bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The City and the Sessions Paper: “Public Justice” in London, 1770–1800
Authors: Devereaux Simon 
Published: February 2004

Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Joseph Nightingale gained admittance to the judges' room at the Old Bailey. He appears to have thought the room small and unremarkable, save for “a bookcase filled with the volumes of the State Trials, a few other law books of reference, and the yearly volumes of the Sessions Papers, or abstracts of the causes tried at this Court, from the earliest period to the present times.” It was this set of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, among all the books there, which most fired his imagination: “In casting one's eye over these records of our Fall, it is painful to notice the gradually increasing thickness of the volumes. Those which I have seen thus uniformly bound, lettered, with the date of the year, and the name of the Lord Mayor for the time being, commence with the year 1730, and reach down to 1812: the first volume may contain perhaps 150 pages; the last, five or six hundred: let it not, however, be hence concluded that this circumstance proves only the increase of vice; it indicates also an increased population, and extended commerce, and improved police.”Nightingale's analysis of the causes for the increased length of the Sessions Paper shows an admirable grasp of both the changes in the character of society and in the means of ordering it to which historians address themselves. But a simpler factor in this change that seems to have eluded his notice was that, beginning in 1778, and especially after 1782, the length of individual trial accounts given in the Sessions Paper increased significantly.
“A Star Chamber of the Twentieth Century”: Suffragettes, Liberals, and the 1908 “Rush the Commons” Case
Authors: Fletcher Ian Christopher 
Published: February 2004

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.
Constructing Discord: Ideology, Propaganda, and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641
Authors: Shagan Ethan Howard 
Published: February 2004

Historians such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe have recently stressed the “British” nature of the crisis which toppled Charles I's regime in the 1640s. England, these historians remind us, was not the first of Charles's three kingdoms to rebel but the last; the Scots rose in 1639–40, the Irish rose in the fall of 1641, but the English only belatedly followed suit in August 1642. They have thus suggested that the origins of the English Civil War cannot be explained within a purely English context but must be understood within the larger vortex of multinational British politics.This injection of the “British problem” into the historiographical debate may seem like a neutral intervention, but in practice it has been closely associated with the revisionist interpretation of the seventeenth century. Since the 1970s, revisionist historians have contended that early Stuart England was an ideologically stable society which collapsed only after a series of sudden, contingent events disrupted the existing consensus. They have thus been at pains to find short-term, nonideological explanations for the Civil War's outbreak or else face embarrassing charges that they have proven why there was no civil war in seventeenth-century England. The “British problem” has come into the debate as just such an explanation, as an answer to thorny questions about how such a violent storm as the English Civil War could have arisen out of clear skies. After all, if radicalized Scotsmen spread the language of confessional conflict and resistance theory across the border, as Sharpe has argued, then no internal explanation for the English Civil War is required.
The Politics of Whisky: Scottish Distillers, the Excise, and the Pittite State
Authors: Dietz Vivien E. 
Published: February 2004

The De'il cam fiddling thro' the town,And danced awa wi' the Exciseman;And ilka wife cried, ‘Auld Mahoun,We wish you luck o' your prize, man.’We'll mak our maut, and brew our drink,We'll dance, and sing, and rejoice, man;And mony thanks to the muckle black De'ilThat danced awa wi' the Exciseman.There's threesome reels, and foursome reels,There's hornpipes and strathspeys, man;But the ae best dance e'er came to our Ian',Was-the De'il's awa' wi' the Exciseman.(Robert Burns,The De'il's awa' wi' the Exciseman, 1792)In 1823 the English government introduced a new Act reducing the outrageous excise tax to levels that made it possible for enterprising Scots to come out of hiding and legally produce and sell their beloved whisky. (Bottle of Glenlivet malt whisky, 1990)In late December 1783, a desperate king took a seemingly desperate political step. With all of his other options exhausted, George III asked William Pitt, then only twenty-four years old, to form a government. In recognition of both the king's remarkable choice and the time of year, Pitt's critics, eagerly expecting the new administration to be short-lived, dubbed it the “mincepie administration.” The critics were of course wrong; Pitt survived not only that Christmas season but another twenty in office. Yet they had reason to be skeptical. For one of the “presents” delivered to the young chancellor of the Exchequer that first Christmas Eve was the preliminary report of a parliamentary committee, appointed under Lord Shelburne, “to enquire into the illicit practices used in defrauding the revenue.”
The Language of Imperialism and the Meanings of Empire: Imperial Discourse in British Politics, 1895–1914
Authors: Thompson Andrew S. 
Published: February 2004

The forthcoming General Election will turn, we are told, mainly on the popularity of Imperialism. If this be so, it is important that voters should make up their minds what Imperialism means.(George Bernard Shaw)Thus wrote George Bernard Shaw on behalf of the Fabian Society in October 1900. Shaw recognized what many historians have subsequently failed to see: the meaning of imperialism inside British politics was not fixed. Rather, the terms “empire” and “imperialism” were like empty boxes that were continuously being filled up and emptied of their meanings. Of course, the same was true of other political concepts: the idea of patriotism, for instance, was constantly being reinvented by politicians. But the idea of empire was all the more vulnerable to this sort of treatment because it was sensitive to changing circumstances at home and abroad and because it had to take account of a colonial as well as a British audience. Furthermore, the fact that opinion in Britain was widely felt to be ignorant or indifferent to the empire meant that politicians had to be particularly careful in deciding what sort of imperial language to use.This article will consider what contemporaries meant when they spoke of empire, how its meaning varied between different political groups in Britain, and whether it is possible to point to a prevailing vision of empire during the period between the launch of the Jameson Raid in December 1895 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.
White Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the Great War
Authors: Gullace Nicoletta F. 
Published: February 2004

On August 30, 1914, Admiral Charles Penrose Fitzgerald, an inveterate conscriptionist and disciple of Lord Roberts, deputized thirty women in Folkstone to hand out white feathers to men not in uniform. The purpose of this gesture was to shame “every young ‘slacker’ found loafing about the Leas” and to remind those “deaf or indifferent to their country's need” that “British soldiers are fighting and dying across the channel.” Fitzgerald's estimation of the power of these women was enormous. He warned the men of Folkstone that “there is a danger awaiting them far more terrible than anything they can meet in battle,” for if they were found “idling and loafing to-morrow” they would be publicly humiliated by a lady with a white feather.The idea of a paramilitary band of women known as “The Order of the White Feather” or “The White Feather Brigade” captured the imagination of numerous observers and even enjoyed a moment of semiofficial sanction at the beginning of the war. According to the Chatham News an “amusing, novel, and forceful method of obtaining recruits for Lord Kitchener's Army was demonstrated at Deal on Tuesday” when the town crier paraded the streets and “crying with the dignity of his ancient calling, gave forth the startling announcement: ‘Oyez! Oyez!! Oyez!!! The White Feather Brigade! Ladies wanted to present the young men of Deal and Walmer … the Order of the White Feather for shirking their duty in not coming forward to uphold the Union Jack of Old England! God save the King.’”
“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963
Authors: Waters Chris 
Published: February 2004

It has been more than a decade since Benedict Anderson urged us to consider the nation a particular kind of cultural artefact and to study national communities in terms of the style in which they are imagined. Anticipating Anderson's seminal work, Enoch Powell, the Biblical scholar, Ulster Unionist M.P., and 1960s advocate of the voluntary repatriation of people of color in Britain likewise suggested that the “life of nations … is lived largely in the imagination.” He also noted that the myths on which Britain's “corporate imagination” rested had, since 1945, become severely impoverished. Amidst the rubble produced by the collapse of many of those myths scholars have begun to problematize the various components of national identity that, customarily, have been taken for granted as “real” rather than invented. They have also begun to trace the manner by which the national community has constantly been imagined and reimagined in the past. Some of their more insightful work has considered the articulation of Englishness against other nationalities in the United Kingdom, particularly the Irish. This had led Linda Colley to suggest that national identity is always contingent and relational, the product of boundaries drawn up to distinguish between the collective self and the other.In this essay, I want to suggest that Britain's wartime sense of national unity, generated through the struggle against fascist Germany, began to crumble after 1945. This gradual erosion of national cohesion, coupled with Britain's failure to generate new narratives of national purpose through the rhetoric of the Cold War, led to a veritable crisis of national self-representation in the 1950s, a crisis compounded by domestic social dislocation and the rapid emergence of the political, military, and economic hegemony of the United States.
English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922
Authors: Bailey Victor 
Published: February 2004

The prison method is callous, regular and monotonous and produces great mental and physical strain. The deprivation of liberty is extremely cruel and if it is attended with treatment that deadens the spiritual nature and fails to offer any stimulus to the imagination, that coarsens and humiliates, then it stands condemned. (Arthur Creech Jones, conscientious objector, Wandsworth Prison, 1916–19)The nineteenth century was the century of the penitentiary. Public and physical punishments (from whipping to the death penalty) were gradually replaced by the less visible, less corporal sanction of imprisonment. By the start of the Victorian era, imprisonment was the predominant penalty in the system of judicial punishments. For every 1,000 offenders sentenced at higher and summary courts in 1836 for serious (or indictable) offenses, 685 were punished by imprisonment in local prisons. By midcentury, moreover, sentences of penal servitude in convict prisons were plugging the gap left by the end of transportation to Australia. The three hundred or so local prisons in the 1830s, to which offenders were sent for anywhere between one day and two years (though typically for terms of less than three months), were locally controlled until 1877 and were less than uniform in regime. The separate system of prison discipline (or cellular isolation) increasingly prevailed over the silent system (or associated, silent labor), but it was subject to considerable local modification. Convict prisons were run by central government with less variability.
The Labour Party, Women, and the Problem of Gender, 1951–1966
Authors: Black Amy , Brooke Stephen 
Published: February 2004

Following the 1966 General Election, the Labour Party's Home Policy Committee observed that the party had, “for the first time, obtained a majority of the female vote” and remarked, “it would be very satisfactory if we could retain it.” Two years later, the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Party Organisation emphasized the “imperative that the Party concerns itself with how to win much more support among women.” These comments not only betrayed a serious weakness in Labour's electoral support between 1951 and 1966 but also acknowledged an important lacuna in its broader political outlook.Given the party's electoral difficulties in the period after 1951, the first concern was particularly apposite. Beatrix Campbell, Nicky Hart, and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska have underlined the importance of this gender gap favoring the Conservatives after 1950 (see fig. 1). In the elections of 1951 and 1955, for example, Labour's vote among women lagged twelve and thirteen percentage points behind that of the Conservatives. Only in two elections between 1945 and 1970 did Labour enjoy leads among female voters, and these were much less substantial than those held by the Conservatives in 1951, 1955, 1959, and 1964. In rough numerical terms, this difference was potentially very significant. In 1951, for instance, women made up approximately 51.9 percent of the population of England, Scotland, and Wales and roughly 53.8 percent of those of voting age. With an electorate of 28.5 million, this meant a possible political advantage for the Conservatives of 1.2 million votes in an electoral contest where there were only .2 million votes between the two parties.
Conflict Resolution and Patronage in Provincial Towns, 1590–1640
Authors: Patterson Catherine 
Published: February 2004

Historians of early modern England, just like the people they study, are preoccupied with order and disorder. Particularly for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, attention has focused on how a government and political nation whose prescriptions demanded unanimity and stability descended into civil war and revolution, the ultimate disorder. The period saw rising populations, social mobility, economic change, and religious division, all of which placed stress on the traditional order. These agents of turmoil deserve close attention. But in focusing so intently on breakdown, we tend to miss seeing how Elizabethan and early Stuart government actually worked. For most of these years, a reasonably stable and increasingly integrated royal government ruled peacefully over the English people. By shifting our attention away from breakdown, we can begin to ask critical new questions. How, precisely, did the leaders of this society work to create order in the face of difference? How did the nature of government affect the ways that people sought stability?Evidence from urban government—provincial borough corporations—provides critical insight into these questions. Civic leaders found that the best way to maintain order and authority in their own communities was by participating in the wider governing structures of the state. London's attempts at the “pursuit of stability” have received serious treatment in recent years. Provincial towns, however, have less often been studied as a means to understand the polity as a whole. They have in the past been characterized as quite insular, either abjectly dependent on a great lord or gentleman or else “independent” and unwilling to brook outside influences; they sought stability and control by looking inward, reinforcing their own authority.
“'Tis a Misfortune to Be a Great Ladie”: Maternal Mortality in the British Aristocracy, 1558–1959
Authors: Lewis Judith 
Published: February 2004

As long ago as 1981, the distinguished demographers E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield threw out a challenge to historians. “A fully satisfactory interpretation of population history,” they offered, “must embrace a wide spectrum of related topics and techniques.” Such a history would “require an alertness for opportunities to quantify historical evidence and to make effective use of statistical techniques,” they continued, but it would be “equally alive to the importance of studying the attitudes of individuals and groups wherever possible. The family,” they concluded, “is the prime institutional form in population history, and the births, marriages and deaths of its members were affected by their behavioral conventions and beliefs as well as by their social and economic circumstances.” The British aristocracy is an ideal subject for such a multifaceted, family-oriented view of population history. Thanks to T. H. Hollingsworth and other demographers, the statistical record of their population history is probably better established than that of any other social group, while thanks to their own historical importance and privileged status, their domestic experiences are richly documented. Consequently, their social mores and personal attitudes can be identified along with their demographics.While we normally assume that privileged social groups are healthier and generally live longer than those more humble in station, commonplace expectations have for centuries been reversed when it comes to one component of population history—maternal mortality. Popular culture has insisted, at least since the time of Rousseau, that ladies of fashion paid for their pleasures by being feeble and overly delicate, too weak to withstand the rigors of childbirth.
Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism
Authors: Cowan Brian 
Published: February 2004

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, theCharacteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times(1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to human virtue. And despite the third earl's widespread reputation as a freethinker in matters religious, he always insisted that liberty of thought did not imply a freedom from moral restraint.Certainly Shaftesbury's early reputation was more that of a shy and unsociable recluse rather than that of a rakishmondain. In 1721, John Toland thought it necessary to defend his late friend from accusations of unsociability, not of licentiousness. He claimed that Shaftesbury's enemies “gave out that he was too bookish, because not given to play, nor assiduous at court; that he was no good companion, because not a rake nor a hard drinker, and that he was no man of the world, because not selfish nor open to bribes.” Toland also remarked how Shaftesbury frowned upon the “extravagant liberties” taken by “both sexes” even without having lived “to see masquerades, or the ancient Bacchanals revived, nor to hear of promiscuous clubs.” Indeed, Lord Ashley's own private papers reveal that he was quite uncomfortable in the polite world of England's social elite; he much preferred the pastoral tranquillity of his Dorset estate and the relaxed company of his most trusted friends.
Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period
Authors: Davies Owen 
Published: February 2004

The newspaper archive is, potentially, the largest untapped source of material concerning the popular belief in witchcraft and magic for the period after the formal cessation of the witchcraft trials in 1736. Several historians have successfully exploited the newspaper archive to examine popular customs in the modern period. However, little use has been made of newspapers to examine magical beliefs in the period defined by the decline of learned belief in witchcraft during the early eighteenth century and the eventual demise of popular belief in witchcraft two centuries later. Writing some fifty years ago, L. F. Newman noted that many witchcraft cases “only appear in the local Press of each district and extensive search is necessary to trace cases.” Newman hoped that his own very brief search would act as a catalyst for more intensive studies. Unfortunately, no one has conducted such work, and our understanding of the extent and influence of witchcraft and magic in the modern period is much the poorer for it. The present discussion, which seeks to begin that task, is based on short searches through various newspapers from around the country, the following up of secondary references, and an extensive, systematic ongoing survey of Somerset newspapers.As Gustav Henningsen has observed, the newspaper has an important advantage over the folklore record in that it “always shows us the tradition in a concrete social context” and also provides a definite chronological basis. The combined exploration of folkloric sources and newspapers provides great potential for the regional study of witchcraft and magic in defined cultural settings.