the century and depicted it as an important corollary to the political aims of the wider women's movement. In contrast, this article contends that an overlooked earlier context for the formation and emergence of ideas of female professionalism and artistry were the debates surrounding female singers in the press between c. 1820 and 1850. In this era, writers in newly emerging specialist music periodicals increasingly advocated a view of female singers as both professionals and artists. Such views did not dominate discourse, however. There remained a great deal of ambivalence even in specialist publications about just how far female singers should pursue the lifestyle of the professional artist, while in the mainstream press very different attitudes towards female singers prevailed. Although female musical professionalism and artistry therefore remained contested concepts, this article highlights the significance of these debates about female singers as an important source for the new ideas about women's professional and artistic work emerging in nineteenth-century British society.

There is at present much interest in historical explanations for the political attitudes and collective behaviour of industrial workers. Typically, such I explanations develop out of descriptions of production relations. In some cases, historians have adduced the constituents of such relations (including shopfloor conditions, job skills and hierarchies of workers and employers) to explain strikes, unions, and mass-based political parties. In other cases, historians of labouring people have emphasized one or another of these elements – e.g. relative levels of skill – in efforts to explain collective behaviour. Still others have taken a more general view, ascribing workers' collective rebellion to the history of industrial capitalism itself; in this view, conditions for rebellion depend upon the historical moment, or conjuncture.

By the middle years of the nineteenth century, Englishmen were in full revolt against the principle of centralization. Parliament's experiments in centralized administration had almost all ended in failure. A powerful and independent Poor Law Commission had given way, in 1847, to a more timid Poor Law Board under ministerial and parliamentary control. A strong Board of Health, ruled by that uncompromising centralizer and bureaucrat, Edwin Chadwick, was sheared of a large part of its influence when, in 1854, the government decided to release Chadwick from their employment. The Times responded to this event with a jubilant leader article which announced that, ‘If there is such a thing as a political certainty among us, it is that nothing autocratic can exist in this country.... Mr Chadwick and Dr Southwood Smith, have been deposed, and we prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest than be bullied into health’.

William III's military and political career was marked by a sustained tension between his obsessive struggle against France and the fear caused by his accession to enhanced titles of power. Crucial to William's shift from stadholderate to kingship was his assumption of emergency powers in 1672 to defend his country against French invasion. Throughout his stadholderate (1672–1702), he came to be seen by his Dutch republican opponents as a Roman dictator intent on using military power to break the harmony of the constitution, while Orangist propaganda tried to present the rule of the One as the best remedy to the recurrent danger of civil war and anarchy. Spurred by the Ryswick treaty of September 1697 and fuelled by a deeply engrained tradition of resistance to any expanded military establishment, the standing army debates of 1697–9 came as an effort to understand a major political controversy in the light of the history of republican Rome. The political theorists of the New Country Party strove to reassert the superiority of civil over military power by showing how the decay of the Roman Republic had been caused by a departure from the civic militia paradigm and a drift towards military monarchy which fostered the growth of tyranny. It was thought that England's commitment to a prolonged war effort would entail a similar process and imperil the age-old balance between king and parliament. The contention of this article is that the standing army debates of 1697–9 can be construed as an encounter between Dutch and English neo-Romanism, crystallizing in the controversial figure of William. An overall view of William's military and political career and the search for elements of continuity in his supporters' and his opponents' arguments will serve to look at the role of historicism in the construction of a late seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch ideological space.

The question of the direction of the speech which Lloyd George made at the height of the Agadir crisis of 1911 has recently been raised again by Dr Cosgrove. His article, however, is in some respects not entirely satisfactory. Most of the material that he uses to revive the traditional version of the Mansion House speech – namely that it was directed against the Germans – is derived from letters which deal with reactions to it, most of them Foreign Office reactions, and some of them at a considerable remove from the event itself. Admittedly one can build a prima facie case on ‘the entirely different impressions’ which the speech was observed to produce in Paris and in Berlin. There was the placing of it by Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to London, at the end of a line of mounting irritation in England against the attitude of Germany, as the sort of thing the Spectator might have quoted in support of its thesis of the necessity of the union ‘intime évidente, affirmée’ of England and France; and his suggestion that French papers be encouraged ‘à publier quelques appréciations flatteuses de ce discours et de son auteur’.

This was how the Public Advertiser greeted the passage of the Quebec Act through parliament in June 1774. It was a remarkable transformation from the ecstasy evident in newspaper reports that greeted the fall of New France in 1760. As early as November 1759 the city of Nottingham singled out the North American campaign as the glorious core of British strategy. Its loyal address congratulated the king ‘particularly upon the defeat of the French army in Canada, and the taking of Quebec; an acquisition not less honourable to your majesty's forces, than destructive of the trade and commerce and power of France in North America’. What occurred in those fourteen years to produce such a stark revision of views on the conquest of New France? The answer can be found partly by surveying the English press for this period. During these years, treatment of Canadian issues in the press displayed quite distinct characteristics that revealed a whole range of attitudes and opinions on the place Canada held in the future of the North American empire. No consensus on this issue ever existed. Debate on Canada mirrored a wider discussion on the future of the polyglot empire acquired at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. In ranged from the enthusiasm of officials at Westminster to spokesmen of a strain in English thinking that challenged the whole thrust of imperial policy to date.

This article examines religious and political conflict in the Kent boroughs of Dover, Canterbury and Sandwich in the early 1680s. Section II describes the personal, political and religious divisions in Dover which lay behind a local campaign to persuade the crown to force the surrender of the town's charter. Section III charts the growth of concerted anglican opposition to the dissenting group which controlled the corporation of Canterbury. The activities of the dissenting mayor of Sandwich which aggravated political differences within the town are described in section IV. The final part of the article suggests some implications of the three case studies for understanding of English politics in the period. It argues that the government took action against the town charters principally in response to the demands of local loyalists, rather than as part of a policy of centralization. It concludes that anglican royalists within the towns were the principal agitators for, and beneficiaries of, the new charters.