bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Computers and the Subversion of British History
Authors: Morris R. J. 
Published: February 2004

The influence of computer usage upon the landscape of British history has been subtle and often profound. This influence has been one of several historiographical and cultural trends which have changed the nature and scope of “history.” The declining importance of the so-called grand narratives of national and class histories, and the fragmentation and loss of cultural authority of scholarly history in the face of increasingly diffuse popular and political uses of “history,” cannot be separated from the impact of the new technologies. The coherence and accessibility of history is not only challenged by the postmodernist questioning of the very validity of the search for authoritative coherence and by the philosophical assertion of the self-sufficiency of the text as a basis for analysis and explanation. This coherence and accessibility is also being challenged by the increasing importance of information technology in historical research and teaching. The scholarly presentation of computer usage by historians has tended to emphasize technical and methodological aspects. Important as these are, this has tended to conceal the major philosophical issues raised by such computer usage.There is then a double challenge to historical practice as it has been developed over the hundred years or so since Tout, Firth, and others established a modern institutional structure toward the end of the nineteenth century. The irony of the conjunction of the postmodern cultural and philosophical challenges and the computer user's technologically based challenge is not perhaps so surprising when it is considered that what the computer user is doing is creating metadata from data/sources/texts and producing metanarratives from that metadata.
Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Janus Imperial
Authors: Strohm Paul 
Published: February 2004

The written record begins with the discovery of a body and the supposition of an unsolved crime. “It happened,” in the laconic words of the coroner's inquest, “that a certain Janus Imperial of Genoa lay slain.” The murder had occurred the night before, on August 26, 1379, in St. Nicholas Acton Lane, before Imperial's London residence. Arriving to view the body, the coroner and sheriffs gathered a jury from among men of Langbourne and adjacent wards and set about to determine how and in what way this foreign merchant met his death.The jury's inquest was only the first step in an inquiry that would ultimately involve the mayor of London, the court of the king's bench, a second jury, the king and his council, and Parliament itself. So, too, did questions of motive and interest spool out from this seemingly random act to embrace the ambitions of London's mercantile elite, vicissitudes of royal finance, and the future and locus of the international wool trade. Starting with an apparent insufficiency of evidence, this investigation eventually found itself knee-deep in pertinent information, plausible motives, and likely suspects. Although it finally stumbled to a sort of stopping point, it never really achieved a satisfactory end.The original investigation offers suggestive analogies to the task of historical reconstruction. The would-be historian is, like the crime's contemporaries, challenged to arrange known details into a coherent narration—and, as new elements emerge, into revised renarrations. The historian's location outside the crime's own participatory pattern is one of weakness and strength.
Continuity or Change in the Court of Chancery in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries?
Authors: Horwitz Henry , Polden Patrick 
Published: February 2004

No reader of Bleak House is likely to forget its scathing portrayal of the excesses of the unreformed Court of Chancery in the handling of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. From its publication in 1852–53, it has created an indelible image of the Court, so powerfully influencing historians as well as laymen that it is sometimes hard to remember that it is fiction, and polemical fiction at that. The fiction, however, is built on a secure bedrock of fact; the voluminous testimony and submissions made by Dickens's contemporaries to a series of parliamentary inquiries on the legal system furnish ample backing for much of his “bill of complaint” on such scores as delay and expense, procedural technicality, and inconclusiveness of outcome. Thus, John Forster, a partner in one of the biggest firms in Lincoln's Inn, called the Court's delays “heart-sickening” and characterized its “modes of proceedings … as little adapted to the ordinary duration of human life as they are calculated for the determination of differences and the quiet of possessions”; in the same vein, a future master of the rolls averred that “cases have occurred, within my knowledge, in which the whole property to be administered in Chancery, has proved insufficient to pay the costs of the suit.”As with the early nineteenth-century attacks on the unreformed House of Commons and the traditional electoral system, denunciations of the Court of Chancery's failings have a long history and, often, a repetitive quality.
“The Halls of Temptation”: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London
Authors: Rappaport Erika D. 
Published: February 2004

On Guy Fawkes Day in 1876 an angry mob of retailers staged a charivari in the fashionable shopping promenade of Westbourne Grove in Bayswater. Their demonstration targeted William Whiteley, a linen-draper rapidly expanding his shop into London's first department store. With his recent addition of a meat and green grocery department, Mr. Whiteley “had made himself exceedingly distasteful” to the “provision dealers in the district.” This distaste turned into a raucous procession through the neighborhood's streets. Around noon, “a grotesque and noisy cortège entered the thoroughfare [Westbourne Grove]. At its head was a vehicle, in which a gigantic Guy was propped up … vested in the conventional frock coat of a draper … conspicuous on the figure was a label with the words ‘Live and Let Live’ … in one hand of the figure a piece of beef bore the label ‘5 1/2 d.’ and in the other was a handkerchief, with the ticket ‘2 1/2 d. all-linen.’” Dressed in their traditional blue frocks and making “hideous” noises by banging cleavers against marrow bones, Bayswater's butchers finally disposed of Whiteley's effigy in a bonfire in nearby Portobello Road.The English charivari, “rough music,” was a communal protest that censured both public and private behaviors. Female scolds, wife beaters, or couples united in apparently mismatched unions might all be chastised in this way. These noisy protests were also directed at any individual who, as E. P. Thompson described it, rode “rough-shod over local custom.”
The Industrial Meaning of “Gradualism”: The Labour Party and Industry, 1918–1931
Authors: Thorpe Andrew 
Published: February 2004

In the period from 1918 until 1931, the British Labour party adhered to the precepts of “gradualism”: incrementally and by degrees, the party would gain support and pass legislation in an inexorable progress toward the socialist millennium. For a while, it seemed that this strategy would carry all before it. Emerging from the First World War with a “socialist” commitment, it became the largest opposition party at the 1918 general election. In 1922 it became the clear opposition to the Conservatives, and Ramsay MacDonald was reelected leader after an eight-year break. A short-lived minority Labour government in 1924 was followed by heavy electoral defeat, but the party was able to form its second minority government in 1929. However, its credibility was destroyed by soaring unemployment, and the ministry collapsed in the summer of 1931 after failing to agree on public expenditure cuts. MacDonald and the chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, led a small Labour cohort into a “National” government, which went on to crush Labour at the polls that October. Detailed work on this complex period of Labour's history is hard to find, however. Little work has been done on policy: in particular, it is surprising that, given the party's symbiotic link with trade unionism and the central role of industry in Labour leaders' conception of the transformation to socialism, so little attention has been paid to the party's industrial policy in this period.Gradualism implied that socialism would emerge from the success of capitalism.
Anglican Attitudes: Some Recent Writings on English Religious History, from the Reformation to the Civil War
Authors: Tyacke Nicholas 
Published: February 2004

It remains a commonplace that what historians write bears some relation to their own time and particular angle of vision. Less often remarked, however, is the tendency for historical interpretations to acquire lives of their own, at least partly independent of the original circumstances that produced them, and to enter as it were the intellectual bloodstream of subsequent generations. A good illustration of this latter proposition is afforded by the history of the English Church. For, since at least the seventeenth century, the very radicalism of the Reformation has proved a continuing source of embarrassment to a section of Church of England opinion; rather than frankly admit their own dissent from the views of many of the Tudor founding fathers, they have regularly sought to rewrite the past in the light of the present. This conservative vision has come to be expressed in terms of a so-called via media, which is deemed to have characterized the English or “Anglican” way of religious reform.Until quite recently, the historiography was heavily influenced by these same Anglican insiders, other historians being prepared largely to take on trust their claims—especially as regards theological change. Moreover, willingness to follow what is in effect a party line has now received powerful reinforcement from certain revisionist historians, who discern a congruence between the alleged moderation of Anglicanism and their own commitment to a consensual model of English politics in the decades before the Civil War. The old idea of the English Church as epitomizing a mean between the extremes of protestantism and catholicism is once more being pressed into service.
English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism
Authors: Sommerville Johann P. 
Published: February 2004

The central argument of this article is that English political thinking in the early seventeenth century was not distinctively English. More particularly, we shall see that a number of English writers put forward political doctrines that were precisely the same as those of Continental theorists who are usually described as absolutists. If the Continental thinkers were absolutists, then so were the English writers. The theory of absolutism vested sovereign power in the ruler alone and forbade disobedience to the sovereign's commands unless they contradicted the injunctions of God Himself. It is with the theory of absolutism and not with its practice that this article is concerned.To claim that English and Continental ideas closely resembled each other, and that absolutism flourished on both sides of the Channel, is to challenge not only the old Whig interpretation of English history but also the newer views of so-called revisionists. True, the revisionists often say that they reject Whig ideas. But in fact they adopt some of the central contentions of the Whigs. In order to set what follows into a broad historiographical context, it may be worthwhile to elaborate a little on this theme.Whig historians of the nineteenth century were keen to emphasize the distinctiveness of England's political development. The Anglo-Saxons, they argued, brought free and democratic institutions into England from their Teutonic forests. Elsewhere in Europe, liberty succumbed to the authoritarianism of popes, kings, and Roman lawyers, but the sea kept foreigners and their unpleasant ways out of England, and there freedom lived on. When the Conqueror came, the old English liberties were for a while in jeopardy.
“Varieties of Irishness”: Historical Revisionism, Irish Style
Authors: Curtin Nancy J. 
Published: February 2004

In an 1989 article inIrish Historical Studies, Brendan Bradshaw challenged the current practice of Irish history by arguing that an “ideology of professionalism” associated with the modern historiographical tradition established a half century ago, and now entrenched in the academy, “served to inhibit rather than to enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience.” Inspired by the cautionary injunctions of Herbert Butterfield about teleological history, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn, and R. Dudley Edwards launched this revisionist enterprise in the 1930s, transforming Irish historiography which until then was subordinating historical truth to the cause of the nation. Their mission was to cleanse the historical record of its mythological clutter, to engage in what Moody called “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” of Irish nationalist history, by applying scientific methods to the evidence, separating fact from destructive and divisive fictions.Events in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this sense that the Irish people needed liberation from nationalist mythology, a mythology held responsible for the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and which offered legitimation to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the nightmare of history from which professional historians could rouse the Irish people. Nationalist heroes and movements came under even more aggressive, critical scrutiny. But much of this was of the character of specific studies. The revisionists seemed to have succeeded in tearing down the edifice of nationalist history, but they had offered little in the way of a general, synthetic history to replace it.
Historiography, Narrative, and the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Price Richard 
Published: February 2004

The narrative stories of nineteenth-century British history have been pulled seriously out of joint. At one time, not too long ago, the master narrative of nineteenth-century history seemed fairly straightforward. The nineteenth century raised the curtain on the modern age; its politics, economics, social relations, and culture presaged the world we know from our own times. If there was one organizing principle that the historiography privileged above all others, it was the idea of change. This was the century of growth and change—generally of a progressive kind. But new stories are now being told that force us to reconsider this picture. The spotlight is being directed toward themes of continuity that challenge the representation of the nineteenth century as the moment of modernity. It is this shift from change to continuity as the basic organizing principle of the field that is the starting point for this article.The touch of continuity is everywhere. The traditional historiography rested secure in the conception that the nineteenth century was shaped and dominated by the fact of Britain as the first industrial nation. But current research has dissolved the Industrial Revolution into the long-term trends of economic growth; now the very name itself is jeopardized. Whereas the nineteenth century was once regarded as the age of the bourgeoisie, it is the landed elites and their various allies who now occupy center stage. The urban middle class has been returned to the provincial peripheries.
The Fall of Wolsey Reconsidered
Authors: Bernard G. W. 
Published: February 2004

In the autumn of 1529, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who had served as Henry VIII's principal minister for a decade and a half, fell from power. On October 17 he surrendered the great seal, thus formally resigning as lord chancellor, the position he had held since 1515. A few days earlier, on October 9, he had been indicted in the Court of King's Bench for offenses under the fourteenth-century statute of praemunire (which restricted papal powers within England), and on October 22 he was to acknowledge his guilt in an indenture made with the king. Nevertheless, he was not utterly destroyed. He remained archbishop of York and was allowed to set off for his diocese in early 1530.The fashionable explanation for these events is to see Wolsey as the victim of faction, a notion briefly asserted or implied in much current writing and substantially elaborated by E. W. Ives. For J. J. Scarisbrick, Wolsey was “the victim of an aristocratic putsch”: “There can be no doubt that for long an aristocratic party, led by the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, had been hoping to ‘catch him in a brake’ and dispossess him, and that they looked to Anne Boleyn as their weapon … it was an aristocratic faction that led the way.” For David Starkey, “Boleyns, Aragonese, nobles … sank their fundamental differences and went into allegiance against him. Together they worked on Henry's temporary disillusionment with his minister, and the pressure coupled with Anne's skilful management of her lover, was enough to break the trust of almost twenty years and destroy Wolsey.”
Self-Scrutiny and the Study of Nature: Robert Hooke's Diary as Natural History
Authors: Mulligan Lotte 
Published: February 2004

Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.
Mad Lord George and Madame La Motte: Riot and Sexuality in the Genesis of Burke'sReflections on the Revolution in France
Authors: McCalman Iain 
Published: February 2004

Throughout the first year of the French RevolutionThe Timesnewspaper could not decide who was the madder, Lord George Gordon or Edmund Burke. The former as a violent incendiary and convicted libeler had fortunately been safely locked in Newgate the previous year, but Burke was still loose. The newspaper had no doubt that he belonged in Bedlam; there could be no other explanation for his obsessive campaign to impeach Warren Hastings long after everyone else had lost interest in the case. A stream of reports suggested variously that he had checked himself into a lunatic asylum, been forcibly confined in a straitjacket, or become temporarily deranged through physical and mental exhaustion. On first readingThe Reflections on the Revolution in Francepublished in November the following year, many of his friends, as well as his foes, felt forced to agree.Even those who found things to like in the book were puzzled that Burke should have produced such a work. In the first place, how did one explain what Thomas Jefferson called “the revolution of Mr. Burke,” an abrupt political tack from advocating parliamentary reform, religious toleration, and American liberty to denouncing France's fledgling efforts at liberty. Why had he turned so violently against the Dissenters and radicals with whom he had often cooperated in the past? Why did he believe that the apparently innocuous revolution in France was unlike anything that had gone before? And even when events in that country began to move more in line with his predictions, there remained something embarrassing about the tone of the book.
Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make “Lady Doctors for India,” 1874–1885
Authors: Burton Antoinette 
Published: February 2004

Recent work in British studies suggests that the project of historicizing the institutions and cultural practices of British imperialism is crucial to understanding metropolitan society in the nineteenth century. Monographs by Catherine Hall, Thomas C. Holt, and Jenny Sharpe, together with the impressive nineteen-volume series on Studies in Imperial Culture, edited by John Mackenzie—to name just a few examples of scholarly production in this field—have effectively relocated the operations of imperial culture at the heart of the empire itself. By scrutinizing arenas as diverse as the English novel, governmental policy making at the highest levels, and the ephemera of consumer culture, scholars of the Victorian period are in the process of giving historical weight and evidentiary depth to Edward Said's claim that “we are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies.”The origins of the London School of Medicine for Women (LSMW), its concern for Indian women in the zenana (sex-segregated spaces), and the embeddedness of its institutional development in Victorian imperial mentalities is one discrete example of how ostensibly “domestic” institutions were bound up with the empire and its projects in nineteenth-century Britain. As this essay will demonstrate, the conviction that Indian women were trapped in the “sunless, airless,” and allegedly unhygienic Oriental zenana motivated the institutionalization of women's medicine and was crucial to the professionalization of women doctors in Victorian Britain. One need only scratch the surface of the archive of British women's entry into the medical profession to find traces of the colonial concerns that motivated some of its leading lights.
Local Sentiment and the “National” Enemy in Northern England in the Later Middle Ages
Authors: Neville Cynthia J. 
Published: February 2004

On April 30, 1408, Archbishop Henry Bowet of York issued a commission ordering the deprivation of John, prior of the tiny and impoverished monastery of Hexham. The archbishop condemned the prior in the strongest terms, noting that, “to the manifest destruction of the English realm, he committed treason by receiving and cherishing the Scots and other false lieges of the king, grievous enemies of the kingdom all, and notorious traitors. In helping them to invade the realm he gave no heed to the danger in which he placed himself and the free men of the realm.” The archbishop went on to state that, when John abandoned his monastery in order to join the Scots, “there is no doubt that the prior perpetrated the infamous crime of lèse majesté.”A note to the printed edition of this commission remarks laconically: “a startling document, which shows how thoroughly disorganized was the state of society on the Borders.” But the grim determination to punish that is so apparent in Bowet's commission was entirely justifiable, for incidents of desertion to the Scots were troublesome and none-too-rare among northern land- and officeholders, and in 1408 the memory of the rebellion of the greatest of these, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, was still fresh. In the eighteen months alone after Bowet issued his commission, the crown learned of another defection on the part of a formerly loyal Scottish cleric in England, as well as of the loss of one key border stronghold and the near loss of another, the results of treasonable conspiracies.