How do literacy and the development of literary culture promote the development of a national identity? This book examines the development of both a literary tradition and institutions aimed at promoting literacy in Romania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alex Drace-Francis combines analysis of education systems, book production, and the periodical press with case studies of key thinkers such as Mihai Eminescu, Ion Luca Caragiale and Titu Maiorescu to trace Romania's cultural and literary development.

David McLean provides a detailed study of the efforts of local and national government to combat cholera in nineteenth-century Britain. Based on a unique cache of documents, McLean's account exposes the struggles between local and national governments as they grappled with the enormity of the problem and the conflict between policies of laissez-faire and state intervention.

Elizabeth Keane offers us the first comprehensive portrait of Sean MacBride, Minister of External Affairs during one of the most turbulent periods in Irish diplomatic history: the inter-party government of 1948. Keane sheds new light on the political party founded by Sean MacBride, his time in government, his fall from power and his impact on Irish foreign policy

Historian, politician, diplomat and traveler, mountaineer and man of letters: James Bryce (1838-1922) was a popular British ambassador to the United States and acclaimed author of The American Commonwealth who established himself as the foremost foreign observer of the United States since de Tocqueville. John Seaman joins history and biography to recount a life of heroic failure and stubborn triumph, and in so doing, sheds new light on 19th century British politics and public life.

Settlements were a distinctive aspect of late-Victorian church life in which individual philanthropic Christians were encouraged to live and work in communities amongst the poor and set an example for the underprivileged through their own actions. Often overlooked by historians, settlements are of great value in understanding the values and culture of the 19th century.
Settlement missions were first conceived when Samuel Barnett, the incumbent of St Jude's, Whitechapel, in the East End of London, sought to introduce them as a major aspect of Victorian church life. Barnett argued that...

Prayer was regarded as an essential arm of the State and even as a method of 'thought control' in early modern Britain. In the 17th Century period covered by this study, common prayer dominated everyday lives at a national level - in communities and congregations - as well as privately in households. At a time when Britain was struggling to come to terms with the political and social turbulence triggered by the violence of the Civil War, unease over the Commonwealth and uncertainties of the Restoration, prayer represented the search for pattern, order and purpose in and between these...

Pilgrimage was an integral part of both medieval religion and medieval life, and from its origins in the fourth-century Mediterranean world it spread rapidly to Northern Europe as a pan-European devotional phenomenon. Concentrating on the medieval Latin West, this book covers the period spanning the growth in pilgrimage during the seventh century to the Protestant Reformation in the 16-century, when pilgrimage ceased to be a vital part of European Christian culture. It draws extensively upon original source materials accounts of pilgrimage, guidebooks, chronicles, wills, covert memos, and...

This book explores the question of education in the British Empire and its debated interpretations: cultural imperialism or vital preparation for independence and nationhood. Clive Whitehead has brought together these studies of the life and work of leading practitioners and covers over 100 years up to the end of empire, the onset of independence, and beyond. He includes both administrators and teachers on the ground, like Sir Hans Vischer, Arthur Mayhew, Eric R. J. Hussey, Sir Christopher Cox, Frank Ward, Freda Gwilliam, and Margaret Mead.

Laurence Sulivan embodied the East India Company. He lived at the Company's heart in the city of London in India House, and controlled a vast commercial and political empire during Britain's ""Commercial Revolution"" and rise to superpower status and supremacy in India and South and Southeast Asia. He was ""king-maker,"" politician, manipulator and negotiator, deeply involved in British and Indian affairs, friend and confident of Chatham, Clive, Burke and Pitt the Younger and--very importantly--protector of Warren Hastings. McGilvary paints a vivid and convincing picture of an influential and...

Mary Queen of Scots was a romantic and tragic figure. The story of the 'Casket Letters' adds richly to the enigma and mystery - eight letters, a love sonnet and two contracts, allegedly written by Mary to her lover, implicated Mary in her husband's murder and 'proved' her adultery. This forensic re-examination of the controversy, the latest historiography, and the huge literature it has generated together with an accessible presentation of the 'Letters', is a detailed and powerful study for both scholar and general reader and illuminates sharply the dramatic events leading to Mary's...