To deconstruct a map, said Brian Harley, it is necessary to read between the lines and to place the cartographic facts within a specific cultural perspective. He used the ideas of literary critics to make historians of cartography aware that there is more to maps than initially meets the eye and that ‘facts’ are rarely what they first appear to be. By viewing a map as a product of a particular society, one can begin to understand why a map was made in the way it was, how it was used and valued, and its role in representing and transforming contemporary attitudes and perspectives. To search for the wider meaning of local maps, it is usually necessary to make inferences based on research into their backgrounds; one rarely finds documents giving explicit directions on how, and why, a map was to be drawn and decorated. If, as in many past studies in the history of cartography, maps are taken at face value, they can leave many of their secrets unrevealed and, indeed, can easily be misinterpreted.

‘How came I to be his property? What right has he in me, but such as a thief may plead to stolen goods?’ cried Pamela, the virtuous servant maid of Richardson's novel. Pamela was written in 1740, but the assumption that masters had sexual rights over their servants cast a long shadow. The questions Pamela raises about powerlessness and ‘worth’ are crucial to understanding the plight of female servants in the nineteenth century. This study examines why servants were particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment, the consequences of sexual abuse for victims and offenders, and underlying male attitudes which affected both the incidence of assaults and the justice meted out by the courts.

Today we can already see a regenerated Ireland, living a new and prosperous life, with a peasantry helped and aided, largely by its own co-operative effort, beyond the peasantry of any other country. Tomorrow we trust to see a self-governing Ireland, still a part of the British Commonwealth. (Barker, Ireland in the Last Fifty Years (1919) 147).

Generations of scholars have analysed and interpreted the events of the Great War which wrought havoc across landscapes of ten départements in northern France (figure 1). By contrast, the processes whereby these areas were restored in the immediate post-war years have received very little attention, although the desperate circumstances in which recovery took place have been powerfully evoked in Bertrand Tavernier's recent film La vie et. rien d'autre (1989). Common problems were encountered throughout the devastated regions but just as the intensity of damage varied between départements so did the speed and efficiency of reconstruction and recovery. Rather than attempting to embrace the revival of urban or industrial life or to explore the complex financial transactions which made all forms of reconstruction possible, the present discussion focuses on the dual imperative of restoring rural land and rebuilding rural settlement within a single département.

This essay considers W.G. Hoskins's work as a key part of the post-war English culture of landscape. To paraphrase his most well-known book, Hoskins made a distinctive English landscape. His work, though, has received remarkably little critical attention in terms of English cultural history. D.W. Meinig, in the only essay to treat Hoskins’ work at any length, focusses on his contribution to the genre of landscape studies and the impact of his work in the 1970s through television (Meinig, 1979). This essay seeks to complement Meinig's generic focus, by considering Hoskins in relation to the wider culture of landscape in England after 1945.

In a recent issue of Rural History, Malcolm Chase wrote a somewhat frustrated commentary, ‘Can history be green?’ Against a general intellectual background that was increasingly preoccupied with environmental issues, historical scholarship remained largely impervious to ‘green’ issues. His timely commentary set out the consequences of this neglect for both the environmental movement and the historian.