21 November 1920 began with the killing of fourteen men in their flats, boarding houses, and hotel rooms in Dublin. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) alleged that they were British spies. That afternoon British forces retaliated by firing on a crowd of supporters at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing twelve and injuring sixty. The day quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Much has been made of the afternoon's events. The shootings in Croke Park have acquired legendary status. Concern with the morning's killing has been largely limited to whether or not the dead men were the spies the IRA said they were. There has been little or no consideration of the men who did the killing. This article is based on largely unused interviews and statements made by the IRA men involved in this and many of the other days that came to constitute the guerrilla war fought against the British forces in Ireland from January 1919 until July 1921. This morning's killings are a chilling example of much of what passed for combat during this struggle. Bloody Sunday morning is used here as a means to explore how generally young and untrained IRA men killed and how this type of killing affected their lives.

In 1750 Frederick II of Prussia created a new trade company in Emden. Diplomats, merchants, and other observers in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Hamburg reacted with great concern to this Prussian bid to join the world of overseas commerce. These concerns were not unfounded. Frederick pursued his goal with great determination. The article explains why Prussia embarked on this ultimately unsuccessful venture and why established commercial powers such as Britain or the Netherlands felt threatened by the new competitor. In this context the article explores an international debate about political economy that was associated with the creation of the Prussian trade company. This debate took place in Britain, the Netherlands, Hamburg, and Prussia. The case of the Prussian Asiatic trade company suggests that the concepts of Oceanic and Atlantic history need to be extended beyond the narrow stretch of coastal regions. In the Prussian case the drive to join the world of overseas commerce originated from the inland and from a country that had traditionally been oriented towards overland commerce and European expansion. The study of the events and debates associated with the creation of the trade company also suggests a partially new perspective on Prussia's economic policies in the period.

This article analyses the proceedings of eight International Sanitary Conferences which were convened between 1851 and 1894 to address the danger that cholera epidemics posed to Europe. These conferences are examined in the context of the intellectual and institutional changes in scientific medicine and in the light of the changing structure of internationalist endeavours that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article shows that the International Sanitary Conferences were as much spaces of co-operation as they were arenas where differences and boundaries between disciplines, nations, and cultures were defined. Furthermore, it seeks to shed light on a broader tension of the period. On the one hand, the fact that the world was growing together to an unprecedented extent due to new means of transportation enabled Europeans to establish and expand profitable commercial and colonial relations. On the other hand, this development increased the vulnerability of Europe – for example to the importation of diseases. The perception that the world was becoming increasingly interconnected was thus coupled with the need for controllable boundaries. The conferences attempted to find solutions as to how borders could be secured without resorting to traditional barriers; like semipermeable membranes they should be open for some kinds of communication but closed for others.

Zionism’s call for a Jewish return to ‘the East’ was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with ‘the Orient’. This interest in ‘the East’ coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of ‘the Orient’ and of Europe’s own orient at home (referred to at times as halbasien, or half-Asia). The notion that Jews – particularly those of eastern Europe – constituted a semi-Asiatic, foreign element in European society became a pervasive trope by the latter part of the century, and one to which Zionist thought and praxis sought to respond in a variety of ways. When Zionists in Palestine, mostly eastern European Jews transplanted further east yet to the ‘Orient’, set out to create a new Hebrew national culture there, competing images of occident and Orient – resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones – would play defining roles in their praxis and in the cultural institutions, the rituals, and the national liturgy they would fashion.

This article explores the history of crossing the road in Britain from the traffic acts of the early 1930s to the introduction of the Green Cross Code in the early 1970s. It reconstructs this history through the examination of government documents, press releases, newspaper articles, newsreels, public information films, and other road safety materials. Since the interwar period, British governments have become progressively more involved in policing the activity of crossing the road, and there have been two main planks of policy. The first has been to design progressively more sophisticated crossings; the second has been road safety education, including advice about how to use the crossings, disseminated through school crossing patrols, children's clubs, and public information films. Governments have generally relied on appeals to good sense and civic duty rather than legally enforceable rules about crossing the road, and have sought to follow as well as lead public opinion in determining how much to coerce both pedestrians and motorists. The formulation of policy in relation to public attitudes and media responses means that crossing the road during this period has interesting implications for both political and cultural history.

Even though the argument runs counter to much of the detailed scholarship on the subject, Britain's decision in 1921 to terminate its alliance with Japan is sometimes held in general historical surveys to be a major blunder that helped to pave the way to the Pacific War. The lingering sympathy for the combination with Japan is largely due to an historical myth which has presented the alliance as a particularly close partnership. The roots of the myth lie in the inter-war period when, in order to attack the trend towards internationalism, the political right in Britain manipulated memory of the alliance so that it became an exemplar of ‘old diplomacy’. It was then reinforced after 1945 by post-war memoirs and the ‘declinist’ literature of the 1960s and 1970s. By analysing the origins of this benevolent interpretation of the alliance, this article reveals how quickly and pervasively political discourse can turn history into myth and how the development of myths tells us much about the time in which they were created.

This article examines the scholarly recovery and popular reception of ‘ancient poetry’ in later eighteenth-century England, with a view to elucidating the relationship between cultural primitivism and more overtly politicized discourses of national identity. The publication of the poems of Ossian, in the early 1760s, gave a new prominence to the earliest cultural productions of Celtic antiquity, and inspired the attempts of English literary historians, such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, to provide an alternative ‘Gothic’ genealogy for the English literary imagination. However, both the English reception of Ossian, and the Gothicist scholarship of Percy and Warton, were complicated by the growing strength of English radical patriotism. As popular political discourse assumed an increasingly insular preoccupation with Saxon liberties and ancient constitutional rights, more conservative literary historians found their own attempts to ground English poetic tradition in some form of Gothic inheritance progressively compromised. The persistence of ancient constitutionalism as a divisive element of English political argument thus curtailed the ability of Gothicist literary scholarship to function as an effective vehicle for English cultural patriotism.

This article explores how walking in a particular type of terrain, the moorland area of north Derbyshire known as the Dark Peak, contributed to a localized sense of place which was framed by regional and national discourses and also testified to broader social and cultural uncertainties strongly shaped by gender and class. The punishing physical values of such wild upland areas offered challenges of stoicism, hardiness and endurance which were central to late-nineteenth century ideals of manliness, as masculinity was increasingly defined by forms of sporting activity which encouraged character-building battles against nature. Sensibility is not readily associated with this robust discourse of adventure. The ‘wild’ outdoors, so easily seen as an extension of the public, masculine world was, however, of far greater complexity. More than a focus for physical activity and trespass ‘battles’, it was a place where emotion and the elating intimacy of open space gave expression to needs which also intimate the masculine anxieties of the era.

The perception of Ireland and India as ‘zones of famine’ led many nineteenth-century observers to draw analogies between these two troublesome parts of the British empire. This article investigates this parallel through the career of James Caird (1816–92), and specifically his interventions in the latter stages of both the Great Irish Famine of 1845–50, and the Indian famines of 1876–9. Caird is best remembered as the joint author of the controversial dissenting minute in the Indian famine commission report of 1880; this article locates the roots of his stance in his previous engagements with Irish policy. Caird's interventions are used to track the trajectory of an evolving ‘Peelite’ position on famine relief, agricultural reconstruction, and land reform between the 1840s and 1880s. Despite some divergences, strong continuities exist between the two interventions – not least concern for the promotion of agricultural entrepreneurship, for actively assisting economic development in ‘backward’ economies, and an acknowledgement of state responsibility for preserving life as an end in itself. Above all in both cases it involved a critique of a laissez-faire dogmatism – whether manifest in the ‘Trevelyanism’ of 1846–50 or the Lytton–Temple system of 1876–9.

In the 1950s the Democratic Party in California grew from a struggling, rump organization into the major political party in the state. This was in large part due to the activities of a network of liberal activists in the California Democratic Council, a group formed in 1953 to encourage the creation of local Democratic ‘clubs’ across California in which those interested in left-of-centre politics could debate issues of the day and campaign for Democratic candidates in elections. This article argues that the rise of the Democrats in the Golden State was predicated on the espousal by both amateur activists and party politicians of an explicitly social democratic ideology that provided a bridge between the policies of the New Deal in the 1930s and the more ambitious goals of the Great Society at the national level in the 1960s. The article examines the ideas embraced by liberal politicians in the 1950s and looks at how those ideas underpinned a massive expansion of California's welfare state in the early 1960s.

During the first half of the Second World War, a network of secretive ultra-right movements emerged in Ireland for the purpose of assisting the Axis cause. These groups had little contact with fascist organizations overseas, but rather were indigenous expressions of discontent with the perceived failure of Irish liberal democracy to address the country’s political and economic problems. Numerically weak, poorly led, and ideologically unsophisticated, the pro-Axis underground made little progress in its subversive activities and was kept in check by the security services. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a considerable number of Irishmen and women on both sides of the Border shared its underlying objective of aligning Ireland with what they regarded as an emerging post-democratic world order.

This article examines the impact of England's first women justices of the peace (JPs) on the work of lay magistrates in the period 1920–50. It argues that the early women JPs (many of whom had been active in the women's suffrage campaign), and the organizations that they belonged to, helped to transform the institution of the lay magistracy by adopting a more ‘professional’ approach, evidenced in their willingness to educate and train themselves for their new role. In consequence, this article challenges conventional definitions of ‘professionalism’, arguing that, where the work of JPs was concerned, the boundary between ‘voluntary’ and ‘professional’ activities was less clear than might be supposed. Furthermore, the willingness of many women magistrates in particular (later followed by some of their male colleagues) to undergo training helped to ensure the survival of the lay element in the criminal justice system to the present day.

A key current concern is how scientific knowledge may inform policy in relation to major environmental and health concerns. There are distinct schools of analysis about this relationship between science and policy. They stress rational relationships; denial and delay; or the role of networks. History is important in modifying such perspectives: smoking policy in the 1950s and 1960s is the case study here. The initial response in the 1950s to the link between smoking and lung cancer was in part conditioned by the role of the tobacco industry and the financial importance of tobacco: the British tobacco industry had closer relationships with government than the American one, and did not rely on public relations. Public health interests worked with the industry. But politicians were concerned also about the fluidity of the epidemiological evidence; the dangers of stirring up further pressure over air pollution; the financial and ideological implications of health education and its location; and the electoral dangers of intervening in a popular mass habit. In the 1960s the British and American medical reports stimulated the growth of a public health ‘policy community’. The initial political considerations began to weaken and these years marked the beginning of a new style of public health.

Responding positively to the 1957 ‘funding experience’ initiative encouraging Whitehall departments to use history more systematically in their everyday work, the Foreign Office commissioned a pilot project centred upon the 1951 Anglo-Iranian Abadan crisis. The resulting study, completed by Rohan Butler in 1962, included a lengthy section drawing lessons from the historical narrative. During the early 1960s Butler's Abadan history, attracting interest and comment from both ministers and officials, fed into ongoing reviews of British foreign policy and methods stimulated by the 1956 Suez debacle and Britain's initial failure to join the Common Market (1963). Confronting policymakers with the contemporary realities affecting Britain's role in the world, the history prompted serious thinking about the case for a radical change of direction in both foreign policy and methods. Generally speaking, the Foreign Office has made little use of history in the actual policymaking process. From this perspective, this episode, centred upon Butler's Abadan history, offers a useful case study illuminating any appraisal of history's potential as a policy input, most notably concerning the role of historical analogies in the formulation, conduct, and presentation of British foreign policy.

The year 1968 witnessed a global revolt against imperialism, capitalism, and bureaucracy. It was not – as has long been claimed – the start of a cultural revolution that produced greater personal freedom, but the end of the post-war attempt to define a new left. This reinterpretation of '68 as a global revolt rather than the the baby-boom generation's coming-of-age party is based upon recent research at the local level. An examination of Ireland's radical left during the ‘long '68’ is an important contribution to this work, as it was significant as well as small. Contact at congresses and through the media with other leftists enabled Northern Ireland's ‘sixty-eighters’ to conceive of themselves as part of an imagined community of global revolt. They shared similar goals and tactics. Like their comrades on the continent and across the Atlantic, the region's sixty-eighters tried to attract attention and support by provoking the authorities into an overreaction. In a country dominated by the sectarian divide, however, clashes between Catholic protesters and Protestant police officers were always more likely to lead to communal conflict than class struggle. The Troubles is perhaps the most tragic outcome of the interaction of global and local politics that occurred during '68.

This article is a contribution to the continuing debate on the character and electoral fortunes of the Conservative party in late Victorian England. Using the West Riding borough of Leeds as a case study, this article focuses on suburban Conservatism (villa toryism) and situates it within the broader context of urban Conservatism in and beyond Leeds. It explores the nature of Conservative electoral dominance in the period after the Third Reform Act. In doing so, it further challenges conventional interpretations about the rise of class-based politics. As the example of Leeds demonstrates, villa toryism was not the political expression of a socially homogeneous, innately conservative suburban middle class. The intense electoral competition that ensued challenges assumptions about suburbia being politically quiescent and dull. Popular Conservatism, it is argued, was a protean and socially heterogeneous political culture, of which villa toryism was one distinctive strand. Villa toryism was the suburban incarnation of respectable, self-reliant, hierarchical, and domesticated popular Conservatism. This villa toryism was distinct from, but related to, the working-class Conservatism of the older industrial districts of urban England.

Dr Anne McLaren has disputed the interpretation of the Vindiciae, contra tyrannos (1579) as a work in which Roman and canon law were fundamental. She correctly identifies Quentin Skinner and me with this interpretation. She bases her case on two sorts of evidence: the alleged paucity of Roman law citations, as compared with scriptural ones, in the margins of the original text; and our alleged failure to appreciate the ‘context’ of the Vindiciae, which, she suggests, means how it was translated and used in England, primarily in the seventeenth century. This response argues that she has seriously underestimated the number of legal citations, ignored the use of legal material which is not cited in the margins, and failed to appreciate that Scripture is interpreted in accordance with the categories and principles of Roman and canon law. It further argues that sixteenth-century France, not seventeenth-century England, is the proper ‘context’ in which to understand the book; and that substituting her assessment of English interpretations for what the original says is illegitimate.

Recent work in the modern history of sexuality, now an established field of inquiry, is characterized by particular approaches to the interpretation of modernity and selfhood. In general, and in contrast to previous approaches, the books under review treat modernity as a localized process with specific effects. Sexual identity is understood in a similar way, as a phenomenon bounded by locality, class, age, nationality, gender, patterns of sociability, and other contextual factors. As such, speaking of sexual identity as a unitary entity, or as something that has historically been structured by an opposition of homosexual/heterosexual, no longer makes sense. In fact, the homo/hetero binary is of much more recent vintage than has been hitherto thought. These histories of sexuality challenge historians of all kinds to rethink the nature of categories like selfhood, identity, and modernity.

The celebration of Empire Day in Britain was of greater significance than previous research has suggested. This article disproves the misconception that the festival was restricted in the main to a constituency of schoolchildren. The celebrations had a far wider effect on diverse communities; in many cases the ritual celebration of the British Empire traversed class boundaries and helped to sustain traditional social hierarchies. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when unrestrained jingoism became inappropriate, Empire Day retained its hegemonic potency by amalgamating the emerging traditions of sombre commemoration into the repertoire of imperial festivity. Empire Day, although remaining popular during the interwar period, became an arena of passionate contestation. The Conservative party and other groups adopted Empire Day as a vehicle for anti-socialist propaganda, whilst the communist party exploited it as an opportunity to attack British imperialism. Other protests came from local Labour groups and pacifist dissenters. The overt politicization of Empire Day severely disrupted its hegemonic function and the political battles fought over the form and purpose of the celebrations made it difficult to uphold the notion that the festival was merely a benign tribute to a legitimate and natural state of affairs.

This article is a response to an account of a communist espionage circle which appeared in this journal in 2003. It argues that the original article is seriously misleading because of its apparently exclusive reliance on previously classified intelligence documents and the interpretations found within them. Combined with a failure to provide an appropriate historical context, particularly concerning the politics of the drama's central figure – the Daily Herald journalist W. N. Ewer – and a tendency to import questionable value judgements into the narrative, the original piece substitutes the secret policeman's opinions for a real history of its subject-matter.