Conference Review: Organise! Organise! Organise! Collective Action, Associational Culture and the Politics of Organisation in the British Isles, c.1790-1914, 20-21 July 2023 Dr Dave Steele, University of Warwick @dr_davesteele This conference was supported by a Social History Society Small Grant. It was also supported by the British Agricultural History Society, the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, … Continued
Waltraud Ernst, Oxford Brookes University wernst@brookes.ac.uk Thomas Müller, Ulm University th.mueller@zfp-zentrum.de This new book addresses one of the central debates in the history of alcohol and intoxication: the supposed ‘medicalisation’ of alcohol use from the nineteenth century onwards. The editors argue that many cultures understood the link between overconsumption of intoxicating beverages and the deterioration … Continued
Dr Howard Webber, independent scholar hwebber@metronet.co.uk You can learn a lot about the strength of a movement by looking at its opponents. It became clear that the wonderfully named League of Audiences was worth a deeper look when I discovered that T S Eliot had devoted an essay to dissing it. The League of Audiences … Continued
Joe Saunders, University of York jes593@york.ac.uk I give and bequeath to William Leeke Stationer sometime myne apprentice, in respect of such paines as he is to take as one of the Overseers of this my wyll the… somme of Twentie shillings” In September 1602 this bequest was put into the will of Francis Coldocke, Stationer … Continued
Hester Barron, University of Sussex H.Barron@sussex.ac.uk Most of the writing for my new monograph, The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London, was done during the pandemic. The lockdowns were a strange time to be writing anything, but to be completing a book which reflected on the purpose of school felt … Continued
Natasha Preger, King’s College London natasha.preger@kcl.ac.uk We are delighted to share this blog, which was runner up in the 2022 SHS Postgraduate Prize. You can read the announcement here. He begins his week’s work at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon; he ends it at half-past ten on Sunday morning; and at any time during that … Continued
Beckie Rutherford, University of Warwick b.rutherford@warwick.ac.uk @B_Rutherford_ We are delighted to share this blog, which is winner of the 2022 SHS Postgraduate Prize. You can read the announcement here. In 1980, Nabil Shaban (a disabled student and aspiring actor) and Richard Tomlinson (an English lecturer at Hereward College in Coventry) co-founded Graeae Theatre Company. It … Continued
James A. S. Sunderland, University of Oxford james.sunderland@merton.ox.ac.uk @JamesSMandate ‘I am a Zionist – and so I have come to Palestine,’ says Ruth, a young woman in Tel Aviv in the late 1930s. She is sat in a café opposite twenty-year-old British journalist Barbara Board. Unlike her male colleagues who were always clambering to grab … Continued
Dr Lorinda Cramer, Australian Catholic University lorinda.cramer@acu.edu.au Some consider them a symbol of modern masculinity: a marker of business, power and authority. Others call them a uniform. More still see them as stuffy and overly formal. I’m referring, of course, to men’s suits. Suit-wearing has a complex and fascinating history across the twentieth century, so … Continued
Simon P. Newman, University of Glasgow and University of Wisconsin Jack was one of more than two hundred enslaved people who escaped from their enslavers in London during the second half of the century. There were no doubt many more, but we know about these few because of advertisements like these that appeared in London’s … Continued
