Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book, first published in 2000, examines the diversity of protest from 1780 to 1840 and how it altered during this period of extreme change. This textbook covers all forms of protest, including the Gordon Riots of 1780, food riots, Luddism, the radical political reform movement and Peterloo in 1819, and the less well researched anti-enclosure, anti-New Poor Law riots, arson and other forms of 'terroristic' action, up to the advent of Chartism in the 1830s. Archer evaluates the problematic nature of source materials and conflicting interpretations leading to debate, and reviews the historiography and methodology of protest studies. This study of popular protest gives a unique perspective on the social history and conditions of this crucial period and will provide a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

A clothier and a deeply religious man, Joseph Ryder faithfully kept a diary from 1733 until his death, 2.5 million words later, in 1768. Recently rediscovered and interpreted by the author of this book, Ryder's diary provides a real-life perspective on the relationship between capitalism and Protestantism at a time when Britain was rapidly changing from a traditional to a modern society. It also provides insights into the early modern family, the birth of industrialisation, the history of Puritanism, the origins of Unitarianism, melancholy, and the making of the British middle class.

On June 11, 1771, a group of thieves broke into a private house in Chelsea, a village outside London. The event ended with the killing of one of the servants in addition to the theft itself. Soon enough it became known that the perpetrators were Jewish and the case became a cause célèbre. The perpetrators were apprehended five months later, put on trial, and sentenced to death. The case attracted wide public attention and resonated into the nineteenth century. What made it a catalyst of such broad public agitation? I argue that it became a compelling case because it effectively featured the contradictions that were embedded in the contemporary imagery of the Jew—specifically of the masculine Jew—oscillating between an assimilated gentleman and a perilous criminal who poses a constant threat to the English woman. At the same time, and relatedly, it touched on the borders of Englishness. The question of whether Jews could be part of English civil society became a contested issue in the second half of the eighteenth century, a debate that reflected the uncertainty of the definitions of both Jewishness and English identity. As we shall see, gender and masculinity were hotspots of vulnerability for both concerns, and they figured prominently in depictions of the Chelsea case.

This book examines the impact siblings had on eighteenth-century English families and society. Using evidence from letters, diaries, probate disputes, court transcripts, prescriptive literature, and portraiture it argues that siblings had to constantly negotiate between prescribed equality and practiced inequalities.

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet, their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and doll's garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

The Decline of Life is an ambitious and absorbing study of old age in eighteenth-century England. Drawing on a wealth of sources - literature, correspondence, poor house and workhouse documents and diaries - Susannah Ottaway considers a wide range of experiences and expectations of age in the period, and demonstrates that the central concern of ageing individuals was to continue to live as independently as possible into their last days. Ageing men and women stayed closely connected to their families and communities, in relationships characterized by mutual support and reciprocal obligations. Despite these aspects of continuity, however, older individuals' ability to maintain their autonomy, and the nature of the support available to them once they did fall into necessity declined significantly in the last decades of the century. As a result, old age was increasingly marginalized. Historical demographers, historical gerontologists, sociologists, social historians and women's historians will find this book essential reading.

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2001 In eighteenth-century America, no centralized system of welfare existed to assist people who found themselves without food, medical care, or shelter. Any poor relief available was provided through local taxes, and these funds were quickly exhausted. By the end of the century, state and national taxes levied to help pay for the Revolutionary War further strained municipal budgets. In order to control homelessness, vagrancy, and poverty, New England towns relied heavily on the warning out system inherited from English law. This was a process in which community leaders determined the legitimate hometown of unwanted persons or families in order to force them to leave, ostensibly to return to where they could receive care. The warning-out system alleviated the expense and responsibility for the general welfare of the poor in any community, and placed the burden on each town to look after its own. But homelessness and poverty were problems as onerous in early America as they are today, and the system of warning out did little to address the fundamental causes of social disorder. Ultimately the warning-out system gave way to the establishment of general poorhouses and other charities. But the documents that recorded details about the lives of those who were warned out provide an extraordinary—and until now forgotten—history of people on the margin. Unwelcome Americans puts a human face on poverty in early America by recovering the stories of forty New Englanders who were forced to leave various communities in Rhode Island. Rhode Island towns kept better and more complete warning-out records than other areas in New England, and because the official records include those who had migrated to Rhode Island from other places, these documents can be relied upon to describe the experiences of poor people across the region. The stories are organized from birth to death, beginning with the lives of poor children and young adults, followed by families and single adults, and ending with the testimonies of the elderly and dying. Through meticulous research of historical records, Herndon has managed to recover voices that have not been heard for more than two hundred years, in the process painting a dramatically different picture of family and community life in early New England. These life stories tell us that those who were warned out were predominantly unmarried women with or without children, Native Americans, African Americans, and destitute families. Through this remarkable reconstruction, Herndon provides a corrective to the narratives of the privileged that have dominated the conversation in this crucial period of American history, and the lives she chronicles give greater depth and a richer dimension to our understanding of the growth of American social responsibility.

Examinations of the controversy surrounding the Jewish Naturalization Act (or ‘Jew Bill’) of 1753 have tended to concentrate on the role of either systematic anti-Semitism or political expediency in attempting to explain the sudden, violent uproar that the Act occasioned. While both of these approaches shed light on the controversy, they ignore the central role of prophecy in debates surrounding the Act, both for its proponents and opponents. Both groups drew upon a reservoir of Restorationist images of the Jews, built on the biblical prophecies of a Jewish return to Palestine. For opponents, the ‘Jew Bill’ represented an attempt to discredit prophecies of Jewish separation and denigrate scripture. Restorationist concepts were used to portray the Jews as violent and disloyal, and to suggest that if naturalised they would use England as a staging ground for their conquest of Palestine. For supporters of the Act, naturalisation offered England a unique opportunity to fulfil prophecy. They saw the Act as allowing the nation to take the first steps in fulfilling the apocalyptic role God had prepared for it as the nation that would ‘bless’ the Jews. Both sides of the debate therefore used Restorationism to negotiate concepts of Englishness and alterity. This paper constructs its argument by examining a range of material surrounding the controversy including parliamentary debates, sermons, pamphlets and newspaper reports. It argues for the importance of a nuanced understanding of the role of religion in eighteenth-century political debates.