Recently, we have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in the history of disability. In this book, David Wright investigates the social history of institutionalization and reveals the diversity of the "insane" population and the complexities of institutional committal in Victorian England--using the National Asylum for Idiots (Earlswood) as a case study. He contends that institutional confinement of mentally disabled and mentally ill individuals in the nineteenth century cannot be understood independently of a detailed analysis of familial and community patterns of care.

This book explores the formation of working-class identitites between 1880-1930, as reflected in changes in work and industrial relations, family life, patterns of saving, and changing political allegiances.

Although the luxurious spending habits of Italians in the Renaissance are well known, this is the first comprehensive study of the sumptuary laws that attempted to regulate the consumption of luxuries. Catherine Kovesi Killerby provides a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than three hundred laws enacted in over forty cities throughout Italy, and sets them in their social context.

This is the first detailed scholarly study of the late Victorian and Edwardian peace movement, the campaigns of which made a significant impact on political debate, especially during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), the Bulgarian Atrocities campaign (1876-8), Britain's conflict in Egypt (1882), the South African War (1899-1902), and the intensifying international crisis before 1914. mong the first to benefit from the opening of the Peace Society Archive, the book focuses on the specialized associations at the heart of the peace movement. Paul Laity identifies the existence of different...

This is the first detailed scholarly study of culture and sociability in Colombia during the period c. 1850 and 1930. Patricia Londono-Vega gives a vivid picture of some of the factors that reduced social distances in the province of Antioquia during this period of relative harmony and prosperity. She examines hundreds of the groups and voluntary associations which flourished at this time and which brought a growing number of Antioquenos of different social backgrounds together around religious practices and societies, the exercising of charity, a concern for education, and the pursuit of...

This book describes the fate of the soldiers of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, who fled Russia at the end of the Russian civil war. Remarkably, the Army continued to exist in exile, refining its ideology, and participating in the underground struggle against the Soviets. Paul Robinson sheds new light on the dynamic individuals involved in the White Movement, as well as on interwar Russian emigration in general.

What role did the theatre of the Irish literary revival play in the politics of identity so avidly debated in pre-revolutionary Ireland? Conversely, how far did that debate influence the development of the theatre? Ben Levitas pursues such vexed questions through a panoramic study of Irish drama and the nationalist debate 1890-1916. He follow the unfolding drama of that relationship and, in giving equal weight to the protagonists inside and outside the theatre movement, provides fresh insight into the dynamics of Irish cultural politics. Extending the range of the drama beyond the canonical...

The impact of the Irish famine of 1845-1852 was unparalleled in both political and psychological terms. The effects of famine-related mortality and emigration were devastating, in the field of literature no less than in other areas. In this incisive new study, Melissa Fegan explores the famine's legacy to literature, tracing it in the work of contemporary writers and their successors, down to 1919. Dr. Fegan examines both fiction and non-fiction, including journalism, travel-narratives and the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. She argues that an examination of famine literature that simply...

This book explores the relationship between the British Liberal party and the rural working-class voters enfranchised by the Third Reform Act of 1884. In contrast to many works that present urban voters as the primary agents of political change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century England, this study argues that an examination of the dynamics of popular rural politics is essential to a thorough understanding of political developments in the early years of mass enfranchisement. Prior to 1914, capturing a substantial portion of the rural vote was essential to any political party seeking to...

This is the first detailed investigation of the thought, activity, and influence of the German economist and social reformer Gustav Schmoller in the era of Bismarck. Tracing the relationship that developed between political economy and social reform during German industrialization, it explores Schmoller's immense and lasting impact on the development of the social sciences and welfare state in Germany.