The modern idea that the Great War was regarded as a futile waste of life by British society in the disillusioned 1920s and 1930s is here called into question by Mark Connelly. Through a detailed local study of a district containing a wide variety of religious, economic and social variations, he shows how both the survivors and the bereaved came to terms with the losses and implications of the Great War. His study illustrates the ways in which communities as diverse as the Irish Catholics of Wapping, the Jews of Stepney and the Presbyterian ex-patriate Scots of Ilford, thanks to the actions...

Anglican clergymen in Britain's Australian colonies in their earliest years faced very particular challenges. Lacking relevant training, experience or pastoral theology, these pioneer religious professionals not only ministered to a convict population unique in the empire, but had also to engage with indigenous peoples and a free-settler population struggling with an often inhospitable environment. This was in the context of a settler empire that was being reshaped by mass migration, rapid expansion and a widespread decline in the political authority of religion and the confessional state,...

The consequences of extreme poverty were a grim reality for all too many people in Victorian England. The various poor laws implemented to try to deal with it contained a number of controversial measures, one of the most radical and unpopular being the crusade against outdoor relief, during which central government sought to halt all welfare payments at home. Via a close case study of Brixworth union in Northamptonshire, which offers an unusually rich corpus of primary material and evidence, the author looks at what happened to those impoverished men and women who struggled to live...

This book offers important new insights into the relationship between crime and gender in Scotland during the Enlightenment period. Against the backdrop of significant legislative changes that fundamentally altered the face of Scots law, Anne-Marie Kilday examines contemporary attitudes towards serious offences against the person committed by women. She draws particularly on rich and varied court records to explores female criminality and judicial responses to it in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Through a series of case studies of homicide, infanticide, assault, popular...

By the 1890s Victorians assumed that London's hospitals were facing an endemic financial crisis which was so severe that some feared the state might have to intervene to support an ailing voluntary system: charity both underpinned London's hospitals and proved insufficient to meet the ever-increasing cost of care, despite the ability of those running the hospitals to pick the pockets of the benevolent. Charity and the London Hospitals takes these themes to study the development of the hospital as an economic, medical, and voluntary institution in the second half of the nineteenth century....

The then Labour government's efforts to promote East-West detente and to improve Anglo-Soviet relations from 1964 to 1970 have been largely overlooked; yet they were of huge significance. This book offers a major reappraisal. It challenges the caricature of Harold Wilson's rigid subservience to America, demonstrating that as a Prime Minister he intended to develop closer contacts with the Soviet leadership, and to foster co-operation on arms control, conflict resolution in Vietnam and East-West trade. It illustrates how the Labour government reconciled its policy towards the USSR and Warsaw...

The period 1500 to 1610 witnessed a fundamental transformation in the nature of Franco-Irish relations. In 1500 contact was exclusively based on trade and small-scale migration. However, from the early 1520s to the early 1580s, the dynamics of 'normal' relations were significantly altered as unprecedented political contacts between Ireland and France were cultivated. These ties were abandoned when, after decades of unsuccessful approaches to the French crown for military and financial support for their opposition to the Tudor regime in Ireland, Irish dissidents redirected their pleas to the...

This book offers the first regional study of women in thirteenth-century England, making pioneering use of charters, chronicles, government records and some of the earliest manorial court rolls to examine the interaction of gender, status and life-cycle in shaping women's experiences in Lincolnshire. The author investigates the lives of noblewomen, gentlewomen, townswomen, peasant women, criminal women and women religious from a variety of angles. Not only does she consider how far women were partners alongside men, especially within the family, but she also explores whether they might have...

The authority of classical texts was challenged in the mid-Victorian era through the unearthing of a very different -Rome- in the material remains under British soil. Developments in archaeology created a new picture of Roman Britain as wealthy and civilized - an image which sat more comfortably with the Victorians' own changing view of empire as they themselves became an imperial power. Changing intellectual ideas ensured that the Roman heritage could no longer be seen solely as the preserve of the classically educated upper class: excavating with a spade allowed a larger audience to...

After an evening spent drinking with Irish conspirators, an inebriated Owen Connelly confessed to the main colonial administrators in Ireland that a plot was afoot to root out and destroy Ireland's English and Protestant population. Within days English colonists in Ireland believed that a widespread massacre of Protestant settlers was taking place. Desperate for aid, they began to canvass their colleagues in England for help, claiming that they were surrounded by an evil popish menace bent on destroying their community. Soon sworn statements, later called the 1641 depositions, confirmed their...