Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life Since 1800
Culture, Thought and Belief in British Political Life Since 1800

Author: Paul Readman

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-10-15

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1837650187

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Brings together agenda-setting essays that illuminate the complex relationship between ideas and political activity in modern British history. Ideas matter in modern British political life: culture, thought and belief are integral to the fabric of politics, high and low, foreign and domestic. They are woven into the day-to-day business of debate, policy and decision-making. This book shows how and why they have mattered so much. Inspired by the work of Jonathan Parry, it explores the cultural and intellectual influences on politics both formal and informal since the turn of the nineteenth century. Featuring original interventions by some of the world's leading historians, the essays in the volume are organised around themes of central relevance to the understanding of modern British political history. They explore a wide range of subjects across political life and its intellectual and cultural hinterlands, including constitutionalism and international political thought, anticolonial activism, race and imperial commemoration, female political thinkers, parliament, monarchy and the law, the politics of religion, and patriotism and national identity. This is an agenda-setting text that will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex relationship between ideas and political activity in modern British history. Paul Readman is Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. Dr Geraint Thomas is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. Contributors: Michael Bentley, John Bew, Paul Bew, David Cannadine, Matthew Cragoe, Tom Crewe, Ben Griffin, Boyd Hilton, Michael Ledger-Lomas, Joanna Lewis, Helen McCarthy, Alex Middleton, Susan D. Pennybacker, Kathryn Rix, James Thompson, Philip Williamson

The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000
The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000

Author: David Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-03-29

Total Pages: 717

ISBN-13: 0191024279

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The two centuries after 1800 witnessed a series of sweeping changes in the way in which Britain was governed, the duties of the state, and its role in the wider world. Powerful processes - from the development of democracy, the changing nature of the social contract, war, and economic dislocation - have challenged, and at times threatened to overwhelm, both governors and governed. Such shifts have also presented challenges to the historians who have researched and written about Britain's past politics. This Handbook shows the ways in which political historians have responded to these challenges, providing a snapshot of a field which has long been at the forefront of conceptual and methodological innovation within historical studies. It comprises thirty-three thematic essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field. Collectively, these essays assess and rethink the nature of modern British political history itself and suggest avenues and questions for future research. The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History thus provides a unique resource for those who wish to understand Britain's political past and a thought-provoking 'long view' for those interested in current political challenges.

Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558-1688
Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558-1688

Author: Barbara Shapiro

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-11-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780804783620

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This book surveys the channels through which political ideas and knowledge were conveyed to the English people from the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I to the Revolution of 1688. Shapiro argues that an assessment of English political culture requires an examination of all means by which this culture was expressed and communicated. While the discussion focuses primarily on genres such as the sermon, newsbook, poetry, and drama, it also considers the role of events and institutions. Shapiro is the first to explore and elucidate the entire web of communication in early modern English political life.

Storied Ground
Storied Ground

Author: Paul Readman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-02-22

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1108424732

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The relationship between landscape and identity is explored to reveal how Englishness encompasses the urban and rural, and the north and south.

God and Progress
God and Progress

Author: Joshua Bennett

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-03-07

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0192574760

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Exploring the rich relationship between historical thought and religious debate in Victorian culture, God and Progress offers a unique and authoritative account of intellectual change in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume recovers a twofold process in which the growth of progressive ideas of history transformed British Protestant traditions, as religious debate, in turn, profoundly shaped Victorian ideas of history. It adopts a remarkably wide contextual perspective, embracing believers and unbelievers, Anglicans and nonconformists, and writers from different parts of the British Isles, fully situating British debates in relation to their European and especially German Idealist surroundings. The Victorian intellectual mainstream came to terms with religious diversity, changing ethical sensibilities, and new kinds of knowledge by encouraging providential, spiritualized, and developmental understandings of human time. A secular counter-culture simultaneously disturbed this complex consensus, grounding progress in appeals to scientific advances and the retreat of metaphysics. God and Progress thus explores the ways in which divisions within British liberalism were fundamentally related to differences over the past, present, and future of religion. It also demonstrates that religious debate powered the process by which historicism acquired cultural authority in Victorian national life, and later began to lose it. The study reconstructs the ways in which theological dynamics, often relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century British intellectual history, effectively forged its leading patterns.

Walking Histories, 1800-1914
Walking Histories, 1800-1914

Author: Chad Bryant

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-04-16

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1137484985

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Few historians have written about walking, despite its obvious centrality to the human condition. Focusing on the period 1800-1914, this book examines the practices and meanings of walking in the context of transformative modernity. It boldly suggests that once historians place walking at the heart of their analyses, exciting new perspectives on themes central to the ‘long nineteenth century’ emerge. Walking Histories, 1800-1914 adopts a global perspective, including contributions from specialists in the history and culture of Great Britain, North America, Australia, Russia, East-Central Europe, and South Asia. Critically engaging with recent research, the contributions within offer fresh insights for academic experts, while remaining accessible to student readers. This book will be essential reading for those interested in movement, travel, leisure, urban history, and environmental history.

Restaging the Past
Restaging the Past

Author: Angela Bartie

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2020-08-17

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1787354059

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Restaging the Past is the first edited collection devoted to the study of historical pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. Across Britain in the twentieth century, people succumbed to ‘pageant fever’. Thousands dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from the history of the places where they lived, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between the 1900s and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organised groups, including Women’s Institutes, political parties, schools, churches and youth organisations. Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of ‘pageant fever’ remain in evidence today.

Victorious Century
Victorious Century

Author: David Cannadine

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-02-19

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 0525557911

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A sweeping history of nineteenth-century Britain by one of the world's most respected historians. "An evocative account . . .[Cannadine] tells his own story persuasively and exceedingly well.” —The Wall Street Journal To live in nineteenth-century Britain was to experience an astonishing and unprecedented series of changes. Cities grew vast; there were revolutions in transportation, communication, science, and work--all while a growing religious skepticism rendered the intellectual landscape increasingly unrecognizable. It was an exhilarating time, and as a result, most of the countries in the world that experienced these changes were racked by political and social unrest. Britain, however, maintained a stable polity at home, and as a result it quickly found itself in a position of global leadership. In this major new work, leading historian David Cannadine has created a bold, fascinating new interpretation of nineteenth-century Britain. Britain was a country that saw itself at the summit of the world and, by some measures, this was indeed true. It had become the largest empire in history: its political stability positioned it as the leader of the new global economy and allowed it to construct the largest navy ever built. And yet it was also a society permeated with doubt, fear, and introspection. Repeatedly, politicians and writers felt themselves to be staring into the abyss and what is seen as an era of irritating self-belief was in fact obsessed with its own fragility, whether as a great power or as a moral force. Victorious Century is a comprehensive and extraordinarily stimulating history--its author catches the relish, humor and staginess of the age, but also the dilemmas faced by Britain's citizens, ones we remain familiar with today.