bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
From Municipal Matters to Parliamentary Principles: Eighteenth-Century Borough Politics in Maidstone
Authors: Phillips John A. 
Published: February 2004

The deaths of three Maidstone Common Councilmen in 1787 and 1788 threatened the unthinkable—the destruction of the Corporation party's long local political hegemony. Although the Corporation party still controlled a solid majority of the twelve aldermen, the anti-Corporationists had won eight of nine seats at the Common Council election two years earlier, giving the ruling group their first genuine political fright in more than twenty years. The further weakening of the party's control over the Common Council as a result of the deaths of Thomas Stevenson, Henry Pocock, and Henry Cutbush, all longstanding Corporation supporters, forced the council to hold an election to fill these three seats. After scheduling an election for August 29, 1788, the Corporation party leaders spared no pains in trying to achieve their goal of replacing their deceased supporters with the similarly disposed William Wimble, William Town, and George May. The anti-Corporation party also worked diligently for its candidates, and together the two parties recruited almost 200 nonresident freemen to vote. Dozens of freemen were brought in from London and its environs, substantial contingents arrived from Chatham and Rochester, and even more came from Aylesbury and other parts of Kent.Thomas Poole recorded the first three votes at the hustings, voting for all three Corporation candidates. At the end of the day, Sir William Bishop cast his three votes for the Corporation candidates. Along with Poole and Bishop, 648 residents and nonresidents cast their ballots. Fifty-five percent of the nonresidents cast strictly partisan ballots for the Corporation party, 36 percent cast straight-party votes for the anti-Corporation candidates, and only 9 percent split their support between the two contending slates.
John Stow and Tudor Rebellions, 1549–1569
Authors: Beer Barrett L. 
Published: February 2004

In recent years, historians have brought into sharper focus the role of rebellion in the political, social, and religious life of sixteenth-century England. Indeed, the Tudor dynasty established itself on the throne in 1485 as a result of a successful baronial rebellion, and each succeeding generation experienced a major rebellion as well as numerous lesser stirs and riots. Until the revival of interest in Tudor rebellions, the majority of historians preferred to portray the century as an era of law and order in which a strong but popular monarchy ruled over grateful and largely obedient subjects. Although contemporaries living in the sixteenth century knew of rebellion and popular disorder, often through direct personal experience, the government quite understandably opposed anything resembling impartial and disinterested study of the rebellions. Government propagandists denounced rebellion vigorously in royal proclamations and manifestos, while the clergy echoed similar themes from the pulpit. Of the two histories of rebellion published during the sixteenth century, the first, John Proctor's history of Wyatt's Rebellion, was unadulterated government propaganda, and the other, Alexander Neville's history of Kett's Rebellion, was a polemic written in Latin to guarantee a select readership. Without specialized books on rebellions, the literate public had one primary source of historical information, the general chronicles that appeared with greater frequency and variety as the century progressed.Although best known for hisSurvey of London, John Stow was the most prolific chronicler of the sixteenth century. Beginning with the brief octavoA Summary of English Chronicles, which appeared in 1565, Stow published no fewer than twenty-one editions and issues of chronicles in three different formats, the octavoSummary, a sextodecimo abridgment of theSummary, and the more substantialChroniclesandAnnales of Englandin quarto.
Culture and the Middle Classes: Popular Knowledge in Industrial Manchester
Authors: Wach Howard M. 
Published: February 2004

God bless my soul, sir … I am all out of patience with the march of mind. Here has my house been nearly burnt down, by my cook taking it into her head to study hydrostatics, in a sixpenny tract, published by the Steam Intellect Society, and written by a learned friend who is for doing all the world's business as well as his own, and is equally well qualified to handle every branch of human knowledge. [Thomas Love Peacock—Crotchet Castle (1831)]The diffusion of knowledge preoccupied middle-class elites in early industrial England. While factory production promised a future of material abundance, an unsettled and menacing social environment threatened this vision of endless progress. Education constituted a cornerstone of the liberal creed embraced by the industrial middle class, and diffusing knowledge offered the hope of raising up the “lower orders” to social responsibility and respectability. A properly arranged distribution of knowledge held out hope for an ordered and orderly social existence.But the diffusion of knowledge meant more than simply uplifting the working class. Its significance extends beyond the problematic historical question of “social control.” An utterly new society was rising in the industrializing urban agglomerations of provincial England. An expanding middle class of businessmen and professionals claimed this world as its own. They pursued political power on both local and national stages and fought for reform in economic and social policy. A strongly felt sense of stewardship prompted the industrial middle class to devote great resources and energies to shaping the new urban environment.
“There Must Be Some Misunderstanding”: Sir Edward Grey's Diplomacy of August 1, 1914
Authors: Valone Stephen J. 
Published: February 2004

For over two generations, scholars have studied Sir Edward Grey's response to the Sarajevo crisis, apparently considering every aspect of his dual effort to find a diplomatic solution while convincing the cabinet that England must intervene in a general war. Historians have generally agreed that Grey's last hope to prevent war evaporated by the end of July, although the cabinet did not decide to intervene until August 2. In this light, the events of August 1, 1914, are only considered to be either a prelude or a postscript to more significant events. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that Grey pursued two distinct, yet interrelated, courses of action on August 1, 1914: (1) for as long as he was unsure of cabinet support for intervention, he sought to make a diplomatic deal with the German ambassador so that a neutral England could salvage something from the crisis, but (2) once confident England would enter the conflict, he sought to prevent the war altogether by applying diplomatic pressure on France.Historians have overlooked Grey's diplomacy on August 1 primarily because of the cloud cast over the events of the day by the so-called misunderstanding between Grey and the German ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. The first Grey-Lichnowsky exchange took place that morning when Sir William Tyrrell, Grey's private secretary, brought a message to the German embassy. After subsequently receiving a personal call from Grey, Lichnowsky, at 11:14 a.m., sent a wire to Berlin in which he indicated Grey had proposed that, if Germany “were not to attack France, England would remain neutral and would guarantee France's passivity.”
The Theatrical Mask/Masque of Politics: The Case of Charles I
Authors: Maguire Nancy Klein 
Published: February 2004

Britain now wear's the sock; the Theater's clean Transplanted hither, both in Place and Scene.Martin Butler and Jonathan Dollimore have recently documented the importance of drama in English political life before 1642. Such scholarship, however, has stopped cold at the great divide of 1642. Except for Lois Potter in “‘True Tragicomedies’ of the Civil War and Interregnum,” no one has considered the relationship between politics and theater while the theaters were officially closed. Scholars have thereby missed a seminal question in understanding the discourse and complex political maneuvering enveloping the act of regicide in 1649. What is the relationship between the theatrical tradition and the execution of Charles I?Even though historians frequently comment on the “tragic” nature of the execution of Charles I, thus far neither historian nor literary person has bothered to examine the immediate and popular reactions to the act of regicide. This is understandable. An odd mix of imaginative projection and verifiable fact enshrines the execution of Charles, and documentation is admittedly difficult. The available assortment of primary literature, however, indicates that many Englishmen responded to the execution as theater, more specifically, the dramatic genre of tragedy. A 1649 sermon (attributed to the Royalist Robert Brown) exemplifies both the tragic response to the act of regicide and the mid-century employment of the theatrical tradition: Brown describes the execution as “the first act of that tragicall woe which is to be presented upon the Theater of this Kingdome, likely to continue longer then the now living Spectators.”
The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham
Authors: Jaffe J. A. 
Published: February 2004

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.
The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual
Authors: Weber William 
Published: February 2004

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.
Ethics in the Marketplace: Gerrard Winstanley's London Bankruptcy, 1643
Authors: Alsop J. D. 
Published: February 2004

One of the casualties of the economic malaise occasioned by the English Civil War was the business career of an obscure thirty-four-year-old junior freeman of the London Merchant Taylors' Company. Had circumstances been otherwise, Gerrard Winstanley would never have gone on to become the eventual leader and spokesman of the Diggers or to develop some of the most innovative and challenging socioeconomic theories of the seventeenth century. Winstanley's bankruptcy of 1643 did not, of course, create by itself one of the foremost radicals of the English Revolution. But scholars are agreed that the failure provoked a significant break in the continuity of Winstanley's life that forced him to change his livelihood and to transport himself from London to Cobham in Surrey, the location of his Digger radicalism. Furthermore, Winstanley never forgot the experience. Throughout his writings of the later 1640s, the bitter contempt and frustration engendered by his financial failings were obvious. They also colored his perceptions of England's current character and its errors. His portrayal of all commerce as dishonest and corrupt is one of the most striking features of his writings:For matter of buying and selling, the earth stinks with such unrighteousnesse, that for my part, though I was bred a tradesmen, yet it is so hard a thing to pick out a poor living, that a man shall sooner be cheated of his bread, then get bread by trading among men, if by plain dealing he put trust in any.And truly the whole earth of trading, is generally become the neat art of thieving and oppressing fellow-creatures, and so laies burdens, upon the Creation, but when the earth becomes a common treasury this burden will be taken off.
Evangelists and Their Hearers: Popular Interpretation of Revivalist Preaching in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Landsman Ned 
Published: February 2004

The most persistent difficulty confronting historical interpreters of popular religion in the early modern world is that of establishing the relationship between ideas enunciated by religious leaders and those held by their hearers. The causes of that uncertainty are obvious; where historical materials for the former are plentiful, sources that address the latter are far more difficult to obtain. The great majority of evidence that we have concerning lay religiosity derives from clerical rather than lay sources, and most of it tells us more about religious behavior than belief. Even those rare accounts we have that purport to narrate the spiritual experiences of ordinary people tend to be both unrepresentative and stylized, to the point where the ultimate implications of such materials for understanding popular belief often are far from certain.Problems of documentation lead to equally significant but less often noted distortions in perspective. Where they have lacked adequate source materials for recovering the mental world of the laity, historians almost by necessity have had to approach their task as one of ascertaining the portion and proportion of the expressions of the ministry that lay men and women adopted. Thus deviations from clerical orthodoxy can only be understood as indicative either of a lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of the laity, or, at best, of a latent “folk” worldview that remains almost inaccessible to historical description. Yet there is ample documentation in the historical record that the laity possessed a rather remarkable capacity to integrate seemingly disparate beliefs and actively forge their own understandings of the delivered message and create their own religious symbols.
“So Few Prizes and So Many Blanks”: Marriage and Feminism in Later Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Levine Philippa 
Published: February 2004

Marriage, for the nineteenth-century woman, was perhaps the single most profound and far-reaching institution that would affect the course of her life. For the woman who did not marry, whether by choice or by chance, spinsterhood marked her as one of society's unfortunates, cast aside from the common lot of the sex. For the woman who did enter wedlock, marriage spelled, simultaneously, a loss of freedom in both political and financial matters, perhaps domestic drudgery and frequent pregnancy, but undoubtedly a clear elevation in social status. Class position aside, marriage had a far greater effect on the lives of women than of men, and the pressures for women to marry were correspondingly far greater than those brought to bear upon men.The meaning and significance of marriage in Victorian England represented a central pressure point in the lives of all women. It was undoubtedly one of the major agencies of socialization to which women were exposed; the pressures it imposed were enormously persuasive and difficult to resist. Family expectation and even self-esteem competed with the public assessment of women on the basis of their marital status. For women, marriage and its effects permeated every aspect of their daily existence and shifted the focus of their emotional and social contacts—what Patricia Jalland has dubbed their “bedroom-bathroom intimacy”—from their own families to those of their husbands.The growing demographic imbalance between the sexes during the course of the nineteenth century was viewed with alarm by contemporary commentators who feared that the changing ratio of men to women would increase the numbers of unmarried women.
Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England
Authors: Jordan Gerald , Rogers Nicholas 
Published: February 2004

In recent years historians have significantly broadened the parameters of popular politics in the eighteenth century to include the ceremonial and associational aspects of political life, what might be aptly described as popular political culture. Whereas the subject of popular politics was conventionally confined to the programmatic campaigns of post-1760 radicals and to the crucial but episodic phenomenon of popular disturbance, historians have become increasingly attentive to the anniversaries, thanksgivings, processions, and parades—to the realm of symbolism and ritual—that were very much a part of Georgian society. This cultural perspective has radically revised our notion of the “popular,” which can no longer be consigned unproblematically to the actions and aspirations of the subaltern classes but to the complex interplay of all groups that had a stake in the extraparliamentary terrain. It has also broadened our notion of the “political” beyond the confines of Parliament, the hustings, and even the press to include the theater of the street and the marketplace with their balladry, pageantry, and iconography, both ribald and solemn.Within this context, the theme of the admiral-as-hero in Georgian society will be explored by focusing on Admiral Edward Vernon, the most popular admiral of the mid-eighteenth century, and Horatio Nelson, whose feats and flamboyance are better known. Of particular interest is the way in which their popularity was ideologically constructed and exploited at home. This might seem an unorthodox position to take. Naval biographers have assumed that the popularity of admirals flowed naturally and spontaneously from their spectacular victories and exemplary feats of valor. This may be taken as a truism. But it does not entirely explain their appeal.
Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854
Authors: Claeys Gregory 
Published: February 2004

The relative quiescence of British working-class radicalism during much of the two decades after 1848, so central to the foundations of mid-Victorian stability, has been the subject of many explanations. Though Chartism did not expire finally until the late 1850s, its mainstream strategy of constitutionalist organization, huge meetings, enormous parliamentary petitions, and the tacit threat of violent intimidation seemed exploded after the debacle of Kennington Common and the failed march on Parliament in April 1848. But other factors also contributed to undermine the zeal for reform. Alleviating the pressures of distress, emigration carried off many activists to America and elsewhere. Relative economic prosperity rendered the economic ends of reform less pressing, and proposals like the Chartist Land Plan less appealing. The popularity of various self-help doctrines, including consumer cooperation, also militated against collectivist political action. “Labour aristocrats” and trade union leaders, moreover, preferred local and sectional economic improvement to the risks and expense of political campaigning.Accounts of mid-Victorian political stability have had little to say, however, about the impact of European radicalism on the British working-class movement after 1848. That the failure of the continental revolutions brought thousands of refugees to Britain is well known. But although useful studies exist of the internationalist dimensions of Chartism prior to 1849—and of some of the refugee groups generally in this period—the effects of the exiled continental radicals on British working-class politics in the early 1850s have remained largely unconsidered.
Military Force and Civil Authority in the United Kingdom, 1914–1921
Authors: Townshend Charles 
Published: February 2004

If liberal England died strangely, no moment in its passing was more bizarre than the close encounter it experienced between the army and a political system from which the military had been banished since the seventeenth century. Habitually all but invisible at home, confining its exploits to lands without the law, and maintaining a political silence equal—though in easier circumstances—to that of the neighboring grande muette, the British army moved to the center of the public stage. It obtained a popular following. This was not merely the result of Britain's involvement in world war. Manifestations of popular militarism, albeit sporadic or marginal, were evident in the later nineteenth century. The second Boer War accelerated a shift in social attitudes. Hostility to “pro-Boers,” if not beginning to resemble the hysteria of 1914, adumbrated the response of a shaken community temporarily recovering cohesion through warlike solidarity. Most public energy was expended in mafficking, but vocal groups continued to campaign for national efficiency and universal military service. The scout movement was the precipitant of a considerable mass sentiment, solidarized by suspicion of Germany and giving back a faint but clear echo of the leagues formed to support the expansion of the German army and navy.Yet if a novel enthusiasm was eroding traditional aversion to the army, it was scarcely capable of creating a public tolerance for its involvement in domestic affairs. Unlike the navy, whose nature more or less precluded its domestic employment, the army was a suspect weapon. The cultivation of nonpolitical professionalism represented in part a functional response to such public suspicion. Modern major generals would not think of doing what their Cromwellian predecessors had done.