27 Ergebnisse - Zeige 1 von 20.

By a Flash and a Scare illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing riots, Tolpuddle, and the New Poor Law riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside during the 1800s, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive resea...

The dozens of petitions addressed to Parliament and the army in the five months before Charles I's execution are widely recognised as having influenced the events that led to his trial and death. A few phrases or short passages from the texts have frequently been quoted by historians, and some have argued that they represent no more than a propaganda campaign engineered by a small number of political and military leaders. There has never befor...

The Houndsditch murders of three City of London policemen in 1910 and the ensuing "Siege of Sidney Street", in which Latvian anarchists took on Winston Churchill and the British Army, have entered into East London folklore. But no-one ever accounted for the mysterious Peter the Painter, popularly supposed to be the leader of the gang and to have escaped the burning house during the battle. This book solves the mystery. Here for the first time ...

England was a spy culture in the years 1790 through 1820. Restriction, regulation and surveillance formed the dominant discursive context. Ultra-radical artisans developed a discourse based on the revolutionary ideology of Thomas Spence which proposed the corporate ownership of land and the overthrow of the Government by physical force. The Spenceans were considered the most radical of the political groups active during this period, with Willi...

It has been generally accepted that the eighteenth century witnessed a series of transformative processes that dramatically changed the social, political and economic fabric of Britain, yet few have determined just when and where the transformation began to have meaningful effects. The process of industrialisation had undoubted revolutionary significance, not only in the manner in which it became integral to the commercial prospects of the cou...

The Chartists is a major contribution to our understanding not just of Chartism but of the whole experience of working-class people in mid-nineteenth century Britain. The book looks at who the Chartists were, what they hoped for from the political power they strove to gain, and why so many of them felt driven toward the use of physical force. It also studies the reactions of the middle and upper classes and the ways in which the two sides - ra...

On Friday, 23 November 1649 Thomas Totney, a puritan and veteran of the Civil War, was working in his goldsmith's shop at 'The Three Golden Lions' in the Strand. He was to claim that after fourteen weeks of self-abasement, fasting and prayer the Lord came upon him in power, overwhelming his wisdom and understanding, smiting him dumb, blind and dead in the presence of hundreds of people. Next his body began to tremble and he was tied down in hi...

Exploring a set of related themes dealing with popular radical language, ideology, and communication in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century England, Radical Expression re-examines the rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and the associated repertoire of constitutionalist mobilization. James Epstein argues that, despite the impulses of the French revolution, popular constitutionalism remained the dominant idiom within which ra...

A re-evaluation of the hoary problem of the question of revolution in Britain and Ireland during the allegedly dying years of the Age of Revolution. On the 16 November 1802 a posse of Bow Street Runners raided the Oakley Arms, a working class pub in Lambeth, on the orders of the Home Office. Over thirty men were arrested, among them, and the only one of any social rank, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard. Despard and twelve of his associates were s...

Once the heartland of British labour history, trade unionism has been marginalised in much recent scholarship. In a critical survey from the earliest times to the nineteenth century, this book argues for its reinstatement. Trade unionism is shown to be both intrinsically important and to provide a window onto the broader historical landscape, the evolution of trade union principles and practices is traced from the seventeenth century to mid-Vi...

Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E. P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which mos...

This book traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and seeks to explain why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. Malcolm Chase considers the relationship between 'land consciousness' and early socialism, attempts to create alternative communities, and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. He concludes that, far from bei...

The full story of the riots in the Forest of Dean in 1831, and how they were suppressed, is told here for the first time. The book also gives the background to the riots, it discusses the simple lives of the foresters before the arrival in Dean of the Industrial Revolution, and how they lived in the Forest, pasturing their animals there and using it as if it was their own. It also describes the ancient way the free miners used to mine their ir...

In 1798, the Rev. T. R. Malthus published his explosive thesis arguing that population had a natural tendency to expand with the capacity of any society to feed itself. The most strident component of the Malthusian cased turned on the 'positive check' to demographic growth, a subsistence crisis generating malnutrition-induced disease and starvation, and thereby inflicting a marked drop in population. Malthus's argument was based on historical ...

In the early 19th century, Henry Hunt became one of the most stirring orators of English Radicalism. His speech following the "Peterloo" massacre cost him three years in prison and gave him a reputation for inciting the rabble to violence. This book considers his place in the radical movement. This first full-scale biography finally brings to light Hunt's vital role in molding the English working-class into an effective political force. Conver...

In the first elections called under the terms of the 1832 Reform Act the Tory party appeared doomed. They had recorded their worst set of results in living memory and were organizationally in disarray as well, importantly, seemingly completely out of touch with the current political mood. During the intense pressure brought to bear by the supporters of political reform was the use of "pressure from without" and in this tactic the industrial wo...

2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of an important and original voice in the history of radicalism: Thomas Spence. Spence described himself as 'the poor man's advocate' but he may equally be described as 'the poor man's revolutionary', for what he advocated was a dramatic over-turning of the existing social order. Spence wasn't interested in compromise, with reforms and half-freedoms. Spence's story is a rags to rags tale of defianc...

What explains the law-abidingness of late Victorian England? A number of modern historians contend that the answer lies with the effectiveness of policing, and with the imposition of a 'policeman-state' in Victorian and Edwardian England. Exploiting the vast archive that Charles Booth amassed for his leviathan social investigation to explore the social order of London's East End, Life and Labour of the People in London, this volume takes issue...

The pieces in this collection range from an account of the Skeleton Army riots against the Salvation Army in the early 1880s to the unsuccessful campaign to abolish the death penalty in the aftermath of the Second World War. They include essays on how the Home Office and Metropolitan Police responded to the unemployed riots in the West End of London in 1886 and the contest over the right to assemble in Trafalgar Square in 1887, on the complex ...

In the 1970s and 80s a revival of interest emerged in researching Bristol's vigorous radical past, which has been echoed in the more recent historical studies concerning the involvement of the Bristol women's movement in the nineteenth century in anti-slavery campaigns, social reform, and the struggle for the emancipation of women. However, significant gaps in our knowledge still exist and there have been too few works that focus on the local ...