This article assesses ‘Rotten Protestants’, or Protestant home rulers in Ulster, by means of an analysis of the Ulster Liberal Association, from its founding in 1906 until its virtual disappearance by 1918. It argues that Ulster Liberalism has been neglected or dismissed in Irish historiography, and that this predominantly Protestant, pro-home rule organization, with its origins in nineteenth-century radicalism, complicates our understanding of the era. It has previously been argued that this tradition did not really exist: this article uses prosopography to demonstrate the existence of a significant group of Protestant Liberal activists in Ulster, as well as to uncover their social, denominational, and geographic profile. Ulster Liberals endured attacks and boycotting; this article highlights the impact of this inter-communal violence on this group. Although Ulster Liberalism had a substantial grassroots organization, it went into sharp decline after 1912. This article describes how the third home rule crisis, the outbreak of the Great War, and the Easter Rising of 1916 prompted a hardening of attitudes which proved detrimental to the survival of a politically dissenting tradition within Ulster Protestantism.

Given the vast amount of literature that has been published about bomber command's role during the Second World War, it might seem, at first sight, that there was not much to add. The magisterial volumes of the official history written by Sir Charles Webster and Dr Noble Frankland appear to have said all there is to say; and to them must now be added numerous books which they have helped to engender, such as – to mention but the most recent two – those of John Terraine and Max Hastings.

The suffrage for the German Reichstag had by the 1890s become the most potent symbol of democratic ideas in imperial Germany. ‘Universal, equal, secret, and direct’, as contemporaries described it, the Reichstag suffrage stood in contrast to restrictive state suffrages as a model of liberty and fairness. By the turn of the century, 70–80 per cent of adult male German citizens took advantage of their right to participate in this, the freest of all German political arenas.

The religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.

This article challenges readings of seventeenth-century English ‘improvement’ that are confined to a literate, elite sphere and thereby take printed claims of ‘economic betterment’ at face value, bestowing brief mention on ‘losers’ as a regrettable, but necessary, consequence of progress. Through examining Charles I's ‘disafforestation’ of the western royal forests of Gillingham, in Dorset, and Braydon, in Wiltshire, this article contends that improvement was not simply a triumphal narrative of material advancement articulated in print, but rather was forged in active conflicts situated within the landscape. Disafforestation was one of the Stuart crown's first major forays into enclosure and ‘improvement’, facilitated by surveyors applying newly geometric techniques to inscribe exclusive ownership so that each might ‘know and have their own’. Resulting riots reveal the contestation of empirical perspectives, improving ideals, and exclusive boundaries by commoners defending customary ways of seeing and using the forest commons rooted in collective memory, practice, and the landscape itself. Via the framing concept of ‘epistemologies’, improvement is examined as a spatial process in which different ways of knowing and using the landscape became pivotal to the production, contestation, and reconfiguration of social relations mapped across royal forests.

One of the most significant of the anti-ministerial newspapers of the early eighteenth century was the London Evening Post. Its importance has been overshadowed by such great newspapers as the Craftsman, which has come to be regarded as the main propaganda weapon of the Opposition to Walpole. But it seems probable that the London Evening Post reached a wider public, and that its influence was more sustained and more immediately effective. The Craftsman was published only once a week, and devoted the greater part of its space to its political essay. These essays were undoubtedly immensely influential, and in times of unusual excitement the paper' circulation could reach quite remarkable figures. But the regular circulation of such a paper was bound to be limited. Outside the capital, London newspapers were not cheap: and few readers would be so politically minded as to be prepared to subscribe regularly to a purely political paper. Most country readers wanted news as well as views: and perhaps no eighteenth-century paper set out to satisfy both demands more effectively than did the London Evening Post. Its reputation was increasingly to be based upon its political content: but its various printers never lost sight of the fundamental fact that their product was first and foremost a newspaper, and even in the most hectic political campaigns the news always received priority. On the political side, instead of relying, as did most political papers of this period, upon lengthy and often tedious essays, the Post preferred to make its point by brief but exceedingly pungent comment upon the news and by the savagely humorous verses for which it was to become notorious. In this way, it made politics both interesting and amusing. The result was that the Post very rapidly became established as one of the main sources of London and foreign news throughout the countryside. By the 1740', there were few country papers indeed which did not draw heavily upon the Post: and these papers reproduced not only the Post's news items but also its politics. In fact, its political influence became so pronounced that on two occasions, in 1733 and 1754, the Whig ministry paid it the supreme compliment of endeavouring to prevent its transmission through the Post Office.

The year 1934 was notable not only for the intense diplomatic activity throughout Europe that followed Hitler's coming to power but also for a spate of political assassinations. Among the victims were Austrian chancellor Dollfuss and the Rumanian politician Ion Duca, not to speak of Kirov and those purged in Russia in December. Perhaps the most notable of these acts of terror occurred in Marseille on 9 October when King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, succumbed to the bullets of an assassin nicknamed Vlada the Chauffeur. The ensuing international crisis threw into sharp focus the evolving national interests and diplomatic styles of the European powers and serves as an illuminating case-study of a particular technique of conflict resolution.

The eighteenth century is traditionally seen as an interlude between two vigorous movements of church reform. This article explores the problems and attitudes which underlay the absence of major structural reform of the Church in this period. To do so, it examines the failure of attempts, especially those of the 1740s and 1750s, to create an anglican episcopate in the American colonies. The leaders of the Church of England were agreed that the need for American bishops was pressing, on both pastoral and administrative grounds, and the 1740s and 1750s witnessed two proposals for their creation which were supported by virtually the whole bench of bishops. Both failed. The whig ministry resolutely opposed these initiatives, largely out of fear that any debate of church reform would revive the political divisions of Queen Anne's reign. The bishops, moreover, were prepared to submit to this ministerial veto, despite their belief in the necessity of reform, not through political subservience, but because they too feared renewed controversy about religion and the Church, believing that such controversy would revive both anti-clerical attacks from without and bitter divisions within.

It has probably occurred to many people that a slight air of unreality overhangs our conception of the relations between church and state in England in the twelfth century. We know the main questions at issue, and something at least of the personalities engaged upon them. We possess much correspondence—ill edited, on the whole, but still illuminating. We have also much biographical matter. Above all, in the Constitutions of Clarendon we have an official statement of what the king claimed, and his bishops could not deny to be the ancient customs of the realm. It is not surprising that the twelfth-century church in England has sometimes been treated by modern writers in a way which would suggest that little more remains to be learned about it.

At an early period it was seen to be necessary that the observation of treaties should be ensured by the adoption of various sanctions besides the signatures of the high contracting parties.

A probably complete list of the expedients employed for the confirmation and execution of treaties up to, say, the end of the sixteenth century would include the following:

An oath taken by the high contracting parties, as well as by their plenipotentiaries and other persons of importance.

In 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868 expedition to Maqdala was no different. What was unique for Maqdala was the inclusion of a member of staff from the British Museum. We argue that a letter from Charles Thomas Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, to Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), illustrates that the plunder of cultural heritage was planned. We also argue that the plunder did not go to plan. The inclusion of a man from the museum made this expedition unique in the museum's history. The acquisition of these objects through colonial violence constitutes a strong moral reason for their repatriation from the British Museum and the numerous institutions in which they are dispersed. Understanding the planning involved in their plunder illustrates the entanglement of politics and imperialism with scientific and cultural institutions that constituted the backbone of Victorian Britain.

This article examines British attitudes towards the career of Sir James Brooke, the English rajah of Sarawak, between 1846 and 1851. It argues that Brooke's early reception as a hero, and the succeeding debates over the principles of his enterprise, were important for three reasons. First, they suggest that the domestic negotiation of imperial issues was influenced much more profoundly by contextual anxieties about the nature of British politics and character, than by considered engagement with conditions overseas and the character of dependent peoples. Secondly, they demonstrate the continued significance of Britain's ‘civilizing mission’, variously defined, as part of a politics of national identity in this period. Finally, the rejection of the radical challenge to Brooke's suppression of ‘piracy’ in the Eastern seas underscores the increasing dominance at this time of a more pragmatic, self-interested conception of how native peoples should be handled.