Ireland in the eighteen-fifties was quiescent through exhaustion. The great famine of the eighteen-forties had resulted in heavy population losses through death and emigration and demoralized tenant farmers had offered but a feeble resistance to wholesale evictions. The failure of the Irish Confederate risings of 1848-49, the collapse of tenant-right agitation and the disintegration of the Independent Irish Party at Westminster, had left the country sunk in political apathy. The trade union movement did not escape the general paralysis and the Regular Trades Association, a central organization that had developed in Dublin during the eighteen-forties, disappeared. Not until 1859 was there renewed trade union activity in the form of a campaign to abolish night-baking; though it had only limited success, it helped to bring about the appearance in 1863 of a new grouping of Dublin trade unions, the United Trades Association. It was, however, not a trade union organization but the Irish Republican Brotherhood that aroused the country from political torpor.

The I.R.B., known in North America as the Fenian Brotherhood, was a secret oath-bound society pledged to establish an independent Irish republic. Its first leader was James Stephens, who had founded it in 1858 after his return from an exile following the 1848 rising. Its membership was drawn from the rural and urban working class – the sons of small farmers, mechanics, artisans, laborers and petty shopkeepers. In 1861 Stephens skillfully stage-managed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, a Confederate exile whose body was brought back for burial in Ireland, and thus aroused an unprecedented interest in “The Organization,” as its members called it.

Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically in The Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.

Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. In Becoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”

Students of British history continue to experience a certain haziness as to what precisely differentiated the Liberals and Conservatives of the mid-Victorian era, a haziness by no means allayed by the plethora of recent publications on the social and organizational structure of the nineteenth-century political party system. In 1832 political reform had constituted an apparently decisive issue—at least Grey and Russell had strongly favored it and Peel and Wellington had forthrightly opposed it. In the mid-1840s the Corn Laws had supplied a comparable cause for division. The Whigs and Radicals had provided Peel with his majority, and two-thirds of the Tories had disavowed their leader and resisted the abolition of the Corn Laws to the last.

Yet neither of these issues would seem to provide a key to the party rivalry of the 1860s. The manner in which Disraeli played the role of political magician in 1867 and pulled the Reform Act of that year out of his hat provides prima facie evidence that political reform as such was not then fundamental to inter-party rivalry. Nor was agricultural protection, the plank that Derby and Disraeli had quietly removed from their party platform a decade-and-a-half earlier. The cause of Italian unification, which had briefly divided parties in 1859 and had spurred Gladstone to cast his political lot once and for all with Palmerston and Russell, had become a fact and was no longer an issue.

For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content analysis of the most popular religious books of Restoration England showed just the opposite—that the most self-consciously “Anglican” authors were those who placed the most emphasis upon work and worldly enterprise as a religious duty. They were also able to integrate this duty with the rest of their theology in a more straightforward, logical manner than the Puritans, for whom the connection is thought to have been psychological, mediated by religious anxiety. Work was, for the most popular Anglican authors, part of a moralistic religion of works. We can even say that such an emphasis was adopted at just the time when Anglicans were facing up to a change in the status of their church and adopting attitudes more characteristic of members of a movement or denomination, which helps to explain why work and effort were coming to seem more important to them.

There have been numerous lines of criticism of Max Weber's thesis connecting the doctrine of evangelical conversion and the spirit of economic enterprise. But since the following approach and alternative suggestions do not build on them, we must go back again to Weber's own classic formulation.

Students of the industrial revolution now generally admit what seemed obvious to Samuel Garbett, the Birmingham manufacturer and lobbyist, two hundred years ago; namely, that the state was an important participant in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Many scholars still emphasize the restraint of English government — a restraint which gave relatively free play to natural economic forces and to individual genius, a restraint which also aggravated the social repercussions of so momentous a transformation. But they recognize that entrepreneurs could obtain legal sanction for enclosures, canals, and a myriad of other “improvements' easily and at moderate cost by means of a private act of parliament, and they debate whether existing patent law stimulated invention by providing adequate rewards for the inventor or aimed primarily at discouraging stultifying monopoly. Because the processes of growth in the last decades of the century were so fundamental and pervasive, fiscal, commercial, colonial, and foreign policies were bound to have an impact on the embryonic industrial economy. Whether government by its various acts encouraged or impeded growth is open to debate at a number of levels. There can be no doubt, however, that politicians endeavored, if sometimes slowly and haphazardly, to adapt policy and law to changing conditions and that their decisions did affect the tempo and quality of growth.

In 1210, King John led to Ireland an army that consisted of the feudal levy of England, mercenary knights from Flanders, and a large force of Serjeants and crossbowmen, supported in the course of the campaign by some seven hundred ships. Money paid out for the ships totalled over £3,800, while wages for the crossbowmen and Serjeants topped £2,380. The 1210 Irish expedition was an impressive operation and showed Angevin government at its most effective. Modern historians, needless to say, have been impressed by the organisation and scale of the undertaking. What makes John’s Irish campaign not only impressive but terrifying was that, in one sense, it was all done to hunt down one man and his family.

For the British, the Anglo-Russian Convention was the culmination of repeated efforts, first begun by Lord Salisbury's government in the 1880s, later reiterated by the ministry of Arthur Balfour after the turn of the century, to come to terms with Russia in Asia. What was the effect on the British position in Asia of the agreement which the Liberal administration of Henry Campbell-Bannerman finally obtained in 1907? The actual working of the Convention in Asia has not received close attention. Since Britain and Russia were wartime allies, it appears to have been taken for granted that, before World War I, the Anglo-Russian Convention produced no major disenchantment or dangers for either partner. One purpose of this essay is to show that for the British, the Convention eventually generated serious dissatisfaction, that it failed to fulfill the British aim of halting Russian expansion in areas strategically crucial to the defense of India, and that in Central Asia after 1912, the Anglo-Russian Convention hindered rather than furthered the British quest for security. Further, a thesis of this paper is that Anglo-Russian relations dominated British policy in Central Asia, and that it was British anxiety about Russian expansion in Central Asia which led the British after 1912 to attempt to establish a veiled protectorate in Tibet. This view diverges from that of a recent major work on the once obscure history of Central Asia: in The McMahon Line, Professor Alastair Lamb emphasized the importance of Sino-Indian relations to the formulation of British policy in Central Asia.

The most important contribution made by Archbishop James Ussher to the ecclesiastical developments of the Interregnum and Restoration periods was his short tract The Reduction of Episcopacy Unto the Form of Synodical Government. Printed only after his death in 1656, its combination of ministerial synods with episcopal rule was seen as a basis for presbyterian-episcopal reconciliation over the next three decades. The tract was printed in five editions during the later 1650s, and came out in two more editions in 1679, when the Popish Plot and the calling of a new Parliament revived hopes that dissenters could be comprehended within the Church of England. It was printed once more in 1689, in Edinburgh, when “comprehension” was again being hotly debated in both England and Scotland. By that time Ussher's name had come to symbolize such “limited” or “primitive” episcopacy, and indeed it has continued to do so among twentieth-century historians.

The fame of the Reduction rests upon its content and authorship. Although the tract was only one of many such compromises offered during the Interregnum, it was the most radical to come from the royalist and Anglican side during that period. Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Ussher was admired and respected by radical puritans and major Laudian spokesmen such as Henry Hammond and Bishop John Bramhall. The power of Ussher's name in this context was shown in 1685, when the nonconformist divine and politician Richard Baxter was on trial for allegedly making a printed attack against the king and the bishops. When Baxter's attorney, Sir Henry Pollexfen, sought to introduce as evidence one of Baxter's own printed compromises between episcopal and presbyterian government, Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys replied, “I will see none of his books; it is for primitive Episcopacy, I will warrant you — a bishop in every parish.” In replying “Nay, my lord, it is the same with Archbishop Usher's,” Pollexfen indicated both the radical nature of the Reduction and the legitimacy that Ussher's name lent to other compromises of this kind.

Those non-medievalists who had the opportunity to see the film The Lion in Winter may well have concluded that the intensity and extent of hostility among the members of King Henry II's family had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. It would appear, however, that the rivalries between Henry and his sons, and of the latter among themselves, provide a noteworthy example of an historical reality that was even more virulent than the fictionalized version. For example, in 1173-1174, Henry's sons, Henry the Younger, Richard, and Geoffrey, revolted against their father despite the fact that they were only teenagers at the time. The youths were joined in this effort by their mother, Eleanor. However, she was captured by Henry II, who imprisoned her until his own death sixteen years later. In 1182, Henry the Younger again threatened to revolt against his father. The next year found the youth at war with his brother Richard. This conflict widened when Geoffrey joined his brother against Richard, who subsequently was supported by the king. During this campaign Henry the Younger and Geoffrey appear to have attempted to have their father killed. In 1184, following Henry the Younger's death, Geoffrey and his youngest brother, John, went to war against Richard. Finally, in 1189, King Henry died while at war against Richard, who was supported by John.

Henry's family problems were not limited to hostilities with his sons, for on two earlier occasions, in 1152 and 1156, he went to war against his own brother Geoffrey. In a similar vein, Henry's sons did not only find themselves in conflict with their father but, as noted above, they fought against each other. This did not end with Henry's death: John and Richard were in conflict with each other on several occasions, and the former certainly was responsible for the murder of his nephew Arthur.

It is difficult to generalize about how people at any point in time view the process of growing old and the aged themselves. Attitudes towards old people have perhaps always been ambiguous and are probably ambiguous in western societies today. In seventeenth-century England, which in so many ways combined tradition and modernity, the ambivalent attitude towards the elderly included both traditional and modern aspects in three ways. First, as with traditional societies, early modern Englishmen looked upon old age as simply another stage in life, one of the seven through which all persons must pass; at the same time, old age was seen as something entirely different, a reversal of all previous stages. The latter view, which sociologists have labeled the “implicit” view, sees life as a constant process of expansion and growth until one reaches old age when the process is halted and reversed. Secondly, as in other traditional societies, old age was seen as a period of great dignity and wisdom, with the elderly deserving the respect and admiration of all other persons. Alongside this view in seventeenth-century England, old age was thought of as a time of folly and old people were described in undesirable terms. Thirdly, there were two ways of looking at death and its nearness: the traditional Christian view, held by many seventeenth-century theologians, was that death was entirely in God's hands and was a relief from the suffering of earthly life. The more modern view, held by others in the seventeenth-century, was that death was postponable by sensible precautions or by the science of medicine. Drawing on the literature of the age, this article will attempt to show old age in all of these various ways and point out the ambiguities.

Serious study of the origins of the jury began in the time of William Stubbs and F. W. Maitland, when the work of the German historical school of jurisprudence reached England. Until then knowledge of the medieval English jury before the time of Henry II had been more legendary than real. William Blackstone had traced the common law to a compilation that King Alfred supposedly commanded to be made. Blackstone had written in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, “Some authors have endeavoured to trace the original of juries up as high as the Britons themselves, the first inhabitants of our island; but certain it is that they were in use among the earliest Saxon colonies.”

In the mid-nineteenth century the Anglo-Saxon origin of the jury was still a popular legend in England, but the German school of legal history sought a more scientific study of the problem. A representative of that group, Heinrich Brunner, in his book, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, rejected the traditional teaching that the jury was Germanic and popular in origin. Instead, he believed it to be royal in origin, an authoritarian means of gathering information, particularly information of a financial nature. It first appeared as the inquest of the Frankish kings, inherited from the imperial Roman fisc. It passed from them to the Norman dukes and then was introduced to England with William. According to Brunner the Norman kings reserved this fact-finding technique for themselves, extending it to their subjects in only a few cases.

No event of the post-Second World War decade in Britain is recalled as affectionately or enveloped in such an aura of nostalgia as the Festival of Britain, a five-month series of cultural events and exhibits, with its centerpiece at the South Bank in London. But the Festival dear to the recollections of those growing up during and after the war diverged sharply from the original conception of its progenitors.

In 1943 the Royal Society of the Arts, partly responsible for the Great Exhibition of 1851, suggested to the government that an international exhibition along similar lines be staged in 1951 to commemorate the earlier event. To propose a celebratory occasion in 1943 was an act of faith that the war would not only end successfully, but that Britain would have recovered sufficiently by 1951 to warrant such a demonstration. In September 1945, with the war over and Labour in power, Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, addressed an open letter to Stafford Cripps, then President of the Board of Trade, advocating a trade and cultural exhibition in London as a way of commemorating the centenary of the Crystal Palace. Such an exhibition would advertise British products and display British prowess in design and craftsmanship. He favored a site in the center of London, such as Hyde Park or Battersea, either of which would provide ample space for such an exhibition. What prompted these suggestions was the need to provide practical help to British commerce at a time when it was clearly under pressure shifting from wartime controls to peacetime competition.

The conventional wisdom of English urban history holds that town government in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coming increasingly under the domination of a tight, resurgent oligarchy. This view was embalmed by Jacob in his volume of the Oxford History of England, and is reproduced in the newest works on medieval and early-modern towns. Clearly, the doubts voiced at length by Mrs. Green in the late nineteenth century and developed quite vigorously by Bridbury in 1962 have found no echo, and the doctrine is now, in the words of one historian, “apparently beyond dispute.”

Yet, in spite of such remarkable unanimity, any student of urban history in this period must feel some unease due to the slender empirical basis upon which this view has been predicated. Monographs on late-medieval and early-modern English towns are few, and specialized studies of town government are equally rare. Indeed, Hoskins has recently identified “the personnel of the governing class” as “one important and almost unfilled field of urban study.” Thus, an extended examination of the structures and personnel of a late-medieval and early-modern urban “oligarchy” needs little justification because of its potential substantive and methodological implications for the constitutional, political, and social history of the English town.

The following study attempts to do this for Oxford, a middling urban center at this time, which, according to Mrs. Lobel, shared in the heightened oligarchy of the age. It is neither a proper study in constitutional history nor a narrative of local politics or governmental activities. Rather, it focuses upon the changing structures and personnel of the town in order to shed some new light on the problems raised above.

Both critics and defenders of James Strachey's translations of Sigmund Freud have tended to judge their worth by the standard of “accuracy”—in other words, their faithfulness to Freud's theories. This article takes a different approach, tracing Strachey's choices as a translator to his own experiences in Edwardian, wartime, and interwar Britain. Convinced that the ruling elite and the mass public alike were captive to dangerously irrational forces, Strachey saw the science of the unconscious as a vehicle for political and social criticism. As an attempt to mobilize expert knowledge against the status quo, Strachey's translation represents a divergence from two influential paradigms for interpreting the history of psychoanalysis: Carl Schorske's account of the Freudian “retreat from politics” and Michel Foucault's portrait of the “superstructural” state as an extension and ally of the human sciences. Strachey's translation also demonstrates that the political and social ambitions of British psychoanalysis were powerfully formed by the era of the First World War, and not only the Second, which historians have often identified as the crucial moment.

For those who by the end of the twentieth century came to be termed “survivors” of child sexual abuse, different genres and forms have been available to narrate and evaluate that abuse. This article explores the reception and practical results of such disclosures: the unpredictable effects of telling, and the strategies of containment, silencing, or disbelief that greeted disclosures. I make note of the ethical challenges of writing the history of child sexual abuse and conclude that twenty-first-century observers have been too ready to perceive much of the previous century as a period of profound silence in relation to child sexual abuse. At the same time, historical and sociological accounts have also been too ready to claim the final third of the twentieth century as a period of compulsive disclosure and fluency in constructing sexual selves. The history of child sexual abuse reveals significant barriers to disclosure in the 1970s and 1980s, despite new visibility of child sexual abuse in the media and through feminist sexual politics. Attention to such obstacles suggests the need to rethink narratives of “permissive” sexual change to acknowledge more fully the ongoing inequities and hierarchies in sexual candor and voice.

The suffragette in the dock at Bow Street police court is one of the emblematic scenes of the “votes for women” agitation. She usually stood alone in the prisoners' box, facing the magistrate, flanked by tables lined with lawyers and police officials and backed by benches full of friends and supporters, newspaper reporters, and ordinary spectators. Notwithstanding the state's claims of legal equality and judicial impartiality, she seemed to be engaged in an unequal contest speaking truth to unbending masculine authority. She was powerless to alter the outcome, a guilty verdict and a spell of imprisonment. This scene, like those of the protester arrested in the streets and the hunger striker being forcibly fed in prison, underlines the spectacular nature of suffrage militancy. Yet its very power to seize and hold our attention can obscure the complex interactions and effects that made militancy such a profoundly ambiguous moment in the intertwined histories of the women's suffrage movement and the Liberal-ruled Edwardian state.

Recent research has displaced the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) from its once central place in suffrage history. Jill Liddington, Jill Norris, and Jo Vellacott have recovered the very important contributions of radical and democratic feminists to the movement. In recounting the efforts of moderate women's suffragists, Claire Hirshfield, Leslie Parker Hume, and others have helped to paint a much more complex picture of the high politics of franchise reform. Historians have also begun to examine the distinct experiences of the movement in Ireland and Scotland.