Browse

As the baby boom generation reaches retirement and old age, bringing unprecedented challenges, this study of aging could not be more timely. Historian Charlotte Greenhalgh examines ignored testimony to urge us to hear the voices of elderly people in Britain throughout the twentieth century. To do so, she probes the work of Peter Townsend, one of Britain’s most celebrated social scientists, and reveals the significant contributions that elderly Britons have made to social research since 1900. The study is the first to unite the public and private histories of old age and to investigate what their connections reveal about attitudes towards old age. This book helps us to understand the experience of growing old — what has changed and what stays the same across time.

Some of the world’s first refugee camps and concentration camps appeared in the British Empire in the late 19^th century. Famine camps detained emaciated refugees and billeted relief applicants on public works projects; plague camps segregated populations suspected of harboring disease and accommodated those evacuated from unsanitary locales; concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer War, meanwhile, adapted a technology of colonial welfare in the context of war. Wartime camps in South Africa were simultaneously instruments of military violence and humanitarian care. While providing food and shelter to destitute refugees and disciplining and reforming a population cast as uncivilized and unhygienic, British officials in South Africa applied a developing set of imperial attitudes and approaches that also governed the development of plague and famine camps in India. More than the outcomes of military counterinsurgency, Boer War camps were registers of cultural discourses about civilization, class, gender, racial purity and sanitary pollution. Although British spokesmen regarded camps as hygienic enclaves, epidemic diseases decimated inmate populations creating a damaging political scandal. In order to curb mortality and introduce order, the British government mobilized a wide variety of disciplinary and sanitary lessons assembled at Indian plague and famine camps and at other kindred institutions like metropolitan workhouses. Authorities imported officials from India with experience managing plague and famine camps to systematize and rationalize South Africa’s wartime concentration camps. Ultimately, improvements to inmates’ health and well-being served to legitimize camps as technologies of liberal empire and biopolitical security.

This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality. Looking at the dramatic transformations of the era—changes in the family and in the law, the emergence of the world's first police force, the growth of a national media, and more—the book asks how perceptions of same-sex desire changed between men, in families, and in the larger society. To illuminate these questions, it mines a rich trove of previously unexamined sources, including hundreds of articles pertaining to sex between men that appeared in mainstream newspapers. Relating this topic to broader economic, social, and political changes in the early nineteenth century, this book sheds new light on the central question of how and when sex acts became identities.

This book unravels the intertwining threads of the protracted agony of France's war with Algeria, the American role in the fall of the Fourth Republic, the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle, and the decisive post-war power of the United States. At its heart is an analysis of how Washington helped bring de Gaulle to power and a penetrating revisionist account of his Algerian policy. Departing from widely held interpretations of the Algerian War, the book approaches the conflict as an international diplomatic crisis whose outcome was primarily dependent on French relations with Washington, the NATO alliance, and the United Nations, rather than on military engagement. It makes extensive use of previously unexamined documents from the Department of State, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and heretofore secret files of the Archives of the French Army at Vincennes and the Colonial Ministry at Aix-en-Provence. The book argues convincingly that de Gaulle always intended to keep Algeria French, in line with his goal to make France the center of a reorganized French union of autonomous but dependent African states and the heart of a Europe of cooperating states. Such a union, which the French called Eurafrica, would further France's chance to be an equal partner with Britain and the United States in a reordered “Free World.” In recent years the Algerian War has reclaimed its place in popular memory in France. Its interpreters have continued to view the conflict as a national, internal drama and de Gaulle as the second-time savior who ended French participation in a ruinous colonial war. But by analyzing the conflict in terms of French foreign policy, the book shows the pivotal role of the United States and counters certain political myths that portray de Gaulle as an emancipator of colonial peoples.

Victorian England has long been recognized as one of the “homes” of modern public health, influencing developments in Europe, the United States and, eventually, much beyond. Recent scholarship, however, has served to undermine any clear sense of the modernity of what was once seen as a progressive, modernizing project that served as the prelude to the emergence of the twentieth-century welfare state. All that once seemed solidly modern—progress and developmental direction; science and humanitarian endeavor; revolutions and rapid change and innovation—has melted away amid an insistence on contingent choices, as well as invariably complex mixtures of science and politics, continuity and change, and theories and practices.This account restores the modernity of public health in Victorian and Edwardian England. It does so by arguing that it was during the early Victorian period when a modern sense of historical progress and administrative—even utopian—possibility began to inform public health reform, which henceforth became a matter of building bureaucratic and technological systems of unprecedented size and complexity. It was also at this point when a series of modern, dialectical processes concerning different levels, agents, and temporalities of governance began to structure how England’s public health system was conceived and practiced as a matter of ongoing reform. Centralization and localization; bureaucratization and democratization; and greater chronological compression and greater temporal depth and historicity—it was in the grip ofthese dynamic processes that a modern public health system was forged in England.

The history of psychiatric institutions and the psychiatric profession is by now familiar: asylums multiplied in nineteenth-century England and psychiatry established itself as a medical specialty around the same time. We are, however, largely ignorant about madness at home in this key period: what were the family's attitudes toward its insane member, what were patient's lives like when they remained at home? Until now, most accounts have suggested that the family and community gradually abdicated responsibility for taking care of mentally ill members to the doctors who ran the asylums. However, this study, painting a picture of how families viewed and managed madness, suggests that the family actually played a critical role in caring for the insane and in the development of psychiatry itself. This social history includes several case histories, looks closely at little-studied source material including press reports of formal legal declarations of insanity, or Commissions of Lunacy, and also provides an historical perspective on our own day and age, when the mentally ill are mainly treated in the home and community.

This book tells the remarkable story of a complex forgery uncovered in London in 1775. The Perreau-Rudd case—filled with scandal, deceit, and mystery—preoccupied a public hungry for sensationalism. Peopled with such familiar figures as John Wilkes, King George III, Lord Mansfield, and James Boswell, this story reveals the deep anxieties of this period of English capitalism. The case acts as a prism that reveals the hopes, fears, and prejudices of that society. Above all, this episode presents a parable of the 1770s, when London was the center of European finance and national politics, of fashionable life and tell-all journalism, of empire achieved and empire lost. The crime, a hanging offense, came to light with the arrest of identical twin brothers, Robert and Daniel Perreau, after the former was detained trying to negotiate a forged bond. At their arraignment they both accused Daniel's mistress, Margaret Caroline Rudd, of being responsible for the crime. The brothers' trials coincided with the first reports of bloodshed in the American colonies at Lexington and Concord and successfully competed for space in the newspapers. From March until the following January, people could talk of little other than the fate of the Perreaus and the impending trial of Mrs. Rudd. The participants told wildly different tales and offered strikingly different portraits of themselves. The press was filled with letters from concerned or angry correspondents. The public, deeply divided over who was guilty, was troubled by evidence that suggested not only that fair might be foul, but that it might not be possible to decide which was which.

Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. This book emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. It follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a “battle plan” especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the “right to preach” and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the “Hallelujah Lasses,” the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. The book fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.

Late-nineteenth-century Britain saw the privileged classes forsake society balls and gatherings to turn their considerable resources to investigating and relieving poverty. By the 1890s at least half a million women were involved in philanthropy, particularly in London. This book collects a fascinating array of the writings of these “lady explorers,” who were active in the east, south, and central London slums from around 1870 until the end of World War I. Contributors range from the well-known, including Annie Besant, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Beatrice Webb (then Potter), to the obscure. The collection reclaims an important group of writers whose representations of urban poverty have been eclipsed by better-known male authors such as Charles Dickens and Jack London.

It was a common charge among black radicals in Britain in the 1960s that Britons needed to start “thinking black.” As state and society consolidated around a revived politics of whiteness, thinking black, they felt, was necessary for all who sought to build a liberated future out of Britain’s imperial past. Thinking Black reveals black radical Britain’s wide cultural-political formation, tracing it across new institutions of black civil society and connecting it to decolonization and black liberation across the Atlantic world. A new history of black activism that retells the formation of New Left politics in Britain, this book shows how, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, black radicalism defined what it meant to be black and what it meant to be radical in Britain. Chapters explore the growth of British black radicalism through the U.S. and Caribbean Black Power movements; how activists negotiated gendered and ethnic difference and sought to utilize and transform new black expressive cultures; the popularization of black critiques of the British state; how black studies reformulated British education politics; and intellectual responses to conflicts between young black people and the police. The book closes with the decline of this politics in the mid-1980s, placing it in its national and international contexts.