Modern history

Christopher Phillips
April 30, 2020

The war of 1914–1918 was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the First World War were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialised to be operated by professional soldiers alone. In Civilian Expertise at War, Christopher Phillips examines the relationship between industrial society and industrial warfare through the lens of Britain’s transport experts. He analyses the multiple connections between the army, the government, and the senior executives of some of pre-war Britain’s largest industrial enterprises to illustrate...

Sam Manning
March 31, 2020

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century. UK cinema attendance grew significantly in the Second World War and peaked in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though ‘going to the pictures’ remained a popular pastime for the remainder of the forties, the transition from war to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the fifties, a range of factors including increased affluence, the growth of television ownership, population shifts and the diversification of leisure activities led to rapid declines in attendance. By 1965, admissions had plummeted to 327 million and the cinema held a far more marginal existence in the nation’s leisure habits. Cinema...

Edward Owens
October 15, 2019

The Family Firm presents the first major historical analysis of the transformation of the royal household’s public relations strategy in the period 1932-1953. Beginning with King George V’s first Christmas broadcast, Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new phase in the House of Windsor’s approach to publicity.

This book also focuses on audience reception by exploring how British readers, listeners, and viewers made sense of royalty’s new media image. It argues that the monarchy’s deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these...

Edited by Courtney J. Campbell, Allegra Giovine, and Jennifer Keating
September 2, 2019

How is emptiness made and what historical purpose does it serve? What cultural, material and natural work goes into maintaining ‘nothingness’? Why have a variety of historical actors, from colonial powers to artists and urban dwellers, sought to construct, control and maintain (physically and discursively) empty space, and by which processes is emptiness discovered, visualised and reimagined?

This volume draws together contributions from authors working on landscapes and rurality, along with national and imperial narratives, from Brazil to Russia and Ireland. It considers the visual, including the art of Edward Hopper and the work of the British Empire Marketing Board, while concluding with a section that examines constructions of...

Senia Pašeta
January 1, 2019
Professor Senia Pašeta argues that our understanding of modern Irish and British politics would be enormously enriched if we recognized two things: that the Irish and British suffrage movements were deeply connected; and that the women’s suffrage movement across the United Kingdom was shaped in fundamental ways by the Irish Question from the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In other words, the women’s suffrage movement did not exist in a political vacuum. It interacted with, influenced and was influenced by the other main political questions of the day, and with the main political question of the day - Ireland.
Edited by Andreas Kramer and Ritchie Robertson
December 1, 2018
Historical research has dispelled a number of myths surrounding Word War I: whereas the outbreak of war was greeted by the urban middle classes with frenzied enthusiasm, in working-class areas and smaller towns the mood was more of foreboding. Little attention has so far been paid to those who opposed the war and its underlying culture of militarism, though opposition to war and militarism has a distinguished German pedigree. This volume explores opposition to war and militarism among a range of German-language authors in a period roughly defined by two international bestsellers: Suttner’s 'Die Waffen nieder' (1889) and Remarque’s 'Im Westen nichts Neues' (1928). Major figures (Kraus, Schnitzler, Zweig) have...
Edited by Elizabeth Baigent and Ben Cowell
March 25, 2016
This volume reassesses the life and work of Octavia Hill, housing reformer, open space campaigner, co-founder of the National Trust, founder of the Army Cadet Force, and the first woman to be invited to sit on a royal commission. In her lifetime she was widely regarded as an authority on a broad range of social problems. Yet despite her early pre-eminence, and the remarkable success of the institutions which she helped to found, Hill fell from public favour in the twentieth century. This book provides a nuanced portrait of Hill and her work in a broader context of social change, reflecting recent scholarship on nineteenth-century society in general, and on philanthropy and preservation, and women’s role in them, in particular.
Edited by Donnacha Sean Lucey and Virginia Crossman
January 23, 2015
This volume explores developments in health and social care in Ireland and Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The central objectives are to highlight the role of voluntarism in healthcare, to examine healthcare in local and regional contexts, and to provide comparative perspectives. The collection is based on two interconnected and overlapping research themes: voluntarism and healthcare, and regionalism/localism and healthcare. It includes two synoptic overviews by leading authorities in the field, and ten case studies focusing on particular aspects of voluntary and/or regional healthcare in Ireland and Britain.