Political History

This book sets a new agenda for the debate over education in America. It argues that both sides of the current debate—the elitist, anti-democratic conservatives and the radical champions of political correctness—have missed the point. The book argues that rather than arguing over who should be taught, what should be taught, and how it should be paid for, education must be addressed as the well-spring of democracy in the United States. Education should engender in students a commitment to community service, the literacy to live in a civil society, the competence to participate in democratic communities, the ability to think critically and deliberately in a pluralistic world, and the empathy to help people to understand their fellow citizens.

‘Being Soviet’ takes a refreshing and innovative approach to the crucial years between 1939 and 1953 in the USSR. It addresses two of the key recent debates concerning Stalinism. It answers the question ‘what was the logic and language of Soviet power?’ by shifting the focus away from Russian nationalism and onto Soviet identity. ‘Sovietness’ is explored via the newspapers, films, plays, and popular music of the era. Soviet identity, in relation to the outside world, provided a powerful frame of reference in the late‐Stalin years. ‘Being Soviet's’ most significant contribution lies in its novel answer to the question ‘How did ordinary citizens relate to Soviet power?’ It avoids the current Foucault‐inspired emphasis on ‘supporters’ and ‘resistors’ of the regime. Instead it argues that most Soviet citizens did not fit easily into either category. Their relationship with Soviet power was defined by a series of subtle ‘tactics of the habitat’ (Kotkin) that enabled them to stay fed, informed, and entertained in these difficult times. ‘Being Soviet’ offers a rich and textured discussion of those everyday survival strategies including rumours, jokes, hairstyles, music tastes, sexual relationships, and political campaigning. Each chapter finishes by exploring what this everyday behaviour tells us about the collective mentalité of Stalin‐era society. ‘Being Soviet’ focuses on the place of Britain and America within Soviet identity; their evolution from wartime allies to Cold War enemies played a vital role in redefining what it meant to be Soviet in Stalin's last years.

Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first major history of the British working class in the Second World War. The book integrates social, political, and labour history and reflects the most recent scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of identities. It examines the war's impact on workers in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the workplace, local communities and the nation. Previous studies of the Home Front have analyzed the lives of civilians, but they have neglected the importance of social class in defining popular experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy, and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of social unity in Britain, this book argues that the 1940s was a crucial decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar decades was ‘remade’, achieving new collective status, power, and solidarity. It criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has downplayed the significance of class in British society. Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and letters, and the records of trade unions and numerous other institutions, the book traces the rapid growth of trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war years. It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into the army, showing how these experiences shaped their social attitudes and aspirations. Using opinion polls and other evidence the book traces the evolution of popular political attitudes from the evacuation of 1939 and the desperate months of late 1940 to the election of 1945, opposing recent claims that the electorate was indifferent or apathetic at the war's end, but also eschewing blanket assumptions about popular radicalization. Labour was an active agent in fashioning itself as both a national progressive party and the representative of working-class interests in 1945; far from a mere passive beneficiary of anti-Tory feeling, it gave organizational form to the idealism and the demand for significant change that the war had generated.

In the 18th century, the considerable degree of social mobility in British society, especially between the upper and middling ranks, was arguably one of the important factors contributing to political and social stability. The extent of that mobility among the members of the nation’s legislature was particularly important in this regard. In this analysis, the book examines how far the House of Commons reflected and was itself affected by such social mobility. Enquiry is directed at the growth in number of ‘non-élite’ members of parliament; men without land. The book gives a sense of the fabric of 18th-century British society by describing the subtle distinctions in the social and economic order.

This book examines the complex and often troubled relationship between anti-imperialist campaigners in Britain and India, from the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 to the winning of independence in 1947. It traces the efforts of British radicals and socialists to identify forms of anti-imperialism in India, which fitted comfortably with their existing beliefs and their sense of how authentic progressive movements were supposed to work. On the other side of the relationship, it charts the trajectory of the Indian National Congress as it shifted from appeals couched in language familiar to British progressives to the less familiar vocabulary and techniques of Mahatma Gandhi. The new Gandhian methods of self-reliance had unwelcome implications for the work that the British supporters of Congress had traditionally undertaken, leading to the collapse of their main organization, and the precipitation of anti-imperialist work into the turbulent cross-currents of left-wing British politics. Metropolitan anti-imperialism became largely a function of other commitments, whether communist, theosophical, pacifist, socialist, or anti-fascist. The book explains the strengths and weaknesses of these connections, and the ultimate failure to create the durable alliance between anti-imperialists which the British Empire's governors had always feared. Drawing on a wide range of newly available archival material in Britain and India, including the records of campaigning organizations, political parties, the British government, and the imperial security services, the chapter provides a full account of the diverse and fragmented world of British metropolitan anti-imperialism.

Between 1666 and 1789, France's Old Regime government used the king's legislative authority to promote marriage and prolific reproduction. This book studies the royal pronatalist law masterminded by Jean‐Baptiste Colbert and follows its implementation in France and New France to show that royal intervention in the realm of family and sexuality was an integral part of the process of state formation in Europe. Even before the establishment of modern demography, political writers recognized that cultivating the kingdom's human resources was essential to building the state's military and economic power. And, they argued, the hierarchical and gendered order of the traditional, monogamous conjugal household was the bedrock of a stable social and political order. For these reasons, the French royal government altered it laws to favor early marriage and to reward men who fathered large families of ten or more legitimate children. The royal government's action signaled that human fertility was no longer a matter of divine control, but a recognized and even legitimate matter for human – and thus political—intervention.