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"Great Britain. History."
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Digging up Britain : ten discoveries, a million years of history /
Britain has long been obsessed with its own history and identity, as an island nation besieged by invaders from beyond the seas: the Romans, Vikings and Normans. The long saga of prehistory is often forgotten. But our understanding of our past is changing. In the last decade, archaeological discoveries have shed new light on those who've gone before us, altering the way we think about our history. This book presents ten of the most exciting--and surprising--of these discoveries.
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Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain
This book explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the 18th century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the 18th century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the 18th century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new desires. This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. This book is built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. The book traces how this new consumer society of the 18th century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialisation itself.
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Nursing and midwifery in Britain since 1700
\"Nurses and midwives, both qualified and in training, have a lively interest in how their professions have developed. A stimulating collection of research-based essays, this book explores and compares the distinct histories of nursing and midwifery in Britain from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the modern day\"--Provided by publisher.
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Stories from a migrant city
Taking a biographical approach, the book explores the causes and consequences of moving or staying put in the context of class inequality and racisms, and looks for commonalities between people often seen as irredeemably divided.
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Civil liberties and human rights in twentieth-century Britain
\"The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) was formed in the 1930s against a backdrop of fascism and \"popular front\" movements. In this volatile political atmosphere, the aim of the NCCL was to ensure that civil liberties were a central component of political discourse. Chris Moores's new study shows how the NCCL - now Liberty - had to balance the interests of extremist allies with the desire to become a respectable force campaigning for human rights and civil liberties. From new social movements of the 1960s and 70s to the formation of the Human Rights Act in 1998, this study traces the NCCL's development over the last eighty years. It enables us to observe shifts and continuities in forms of political mobilization throughout the twentieth century, changes in discourse about extensions and retreats of freedoms as well as the theoretical conceptualization and practical protection of rights and liberties\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The State of Freedom
What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.
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A short history of England : the glorious story of a rowdy nation
Presents an overview of the history of England from the Saxons to today and provides lists of kings and queens with the dates they ruled, prime ministers, and one hundred key dates in the nation's history.
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Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900
This book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies –often working-class ones – and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.
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Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 The New Historicism of the 1980s and early 1990s was preoccupied with the fashioning of early modern subjects. But, Jonathan Gil Harris notes, the pronounced tendency now is to engage with objects. From textiles to stage beards to furniture, objects are read by literary critics as closely as literature used to be. For a growing number of Renaissance and Shakespeare scholars, the play is no longer the thing: the thing is the thing. Curiously, the current wave of \"thing studies\" has largely avoided posing questions of time. How do we understand time through a thing? What is the time of a thing? InUntimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, Harris challenges the ways we conventionally understand physical objects and their relation to history. Turning to Renaissance theories of matter, Harris considers the profound untimeliness of things, focusing particularly on Shakespeare's stage materials. He reveals that many \"Renaissance\" objects were actually survivals from an older time-the medieval monastic properties that, post-Reformation, were recycled as stage props in the public playhouses, or the old Roman walls of London, still visible in Shakespeare's time. Then, as now, old objects were inherited, recycled, repurposed; they were polytemporal or palimpsested. By treating matter as dynamic and temporally hybrid, Harris addresses objects in their futurity, not just in their encapsulation of the past.Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeareis a bold study that puts thematériel-the explosive, world-changing potential-back into a \"material culture\" that has been too often understood as inert stuff.
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