Letitia Bushe (c. 1705–57), daughter of a minor Irish landowner and one-time office- holder, was a member of the intellectual and cultural circle that included Swift's friend, the letter writer Mary Delany, the ‘proto-bluestocking’ Anne Donnellan, and the ‘heretic’ bishop Robert Clayton. The means by which, as a single woman of independent but limited means, Bushe maintained her position within this circle had elements of informal domestic servitude. At the same time a cache of unusually intimate letters reveals a determined individualist, consciously distancing herself from some of the official pieties of her society, and enjoying a greater freedom of thought, action, and speech than might at first sight have been expected. The letters also document Bushe's intense and tortured relationship with a younger woman, Lady Anne Bligh, an episode which raises important questions about the nature of women's friendships at this time.

This article examines the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Dublin during the 1880s. It explores the organization's weakness and the attempts of elements within the IRB to rejuvenate the tradition through the nurturing of a Fenian-inspired cultural nationalism. Much of the focus falls upon the Young Ireland Society (YIS), which came under IRB control in 1883, prior to the Fenian takeover of the Gaelic Athletic Association. With the growing prominence of the YIS, the home rule establishment attempted to bring the organization within its sphere of influence. For Parnellite MPs, especially those with latent Fenian sympathies, such as William O'Brien, the public meetings of the YIS provided a substantial Dublin forum. After 1885 the YIS increasingly came under the control of the Fenians and fellow-travellers led by John O'Leary who favoured coexistence with the constitutionalists. This split the society between those loyal to the traditional precepts of an oath-bound revolutionary organization and those who recognized that Fenian ideals, reconceived, retained much potency.

The years 1920–5 constituted a pivotal phase in the development of twentieth-century British politics. At the same time, Ireland continued to be a potentially explosive issue despite the signing of the 1921 treaty. This was so because the agreement failed to resolve the dispute at the heart of the Irish question: namely, whether or not Ireland would be a united or a divided nation. This problem was particularly acute for the Conservative party, as it could revive splits between former Coalitionists and die-hards and, further, would hinder efforts aimed at winning over Liberal votes during the crucial 1924 general election. When Labour's first government was unwillingly forced to confront the Irish problem, Stanley Baldwin and his Conservative colleagues worked to contain the quarrel between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Only by doing so could they then concentrate on other issues which were more likely to attract support for the tories and, further, to ensure that their party and Labour would dominate British politics to the exclusion of the Liberals.

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.

The eighteenth-century commodifications of childhood and the sciences overlapped in the production of science books for children. This article examines a children's book written by two members of the Unitarian circle around Warrington Academy in the 1790s, and contrasts it with a Church of England work. The analysis reveals the extent to which religious differences could affect parental attitudes to the natural world, reason, the uses of the sciences, and the appropriate way to read and discuss books. Although the sciences were admitted as suitable for children, the issues of the subjects to be chosen, the purposes they were intended for, and the pedagogical methods by which they were presented, were still contested. This article also goes beyond the usual studies of children's books by focusing on non-fiction, and by emphasizing readers and use, rather than authors or publishers. Yet producing a history of reading based entirely on actual readers will be exceedingly difficult, so this article suggests an alternative, by combining accounts of actual readers' experiences with attitudes towards practices like orality and discussion.

This article examines the relationship between Anthony Eden, British minister for League of Nations' affairs (1935) and foreign secretary (1935–8), and Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime within the context of Italian foreign policy in the later 1930s. It outlines the precise aims and objectives of Mussolini's expansionist policies over the period 1935–8, assesses the accuracy of Eden's interpretation of them and, in turn, discusses official Italian diplomatic perceptions of Eden. It specifically challenges Renzo De Felice's view that for Mussolini, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia (1935–6) marked the limit of Fascist expansionism. Furthermore, it contests his theory that the dictator did not pursue an Italo–German alliance that would drive an Italian imperialist war against Britain and France in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Anthony Eden had been fully aware of such an intention, and had been targeted by the regime as Italy's ‘public enemy number one’, precisely because he fully comprehended what lay at the heart of Mussolini's brand of Fascism.

This article examines the impact on German urban society of the allied air raids during the Second World War. It rejects the oft-made assertion that the bombing strengthened the ‘community of fate’ on the German home front, arguing that this is an invention of Nazi propaganda which has been absorbed uncritically by subsequent scholars. Instead, it contends that the bombing brought to the surface many social and cultural tensions within German society and led to a widespread process of atomization and dissolution of community ties. The local authorities were quickly overwhelmed by the scale of the bombing and Nazi party propaganda singularly failed to have any impact on the population.

The folk music movement was among the most important influences on English cultural life in the years immediately before 1914. Its major figure, both in terms of volume of material collected and published, and in terms of organization and publicity, was Cecil Sharp. Historical understanding of the movement and modern appreciation of the material have been hampered by a Marxist orthodoxy which sees folk music as the cultural property of the working class and which attempts to discredit the folk music collectors, particularly Sharp. This article summarizes the trends in scholarship and employs the first biographical survey of a large group of folk singers to challenge the Marxist interpretation.

The special operations executive (SOE) has been the subject of controversy among historians, who disagree over its contribution to the British war effort. Recent releases of SOE documents to the PRO make possible the re-examination of SOE's effectiveness in stimulating resistance in particular countries, for example Poland, the focus of this case study. Colin Gubbins, the key figure in the history of SOE, was brought into the organization in autumn 1940 specifically so he could co-ordinate the aid to the Polish resistance. But the level of supplies dropped by the RAF for the Polish resistance was disappointing. The chiefs of staff relegated the Polish resistance to a secondary role of sabotage and subversion and stressed that they could not prevent a Polish uprising from being overwhelmed by the Nazis. SOE, which had responsibility for British liaison with the Polish resistance, failed to convey this decision to the Poles with sufficient emphasis, and the Polish home army launched the Warsaw uprising unaware of the enormous difficulties in the way of supplying their capital from the air. Churchill, the earl of Selborne, and some SOE officers sought vigorously to provide the Poles with the maximum possible level of supplies. After the first ten days Gubbins himself played a surprisingly small part in supporting the Poles. Disheartened, Gubbins bitterly predicted that Britain would abandon Poland after the war. Overall, SOE's contribution to Polish resistance did more harm than good.

This article challenges the view that, in accepting the 1945 American loan and its attendant commitments to international economic liberalization, the Labour party easily fell in behind the Atlanticist approach to post-war trade and payments. It is suggested instead that Labour's sometimes seemingly paradoxical behaviour in office was driven, not only by the very tough economic conditions it faced, but also by a fundamental contradiction inherent in its desire to ‘plan’ at both domestic and international levels. This contradiction – the ‘planning paradox’ – is explored with reference to pre-war and war-time developments, including Labour's reactions to the Keynes and White plans of 1943, and to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. The decision to accept the US loan, and with it the Bretton Woods agreements, is then examined within this context. Finally, an assessment is made of whether, in this key area of policy, Labour's pre-1945 deliberations were effective in preparing the party for the challenges it would face in government.

The opening of archives in recent years makes it possible to reassess the membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) before 1945. The revised aggregate figures, while not startling, suggest that revisions to established views of the effects of the General Strike, the shift to the ‘new line’ and the popular front, are in order. The party's membership was very predominantly male, tended to be young, often included a high proportion of unemployed people, and was heavily working class, with miners especially significant. Geographically, its membership was dominated for most of the period by London, Scotland, Lancashire, and South Wales. There was also a very high turnover of membership for much of the period. The reasons for this turnover, and explanations for the circumstances in which the party was best able to recruit, are discussed. Over time the party's membership did become less unrepresentative of Britain as a whole, enabling it to become an organic, if minor, part of British political life. CPGB membership patterns have similarities with those of other Western Communist parties and its predecessor organizations in Britain, showing how the CPGB reflected features of both international Communism and the British left.

By taking the Austrian province of Tyrol as a case-study, the article explores the relationship between Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment, and national sentiments in and around the 1790s. Characterized by economic crisis and political turbulence, this period had profound consequences for the formation of national and regional identities amongst the region's German-speaking majority. In reaction to the challenges posed first by the centralist reforms in the Habsburg monarchy, and secondly the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars, the local nobility and clergy articulated a greater Tyrolian provincial consciousness, and also a stronger sense of their German identity. The mobilizing experience created by Tyrol's fight against the invading French armies meant that these sentiments were disseminated among and articulated by broader sections of the German-Tyrolian population as well. The article assesses the meanings and nuances of regional consciousness, local patriotism, German identity, and dynastic loyalty, and argues that national feeling in Tyrol was strongly influenced by anti-Enlightenment political and social forces.

This communication presents a newly discovered letter to Thomas Hobbes. It offers conclusive evidence that the letter was written by Hobbes's friend, the scientist and Anglican clergyman Robert Payne, and strong evidence that the letter was in fact received by Hobbes in late 1649. The discovered letter was part of a running controversy over questions of church government in which Hobbes and Payne engaged during the composition of Leviathan. In it Payne tries unsuccessfully to soften Hobbes's strident Erastianism, and to defend the beleaguered Church of England from his criticisms. The letter thus sheds light on the political and religious context in which Leviathan was composed. Moreover, the letter offers an indirect but intriguing glimpse at underlying assumptions of Hobbes's religious thought.

Royalists of the Civil War period readily employed the English legal system to recover lost estates, even at the nadir of their political fortunes, namely the years just after the king's defeat. Rather than accept the verdict of a war lost, royalist and Catholic ‘delinquents’ successfully sought their own verdicts at law against former tenants for rents on lands that had been confiscated by parliament. The radical MPs staffing the Indemnity Committee respected the principles of due process of law and, ironically, given the fact that the committee's purpose was to protect parliament's supporters, upheld royalist claims to confiscated lands, thereby assisting the law courts in thwarting parliament's plan to repay war debts with rents collected from losers' property. So pervasive was the legalistic mindset in both the courts and the Indemnity Committee that royalists received favourable rulings against many on the winning side of the conflict, including famous leaders such as Sir William Brereton.

The origins of the process that transmuted Prussia–Germany's most hallowed social institution and professional group, the officer corps, into a functional elite of ‘National Socialist Führer-personalities’ remain obscure. Recent studies have argued that the ‘structural pressures of modern war’ – the immense losses of summer 1942 – compelled the abolition of time-honoured educational and social qualifications for officer candidacy and the basing of promotions almost solely on battlefield prowess, and that ‘National Socialist elite manipulation’ was at best a secondary factor. Yet archival evidence makes clear that the pressures of war took second place in the army's official mind to the need to preserve order and tradition, and that it was above all Adolf Hitler who dictated the timing, shape, and extent of changes that the bureaucrats were largely incapable of imagining. ‘Führer-selection through battle’ was simultaneously the most far-reaching and lasting element in the social revolution that Hitler sought, and a decisive step in steeling the German armed forces for their fight to the bitter end. In this as in other areas, it was National Socialism's very modernity that endowed it with demonic force.

This article gives chronology, nuance, and context to an analysis of how early socialist attitudes to religion changed. It asks why socialists argued with increasing fervour between the early 1830s and 1848 that social reform had to be rooted in spiritual as well as moral values. Two of the largest groups, the Icarians and the Fourierists, moved from a rational deism to Christianity. Both were driven by the need to defend themselves from accusations of immorality levelled against Fourier and the Saint-Simonians because of their rejection of monogamous marriage. The Fourierists, strongly influenced by their dominant female members, transformed Fourier's diety into a Christian God. Cabet, under pressure of ‘moral outrage’ from his critics, did likewise and found that this corresponded to the experiences of the Icarians in their artisan organizations. The religion of the early socialists was a democratic and a pragmatic morality, derived from artisan corporations, and seen as a vital base for fraternal association which was their solution to the ills of society.

Two main alternative paths structured the lives of women in early modern Italy: marriage and the convent. Historians have analysed the disciplinary and economic functions, and the legal, religious and symbolic meaning of these paths, from a variety of perspectives. However, studies of marriage and the convent have mainly developed as two separate fields of historical research. My article reviews these two series of studies in the context of the historiography of early modern Italy, and suggests some of the possible connections between them.

In my article in The Historical Journal, 40 (1997) pp. 435–61 I concluded, primarily on the evidence collected by the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) investigator David Murray, that Bob Smillie, a volunteer with the ILP's contingent in the Spanish Civil War, had died of appendicitis. However, he had been the victim of an appalling degree of neglect by the prison authorities in Valencia. I also concluded that the ILP leadership had deliberately prevented Smillie's death from becoming a matter of political debate. The account by Georges Kopp presented by John Newsinger in The Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 575–8 suggests a very different story: that the appendicitis was ‘imaginary’ and that Smillie was, in fact, kicked to death by his Communist interrogators for refusing to co-operate. Does Kopp's evidence necessitate a rethink of the Smillie case? I do not think so, and I believe that there are serious doubts surrounding both the nature of this evidence and the version of events that it presents.

This essay reviews the contribution of Foucauldian poststructural theory to history. It retrieves its origins as a supplement to, not a negation of, the structuralisms of the Annales. Histories of discourses influenced by modish (Barthesian, gender, post-colonial, Cultural Studies …) paradigms often overlook this heritage. They take, ‘il n'y a pas hors de texte’ at face value. This essay suggests ways to re-assimilate historical studies of discourses with older historiographies of classes, institutions, social structures, and ideologies. Poststructural historiography today tends to focus only on discourses, confusing coherence with power, meanings with causes. Making use of Giddens's structuration, de Certeau's reçu and Bourdieu's pratique, I suggest that historians must seek out actions as well as words, looking for sites where discourses they find in one sphere affect another. Only then can historians assess the importance of the discourses they find, above and beyond their mere coherence.

Analysis of policy after 1945 has been profoundly shaped by the idea of a post-war settlement, which is increasingly viewed as inherently inflationary. For much of the period 1951–64, British economic policy was centrally focused on reducing inflation. The extension of sterling's convertibility in the mid-1950s forced British policy-makers to be sensitive to overseas perceptions of British policy and performance. At the beginning of the Conservative government's period in office, monetary policy was believed to be the most effective instrument to control inflation, but its limitations slowly became apparent and created enormous tension between the Treasury and Bank of England. In the literature stimulated by the Phillips curve, the formation of price expectations is the central element in inflationary dynamics, and it is argued that after 1955 Conservative policy was driven by the need to find alternatives to monetary policy to prevent and then limit inflationary expectations. A number of these initiatives – a steep rise in unemployment and confrontation in pay bargaining – sit uncomfortably with the idea of the post-war settlement and an alternative perspective on the Conservative years, emphasizing the Radcliffe committee and the investigations into incomes policy, is proposed.