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The seventeenth-century war on piracy is remembered as a triumph for the English state and her Atlantic colonies. Yet it was piracy and illicit trade that drove a wedge between them, imperiling the American enterprise and bringing the colonies to the verge of rebellion. In The Politics of Piracy, competing criminalities become a lens to examine England’s legal relationship with America. In contrast to the rough, unlettered stereotypes associated with them, pirates and illicit traders moved easily in colonial society, attaining respectability and even political office. The goods they provided became a cornerstone of colonial trade, transforming port cities from barren outposts into rich and extravagant capitals. This transformation reached the political sphere as well, as colonial governors furnished local mariners with privateering commissions, presided over prize courts that validated stolen wares, and fiercely defended their prerogatives as vice-admirals. By the end of the century, the social and political structures erected in the colonies to protect illicit trade came to represent a new and potent force: nothing less than an independent American legal system. Tensions between Crown and colonies presage, and may predestine, the ultimate dissolution of their relationship in 1776. Exhaustively researched and rich with anecdotes about the pirates and their pursuers, The Politics of Piracy will be a fascinating read for scholars, enthusiasts, and anyone with an interest in the wild and tumultuous world of the Atlantic buccaneers.

The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and the Restoration Stage is the first full-length study to examine representations of sexual violence on the Restoration stage. By reading theatrical depictions of sexual violence alongside political tracts, propaganda pamphlets, and circulating broadsides, this study argues that authors used dramatic representations of rape to respond to and engage with late-century upheavals in British political culture. Beginning with an examination of rape scenes in English Civil War propaganda, The Politics of Rape argues that Roundhead authors described acts of rape and atrocity to demonize their enemies, the Irish, the Catholics, and the Cavaliers. After the Restoration, propagandists and playwrights on each side of every political conflict would follow suit, altering the rhetoric of sexual violence in response to each new moment of political upheaval: The Restoration of Charles II, the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, and the accession of William and Mary. The study offers an intensive look at British propaganda culture, gathering together a wealth of understudied pamphlet texts, and identifying a series of stock figures that recur throughout the century: The demonic Irishman, sexually violent villain of the 1641 Irish Rebellion tracts; the debauched Cavalier, the secretly Catholic royalist rapist; the poisonous Catholic bride, the malignant consort who encourages the rapes of Protestant women; the cannibal father, the evil patriarch who rapes his daughters-in-laws before ingesting his own sons as a symbol of monarchical overreach; and the ravished monarch, the male rape victim whose sexual violation protests his political disenfranchisement. The study also traces the appearance of these figures on the British stage, examining well-known works by Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Lee, and Shadwell, alongside lesser-known plays by Orrery, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Ravenscroft, Pix, Cibber, and Brady. The Politics of Rape thus offers a new method for understanding of the geo-political implications of theatrical sexual violence.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

Recognizing that the seventeenth century's volatile debate over apocalyptic interpretation has since become a one-sided discussion, Esther Gilman Richey develops a context that recovers the dynamism so inherent in the writings of the period and provides illuminating details that enhance the prophetic continuum. The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance does not ignore the familiar prophetic verse of Spenser and Milton, but it significantly expands the scope of study by examining the interpretations of both men and women who represent a range of ecclesiastical and political perspectives.

Richey rejects Barbara Lewalski's claim that the radical, prophetic writers and metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century drew inspiration from distinct biblical models, the former from the Apocalypse and the latter from the Psalms. Instead she contends that even writers such as Donne and Herbert, whom we have long considered "literary," were in reality using their poetry to participate in the hottest debates of the time.

While the radical writers, such as Spenser and Milton, were immediately responsive to ecclesiastical and political controversies, the conservative, metaphysical poets—Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan—were posing equally politically charged questions: Is the pope Antichrist? Is the Bride of Christ pure? Is the Temple a model of ecclesiastical reform? The writers of the period did not move in divided and distinguished worlds, but in fact constantly responded to one another through poetic and politically charged dialogue.

By drawing from the writings of various individuals, both radical and conformist, male and female, Richey traces the shifting representations of the apocalyptic Bride and Temple over time. Organized chronologically, the chapters of The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance reveal the escalating debate among the pacifists, conformists, militants, and feminists. Not only does Richey uncover the prophetic dimension of conformist writers usually described as apolitical and devotional, but she also explores the writings of lesser-known women prophets: Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Cary, Anna Trapnel, and Margaret Fell. In such biblical passages as the apocalyptic "woman clothed with the sun," these early feminists find the authority for their own prophetic speech.

This provocative analysis—at once far-reaching and tightly focused—reveals the complexity of the apocalyptic discourse that transpired among Renaissance writers and poets.

In this devastatingly funny classic, Frederick Crews skewers the ego-inflated pretensions of the schools and practitioners of literary criticism popular in the 1960s, including Freudians, Aristotelians, and New Critics. Modeled on the "casebooks" often used in freshman English classes at the time, The Pooh Perplex contains twelve essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek "questions and study projects," and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies some of the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.

In this pioneering work Victor Neuberg has assembled a wealth of information about popular literature, from the invention of the printing press to the present. This guide, by judicious selection, gives a vivid picture of the range and variety of popular literature and its producers. Besides describing the main genres, the author has also included the social, cultural and commercial background to the production of popular literature, factors that were crucial in influencing the forms it took.

 
Throughout Britain, Civil Servants are exposed to public scrutiny today in unprecedented ways. What does it mean that the political neutrality of the Civil Service has only been enshrined in law since 2010, nearly 150 years after it was first proposed? Why is it so important for politicians to trust Civil Servants (and what difficulties arise when they do not)? 

Coauthored by former First Civil Service Commissioner David Normington and historian Peter Hennessy, The Power of Whitehall provides answers through rich observations about the nature of the British Civil Service, its values and effectiveness, and how it should continue to adapt to a changing world.

We live in a profoundly challenging era for journalists. While the profession has historically taken on the mantle of providing clear, sound information to the public, journalists now face competition from dubious sources online and smear campaigns launched by public figures. In The Power of Journalists, four of the United Kingdom’s foremost journalists—Nick Robinson, Barbara Speed, Charlie Beckett, and Gary Gibbon—give on-the-ground accounts of how they’ve weathered some of the most significant political events of the past five years, including the referendum on Scottish independence and Brexit. These monumental political decisions exposed each journalist to the dangerous vicissitudes of public opinion, and made them all the more certain of their mission. In describing the role of the journalist as truth-teller and protector of impartiality as well as interpreter of controversial facts and trusted source of public opinion, they issue a clarion call for good journalism.

To the vast majority of the English public, the role of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court has often been distant and incomprehensible, its judges a caste apart from society. The Power of Judges ends this mystery, exploring the fundamental concept of justice and explaining the main functions of the courts, the challenges they face, and the complexity of the judicial system.

In this lucid account of the judiciary, David Neuberger and Peter Riddell lead us through an array of topics both philosophical and logistical, including the relationships between morality and law and between Parliament and the judiciary. They explain the effects of cuts in legal aid and shed light on complex and controversial subjects like assisted dying and the complexities of combating mass terrorism while protecting personal liberty. Given that many of these issues span national borders, the book also compares the United Kingdom’s legal system with its counterparts in the United States and Germany.

Full of insights, The Power of Judges is an informative and accessible account of the United Kingdom’s judicial system, its contribution to running the country, and the challenges it faces—including the many threats to its effectiveness.

The Power of Politicians takes readers inside the workings of Parliament via an autobiographical account of Tessa Jowell’s own experience of entering politics as an MP. Jowell offers fascinating insights into the workings of Parliament and sheds light on the successful pathways for developing policy into final legislation. The details of the inner workings of politics are interwoven with a powerful personal narrative, as Jowell offers a firsthand account of the role of women in contemporary political life.

With former Lord Speaker Frances D’Souza serving as Jowell’s interlocutor, this book provides a passionate and inspiring interpretation on moral duty. Ultimately, The Power of Politicians offers not just a case study of the life and everyday work of a politician, but also attends to deeper questions about what is demanded from the political class. The overall result is a nothing less than a master class in how to be a good politician.

Shortlisted for the 2021 BARS First Book Prize (British Association for Romantic Studies)​

The Printed Reader explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings. Through intersecting readings of quixotic narratives, including work by Charlotte Lennox, Laurence Sterne, George Colman, Richard Graves, and Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Dale argues that literature was envisaged as imprinting—most crucially, in gendered terms—the reader’s mind, character, and body. The Printed Reader brings together key debates concerning quixotic narratives, print culture, sensibility, empiricism, book history, and the material text, connecting developments in print technology to gendered conceptualizations of quixotism. Tracing the meanings of quixotic readers’ bodies, The Printed Reader claims the social and political text that is the quixotic reader is structured by the experiential, affective, and sexual resonances of imprinting and impressions. 

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Challenging the accounts of John Henry Wigmore and Leonard W. Levy, this history of the privilege against self-incrimination demonstrates that what has sometimes been taken to be an unchanging tenet of our legal system has actually encompassed many different legal consequences in a history that reaches back to the Middle Ages.

Each chapter of this definitive study uncovers what the privilege meant in practice. The authors trace the privilege from its origins in the medieval period to its first appearance in English common law, and from its translation to the American colonies to its development into an effective protection for criminal defendants in the nineteenth century. The authors show that the modern privilege—the right to remain silent—is far from being a basic civil liberty. Rather, it has evolved through halting and controversial steps. The book also questions how well an expansive notion of the privilege accords with commonly accepted principles of morality.

This book constitutes a major revision of our understanding of an important aspect of both criminal and constitutional law.

One of the most original and prolific economists of the twentieth century, Joan Robinson (1903–83) is widely regarded as the most important woman in the history of economic thought. Robinson studied economics at Cambridge University, where she made a career that lasted some fifty years. She was an unlikely candidate for success at Cambridge. A young woman in 1930 in a university dominated by men, she succeeded despite not having a remarkable academic record, a college fellowship, significant publications, or a powerful patron. In The Provocative Joan Robinson, Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes trace the strategies and tactics Robinson used to create her professional identity as a Cambridge economist in the 1930s, examining how she recruited mentors and advocates, carefully defined her objectives, and deftly pursued and exploited opportunities.

Aslanbeigui and Oakes demonstrate that Robinson’s professional identity was thoroughly embedded in a local scientific culture in which the Cambridge economists A. C. Pigou, John Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson, Piero Sraffa, Richard Kahn (Robinson’s closest friend on the Cambridge faculty), and her husband Austin Robinson were important figures. Although the economists Joan Robinson most admired—Pigou, Keynes, and their mentor Alfred Marshall—had discovered ideas of singular greatness, she was convinced that each had failed to grasp the essential theoretical significance of his own work. She made it her mission to recast their work both to illuminate their major contributions and to redefine a Cambridge tradition of economic thought. Based on the extensive correspondence of Robinson and her colleagues, The Provocative Joan Robinson is the story of a remarkable woman, the intellectual and social world of a legendary group of economists, and the interplay between ideas, ambitions, and disciplinary communities.

Part of a larger project to examine the Elizabethan politics of representation, Louis Montrose's The Purpose of Playing refigures the social and cultural context within which Elizabethan drama was created.

Montrose first locates the public and professional theater within the ideological and material framework of Elizabethan culture. He considers the role of the professional theater and theatricality in the cultural transformation that was concurrent with religious and socio-political change, and then concentrates upon the formal means by which Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays called into question the absolutist assertions of the Elizabethan state. Drawing dramatic examples from the genres of tragedy and history, Montrose finally focuses his cultural-historical perspective on A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Purpose of Playing elegantly demonstrates how language and literary imagination shape cultural value, belief, and understanding; social distinction and interaction; and political control and contestation.

"A woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs," Dr. Johnson pronounced. "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The prejudice embodied in this remark has persisted over time, impeding any proper assessment of the female preaching tradition and its role in shaping social and literary discourse. The Reader's Repentance recovers this tradition, and in doing so revises the history of nineteenth-century women's writing.

Christine L. Krueger persuasively argues that Evangelical Christianity, by assuming the spiritual equality of women and men and the moral superiority of middle-class women, opened a space for the linguistic empowerment of women and fostered the emergence of women orators and writers who, in complex and contradictory ways, became powerful public figures. In the light of unpublished or long out-of-print writing by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women preachers, Krueger shows how these women drew on religious language to critique forms of male domination, promote female political power, establish communities of women, and, most significantly, feminize social discourse. She traces the legacy of these preachers through the work of writers as diverse as Hannah More, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—women who, despite political differences, shared an evangelical strategy for placing women's concerns on the social agenda of their time.

Documenting and analyzing the tradition of women's preaching as a powerful and distinctly feminist force in the development of nineteenth-century social fiction, The Reader's Repentance reconstitutes a significant chapter in the history of women and culture. This original work will be of interest to students of women's history, literature, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society.

In 1593 the brilliant but controversial young playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house. The circumstances were shady, the official account—a violent quarrel over the bill, or "recknynge"—has been long regarded as dubious.

Here, in a tour de force of scholarship and ingenuity, Charles Nicholl penetrates four centuries of obscurity to reveal not only a complex and unsettling story of entrapment and betrayal, chimerical plot and sordid felonies, but also a fascinating vision of the underside of the Elizabethan world.

"Provides the sheer enjoyment of fiction, and might just be true."—Michael Kenney, Boston Globe

"Mr. Nicholl's glittering reconstruction of Marlowe's murder is only one of the many fascinating aspects of this book. Indeed, The Reckoning is equally compelling for its masterly evocation of a vanished world, a world of Elizabethan scholars, poets, con men, alchemists and spies, a world of Machiavellian malice, intrigue and dissent."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"The rich substance of the book is his detail, the thick texture of betrayal and evasion which was Marlowe's life."—Thomas Flanagan, Washington Post Book World

Winner of the Crime Writer's Gold Dagger Award for Nonfiction Thriller

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith.

As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.

Deregulation, revenge evictions, corruption, and day-to-day instability: these are realities becoming ever more familiar for those of us who rent our homes or apartments. At the same time, house prices are skyrocketing and the promise of homeownership is now an impossible dream for many. This is the rent-trap, an inescapable consequence of market-induced inequality.
 
Samir Jeraj and Rosie Walker offer the first in-depth case study of the private rental sector in the United Kingdom, exploring the rent-trap injustices in a first-world economy and exposing the powers that conspire to oppose regulation. A quarter of British MPs are landlords; rent strike is almost impossible; and sudden evictions are growing. Nevertheless, drawing on inspiration from movements in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and elsewhere, The Rent Trap shows how people are starting to fight back against the financial burdens, health risks, and vicious behavior of landlords, working to create a world of fairer, safer housing for all—lessons that extend well beyond the borders of the UK.

Valuable and timely in its long historical and critical perspective on the legacy of romanticism to Victorian art and thought, The Rescue of Romanticism is the first book-length study of the close intellectual relationship between Walter Pater and John Ruskin, the two most important Victorian critics of art. Kenneth Daley explores the work and thought of both writers in context with other Victorian writers, and enlarges the issues at stake between them, connecting these issues to ongoing artistic, cultural, and political concerns of the modern world.

Professor Daley gives a more finely honed picture than ever before of romanticism’s emergence as a literary concept in Victorian England, detailing the political differences that characterize the opposition between John Ruskin and his younger contemporary, Walter Pater, over the nature of romanticism. Individual chapters reassess the Victorian reception of such romantic figures as Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.

Daley demonstrates how Pater’s “modern” reading of romanticism emerged from Ruskin’s distrust of romanticism and from Ruskin’s arguments and examples defining pathetic fallacy. His discussion of Ruskin’s Oxford lectures and their timing in Pater’s developing career refresh the intersections of the two bodies of work and the portrait of the Victorian period in general.

This work presents analyses by experts on the rise of anew tide of conservative governments in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain in an attempt to find what, if any, common ideologies and programs unite them, with what results, in terms of institutional change and policy direction, have been, and what are the prospects for permanent change.

The Lost Generation has held the imagination of those who succeeded them, partly because the idea that modern war could be romantic, generous, and noble died with the casualties of that war. From this remove, it seems almost perverse that Britons, Germans, and Frenchmen of every social class eagerly rushed to the fields of Flanders and to misery and death.
In The Road to Armageddon Cecil Eby shows how the widely admired writers of English popular fiction and poetry contributed, at least in England, to a romantic militarism coupled with xenophobia that helped create the climate that made World War I seem almost inevitable.
Between the close of the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and the opening guns of 1914, the works of such widely read and admired writers as H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, J. M. Barrie, and Rupert Brooke, as well as a host of now almost forgotten contemporaries, bombarded their avid readers with strident warnings of imminent invasions and prophecies of the collapse of civilization under barbarian onslaught and internal moral collapse.
Eby seems these narratives as growing from and in turn fueling a collective neurosis in which dread of coming war coexisted with an almost loving infatuation with it. The author presents a vivid panorama of a militant mileau in which warfare on a scale hitherto unimaginable was largely coaxed into being by works of literary imagination. The role of covert propaganda, concealed in seemingly harmless literary texts, is memorably illustrated.

In the 1870s and 1880s, as the United Kingdom avidly built its empire in Asia and Africa, its rampant expansionism came under the scrutiny of its first and oldest colony, Ireland. Some Irish considered themselves loyal subjects and proud participants in the imperial enterprise, but others drew sharp analogies between the crown's ongoing conquests of distant lands and its centuries-old oppression of their homeland. The Irish were aware of how the British army had brutally suppressed Afghans, Egyptians, Zulus, and Boers—and how returning troops were then redeployed to quash dissent in Ireland. In Irish eyes, misrule by British officials and absentee landlords mirrored imperial oppression across the globe.

Paul Townend shows that a growing critique of British imperialism shaped a rapidly evolving Irish political consciousness and was a crucial factor giving momentum to the Home Rule and Land League campaigns. Examining newspaper accounts, the rich political cartoons of the era, and the rhetoric and actions of Irish nationalists, he argues that anti-imperialism was a far more important factor in the formation of the independence movement than has been previously recognized in historical scholarship.

The story of the rise of radicalism in the early nineteenth century has often been simplified into a fable about progressive social change. The diverse social movements of the era—religious, political, regional, national, antislavery, and protemperance—are presented as mere strands in a unified tapestry of labor and democratic mobilization. Taking aim at this flawed view of radicalism as simply the extreme end of a single dimension of progress, Craig Calhoun emphasizes the coexistence of different kinds of radicalism, their tensions, and their implications.

 

The Roots of Radicalism reveals the importance of radicalism’s links to preindustrial culture and attachments to place and local communities, as well the ways in which journalists who had been pushed out of “respectable” politics connected to artisans and other workers. Calhoun shows how much public recognition mattered to radical movements and how religious, cultural, and directly political—as well as economic—concerns motivated people to join up. Reflecting two decades of research into social movement theory and the history of protest, The Roots of Radicalism offers compelling insights into the past that can tell us much about the present, from American right-wing populism to democratic upheavals in North Africa.

In The Ruling Passion, Christopher Lane examines the relationship between masculinity, homosexual desire, and empire in British colonialist and imperialist fictions at the turn of the twentieth century. Questioning the popular assumption that Britain’s empire functioned with symbolic efficiency on sublimated desire, this book presents a counterhistory of the empire’s many layers of conflict and ambivalence.
Through attentive readings of sexual and political allegory in the work of Kipling, Forster, James, Beerbohm, Firbank, and others—and deft use of psychoanalytic theory—The Ruling Passion interprets turbulent scenes of masculine identification and pleasure, power and mastery, intimacy and antagonism. By foregrounding the shattering effects of male homosexuality and interracial desire, and by insisting on the centrality of unconscious fantasy and the death drive, The Ruling Passion examines the startling recurrence of colonial failure in narratives of symbolic doubt and ontological crisis. Lane argues compellingly that Britain can progress culturally and politically only when it has relinquished its residual fantasies of global mastery.

Eileen Cleere argues in this interdisciplinary study that mid-century discoveries about hygiene and cleanliness not only influenced public health, civic planning, and medical practice but also powerfully reshaped the aesthetic values of the British middle class. By focusing on paintings, domestic architecture, and interior design, The Sanitary Arts: Aesthetic Culture and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns shows that the “sanitary aesthetic” significantly transformed the taste of the British public over the nineteenth century by equating robust health and cleanliness with new definitions of beauty and new experiences of aisthesis. Covering everything from connoisseurs to custodians, Cleere demonstrates that Victorian art critics, engineers, and architects—and even novelists from George Eliot to Charles Dickens, Charlotte Mary Young to Sarah Grand—all participated in a vital cultural debate over hygiene, cleanliness, and aesthetic enlightenment.
 
The Sanitary Arts covers the mid-forties controversy over cleaning the dirt from the pictures in the National Gallery, the debate over decorative “dust traps” in the overstuffed Victorian home, and the late-century proliferation of hygienic breeding principles as a program of aesthetic perfectibility, to demonstrate the unintentionally collaborative work of seemingly unrelated events and discourses. Bringing figures like Edwin Chadwick and John Ruskin into close conversation about the sanitary status of beauty in a variety of forms and environments, Cleere forcefully demonstrates that aesthetic development and scientific discovery can no longer be understood as separate or discrete forces of cultural change.

In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin placed sympathy at the crux of morality in a civilized human society. His idea buttressed the belief that white, upper-class, educated men deserved their sense of superiority by virtue of good breeding. It also implied that societal progress could be steered by envisioning a new blueprint for sympathy that redefined moral actions carried out in sympathy's name. Rob Boddice joins a daring intellectual history of sympathy to a portrait of how the first Darwinists defined and employed it. As Boddice shows, their interpretations of Darwin's ideas sparked a cacophonous discourse intent on displacing previous notions of sympathy. Scientific and medical progress demanded that "cruel" practices like vivisection and compulsory vaccination be seen as moral for their ultimate goal of alleviating suffering. Some even saw the so-called unfit--natural targets of sympathy--as a danger to society and encouraged procreation by the "fit" alone. Right or wrong, these early Darwinists formed a moral economy that acted on a new system of ethics, reconceptualized obligations, and executed new duties. Boddice persuasively argues that the bizarre, even dangerous formulations of sympathy they invented influence society and civilization in the present day.

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now updated with a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship.
 
“An excellent book.”—Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
 
“Timely and highly readable. . . . A book which every scientist curious about our predecessors should read.”—Trevor Pinch, New Scientist

“Shapin's account is informed, nuanced, and articulated with clarity. . . . This is not to attack or devalue science but to reveal its richness as the human endeavor that it most surely is. . . . Shapin's book is an impressive achievement.”—David C. Lindberg, Science
 
“It's hard to believe that there could be a more accessible, informed or concise account. . . . The Scientific Revolution should be a set text in all the disciplines. And in all the indisciplines, too.”—Adam Phillips, London Review of Books

The Scots Irish were one of early Pennsylvania’s largest non-English immigrant groups. They were stereotyped as frontier ruffians and Indian haters. In The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania, historian Judith Ridner insists that this immigrant group was socio-economically diverse. Servants and free people, individuals and families, and political exiles and refugees from Ulster, they not only pioneered new frontier settlements, but also populated the state’s cities—Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—and its towns, such as Lancaster, Easton, and Carlisle. 

Ridner provides a much-overdue synthesis and reassessment of this immigrant group, tracing a century of Scotch-Irish migration from 1720 to 1820. These men and women brought their version of Ulster to the colonies in their fierce commitments to family, community, entrepreneurship, Presbyterianism, republican politics, and higher education. The settlements they founded across the state, including many farms, businesses, meetinghouses, and colleges, ensured that Pennsylvania would be their cradle in America, and these settlements stand as powerful testaments to their legacy to the state’s history and development.

One of the most important voices of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay is largely recognized for his work during the 1920s, which includes a major collection of poems, Harlem Shadows, as well as a critically acclaimed novel, Home to Harlem. But McKay was never completely comfortable with his literary reputation during this period. Throughout his world travels, he saw himself as an English lyricist.

In this compelling examination of the life and works of this complex poet, novelist, journalist, and short story writer, Josh Gosciak sheds light on McKay’s literary contributions beyond his interactions with Harlem Renaissance artists and writers. Working within English literary traditions, McKay crafted a verse out of hybridity and diaspora. Gosciak shows how he reinvigorated a modern pastoral through his encounters with some of the major aesthetic and political movements of the late Victorian and early modern periods.

Exploring new archival material as well as many of McKay’s lesser known poetic works, TheShadowed Country provides a unique interpretation of the writings of this major author.

Immortalized in The Last of the Mohicans, the True Story of a Pivotal Battle in the British and French War for the North American Continent
The opening years of the French and Indian War were disastrous for the British. In 1755 General Braddock’s troops were routed at the Battle of Monongahela and by the middle of 1756 Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario had fallen. Hindered by quarrelsome provincial councils, incompetent generals, and the redcoats’ inability to adapt to wilderness warfare, Britain was losing the war. In 1757 the 35th Regiment of Foot stepped into the breach. A poorly trained assortment of conscripts, old soldiers, and convicted criminals led by Lieutenant Colonel George Monro, the regiment was destined to take center stage in the most controversial event of the war. Fort William Henry on the southern shore of New York’s Lake George was a key fortification supporting British interests along the frontier with French America. Monro and his regiment occupied the fort in the spring of 1757 while Britain planned its attack on the key French fortress at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia. Learning that most of Britain’s military resources were allocated to Louisbourg, the French launched a campaign along the weakened frontier. French Commander Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and his American Indian allies laid siege to Fort William Henry; Monro could not hold out and was forced to surrender. As part of the terms, the British regiment, colonial militia, and their camp followers would be allowed safe passage to nearby Fort Edward. The French watched in horror, however, as their Indian allies attacked the British column after it left the fort, an episode that sparked outrage and changed the tactics of the war.

Seen through the eyes of participants such as Louis Antoine de Bougainville, a scholarly young aide-de-camp, Jabez Fitch, an amiable Connecticut sergeant, and Kisensik, a proud Nipissing chief whose father once met Louis XIV in the marbled halls of Versailles, The Siege of Fort William Henry: A Year on the Northeastern Frontier uses contemporary newspaper reports, official documents, private letters, and published memoirs to bring the narrative to life. From Indian councils on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River and bustling military camps in northern New York to the narrative’s bloody denouement on the shores of Lake George, the reader is immersed in the colorful, yet brutal world of eighteenth-century northeastern America.

Although never previously studied in any depth, the sinking of the Lisbon Maru was the most costly American on British ‘Friendly Fire’ incident of the Second World War. Of the 4,500 of Hong Kong’s garrison who perished during the war, 1,000 died directly or indirectly from this sinking. From American, British, Hong Kong and Japanese sources, this book reconstructs the fateful voyage of the Lisbon Maru, and the experiences of the captives, the captors, and those on board the submarine that sank her. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the ‘Hellships’ that caused the deaths of almost 20,000 Allied Prisoners of War during the Second World War, or the experiences of Allied POWs in Japan.

The Social Life of Criticism explores the cultural representation of the female critic in Victorian Britain, focusing especially on how women writers imagined themselves—in literary essays, periodical reviews, and even works of fiction—as participants in complex networks of literary exchange. Kimberly Stern proposes that in response to the “male collectivity” prominently featured in critical writings, female critics adopted a social and sociological understanding of the profession, often reimagining the professional networks and communities they were so eager to join.

This engaging study begins by looking at the eighteenth century, when critical writing started to assume the institutional and generic structures we associate with it today, and examines a series of case studies that illuminate how women writers engaged with the forms of intellectual sociability that defined nineteenth-century criticism—including critical dialogue, the club, the salon, and the publishing firm. In doing so, it clarifies the fascinating rhetorical and political debates surrounding the figure of the female critic and charts how women writers worked both within and against professional communities. Ultimately, Stern contends that gender was a formative influence on critical practice from the very beginning, presenting the history of criticism as a history of gender politics.

While firmly grounded in literary studies, The Social Life of Criticism combines an attention to historical context with a deep investment in feminist scholarship, social theory, and print culture. The book promises to be of interest not only to professional academics and graduate students in nineteenth-century literature but also to scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including literature, intellectual history, cultural studies, gender theory, and sociology.
 

Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and intellectual boundaries have heavily influenced our views of medieval Germany. Historians have looked back to the Middle Ages for the origins of modern European political crises. They concluded that while England and France built nation-states during the medieval era, Germany--lacking a unified nation-state--remained uniquely backward and undeveloped.

Employing a comparative social history, Huffman reassesses traditional national historiographies of medieval diplomacy and political life. Germany is integrated into Anglo-French notions of western Europe and shown to be both an integral player in western European political history as well as a political community that was as fully developed as those of medieval England or France.

The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy offers a study of the social dynamics of relations between political communities. In particular, the Anglo-French political communities do not appear as state and constitution builders, while the German political community is not as a state and constitution destroyer. The book concludes by encouraging medievalists to integrate the German kingdom into their intellectual constructs of medieval Europe.

This book is an essential history of medieval Germany. It bridges the gaps between Anglo-French and German scholarship and political and social history. Joseph Huffman makes available German-language scholarship. Both English and German history is integrated in an accessible and interesting way. The historiographical implications of this study will be far-reaching.

Joseph P. Huffman is Associate Professor of History and Political Science, Messiah College.

From the Bible’s “Canst thou raise leviathan with a hook?” to Captain Ahab’s “From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!,” from the trials of Job to the legends of Sinbad, whales have breached in the human imagination as looming figures of terror, power, confusion, and mystery.

In the twentieth century, however, our understanding of and relationship to these superlatives of creation underwent some astonishing changes, and with The Sounding of the Whale, D. Graham Burnett tells the fascinating story of the transformation of cetaceans from grotesque monsters, useful only as wallowing kegs of fat and fertilizer, to playful friends of humanity, bellwethers of environmental devastation, and, finally, totems of the counterculture in the Age of Aquarius. When Burnett opens his story, ignorance reigns: even Nature was misclassifying whales at the turn of the century, and the only biological study of the species was happening in gruesome Arctic slaughterhouses. But in the aftermath of World War I, an international effort to bring rational regulations to the whaling industry led to an explosion of global research—and regulations that, while well-meaning, were quashed, or widely flouted, by whaling nations, the first shot in a battle that continues to this day. The book closes with a look at the remarkable shift in public attitudes toward whales that began in the 1960s, as environmental concerns and new discoveries about whale behavior combined to make whales an object of sentimental concern and public adulation.

A sweeping history, grounded in nearly a decade of research, The Sounding of the Whale tells a remarkable story of how science, politics, and simple human wonder intertwined to transform the way we see these behemoths from below.

Too "artistic" for political history, too political for the history of art, the visual history of the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain has long been neglected. In this comprehensive and pathbreaking study, Lisa Tickner discusses and illustrates the suffragist use of spectacle—the design of banners, posters and postcards, the orchestration of mass demonstrations—in an unprecedented propaganda campaign.

The Springs of Liberty takes up questions of literary history and theory and explores sources of power harnessed by modern political doctrines and the journalism that conveys them to the public. These forces of opinion are traced to a tradition deeper and older than either: satire. In that tradition—its power, diversity, and license—the author locates the spirit of free speech.

Many of the oldest and largest Western cities today are undergoing massive economic decline. The State and the City deals with a key issue in the political economy of cities—the role of the state. Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King argue that theoreticians from both the left and the right have underestimated the significance of state action for cities. Grounding theory in empirical evidence, they argue that policies of the local and national state have a major impact on urban well-being.

Gurr and King's analysis assumes modern states have their own interests, institutional momentum, and the capacity to act with relative autonomy. Their historically based analysis begins with an account of the evolution of the Western state's interest in the viability of cities since the industrial revolution. Their agument extends to the local level, examining the nature of the local state and its autonomy from national political and economic forces.

Using cross-national evidence, Gurr and King examine specific problems of urban policy in the United States and Britain. In the United States, for example, they show how the dramatic increases in federal assistance to cities in the 1930s and the 1960s were made in response to urban crises, which simultaneously threatened national interests and offered opportunities for federal expansion of power. As a result, national and local states now play significant material and regulatory roles that can have as much impact on cities as all private economic activities.

A comparative analysis of thirteen American cities reflects the range and impact of the state's activities at the urban level. Boston, they argue, has become the archetypical postindustrial public city: half of its population and personal income are directly dependent on government spending. While Gurr and King are careful to delineate the limits to the extent and effectiveness of state intervention, they conclude that these limits are much broader than formerly thought. Ultimately, their evidence suggests that the continued decline of most of the old industrial cities is the result of public decisions to allow their economic fate to be determined in the private sector.