In this volume, leading experts on the past and present of pensions in Britain debate the present crisis, and the lessons of history for those seeking to craft solutions to it that are both effective and enduring. The volume also contains a number of chapters which draw important lessons from the experience of other European and North American countries over the past few decades.

This new collection gathers together the best work in social history published in essay form in the past decade. A substantial introduction surveys the rapid growth in this field of study.

Based upon interdisciplinary themes such as status and welfare, this text contains a collection of pieces examining old age in the study of history and places the problem of a rapidly ageing population in its historical context.

Why has a party that has achieved so much nonetheless spent so much of the twentieth century in opposition? Labour's First Century is the only book that assesses this anomaly. Written by a team of acknowledged experts, it covers a wide range of key issues, from economic policy to gender. Their essays challenge those who minimize the party's contribution and explain why mistakes and weaknesses have occurred. Everyone interested in British political history--whether supporters or opponents of the Labour Party--will need to read Labour's First Century.

In this book a distinguished group of historians focuses on this dialectal relationship between capitalism and its pre-capitalist heritage.

This book examines a period which was the fulcrum around which postwar British history moved. In popular discourse the 1970s is commonly characterized as a dismal decade of economic and political failure from which the country was apparently rescued by Thatcherism. The editors of this volume argue that this is both simplistic and a barrier to understanding a period of fundamental importance in the trajectory of postwar British history. Most notably, it was a decade of extraordinary ferment in ideas. Out of the battles waged around these ideas emerged the Britain of the late-twentieth century....

Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? is the first book to describe the real lives of unmarried mothers, and attitudes towards them, in England from the First World War to the present day. Pat Thane and Tanya Evans use biographies and memoirs, as well as archives and official sources, to challenge stereotypes of the mothers as desolate women, rejected by society and by their families, until social attitudes were transformed in the 'permissive' 1960s. They demonstrate the diversity of their lives, their social backgrounds, and how often they were supported by their families, neighbours, and...

Based on themes such as status and welfare, Old Age from Antiquity to Post-Modernity examines the role of the elderly in history. This empirical study represents a substantial contribution to both the historical understanding of old age in past societies as well as the discussion of the contribution of post-modernism to historical scholarship.

These essays examine the lives of elderly women and attitudes towards them from 1500 to the present. They shed light on the process of industrialisation and welfare provision and question many common assumptions about elderly women.