History

People like to believe in a past golden age of traditional English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. However, that countryside may have looked both more and less familiar than we imagine. Take today's startling yellow fields of rapeseed, seemingly more suited to the landscape of Van Gogh than Constable. They were, in fact, thoroughly familiar to fieldworkers in 17th-century England. At the same time, some features that would have gone unremarked in the past now seem like oddities. In the 15th century, rabbit warrens were specially guarded to rear rabbits as a luxury food for rich men's tables; whilst houses had moats not only to defend them, but to provide a source of fresh fish. In the 1500s Catherine of Aragon introduced the concept of a fresh salad to the court of Henry VIII; and in the 1600s, artichoke gardens became a fashion of the gentry in their hope of producing more male heirs. The common tomato, suspected of being poisonous in 1837, was transformed into a household vegetable by the end of the 19th century, thanks to cheaper glass-making methods and the resulting increase in glasshouses. In addition to these images of past lives, the author reveals how the forces that drive our current interest in alternative forms of agriculture — a glut of meat and cereal crops, changing dietary habits, the needs of medicine — have striking parallels with earlier periods in our history.

The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the 18th century, but it represented division also, separating families across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal ideal. The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves ‘all at sea’ were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected in times and places of great disconnection. Portraying the family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social stratification. It could also afford social and economic leverage to individual men and women in certain circumstances. This book explores the lives and letters of these families, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea in a series of microhistories. Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, the book argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world — much more than the American Revolution — that reshaped contemporary ideals about families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic world.

Witches are imaginary creatures. But in Poland as in Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, people imagined their neighbours to be witches, with tragic results. This book tells the story of the imagined Polish witches, showing how ordinary peasant women got caught in webs of suspicion and accusation, finally confessing under torture to the most heinous crimes. Through a close reading of accusations and confessions, the book also shows how witches imagined themselves and their own religious lives. Paradoxically, the tales they tell of infanticide and host desecration reveal to us a culture of deep Catholic piety, while the stories they tell of diabolical sex and the treasure-bringing ghosts of unbaptized babies uncover a complex folklore at the margins of Christian orthodoxy. Caught between the devil and the host, the self‐imagined Polish witches reflect the religion of their place and time, even as they stand accused of subverting and betraying that religion. Through the dark glass of witchcraft the book attempts to explore the religious lives of early modern women and men: their gender attitudes, their Christian faith and folk cosmology, their prayers and spells, their adoration of Christ incarnate in the transubstantiated Eucharist and their relations with goblin-like house demons and ghosts.

The early 20th century witnessed a revolution in contraceptive behaviour as the large Victorian family disappeared. This book offers a new perspective on the gender relations, sexual attitudes, and contraceptive practices that accompanied the emergence of the smaller family in modern Britain. It draws on a range of first-hand evidence, including over 190 oral history interviews, in which individuals born between 1900 and 1930 described their marriages and sexual relationships. It challenges many of the key conditions envisaged by demographers and historians as necessary for any significant reduction in average family size to take place. The book demonstrates that a massive expansion in birth control took place in a society in which sexual ignorance was widespread; that effective family limitation was achieved without the mass adoption of new contraceptive technologies; that traditional methods, such as withdrawal, abstinence, and abortion were often seen as preferable to modern appliances, such as condoms and caps; that communication between spouses was not key to the systematic adoption of contraception; and, above all, that women were not necessarily the driving force behind the prevention of pregnancy. Women frequently avoided involvement in family planning decisions and practices, whereas the vast majority of men in Britain from the interwar period onward viewed the regular use of birth control as a masculine duty. By allowing this generation to speak for themselves, the book produces a rich understanding of the startling social attitudes and complex conjugal dynamics that lay behind the changes in contraceptive behaviour in the 20th century.

From childbirth and baptism through to courtship, weddings, and funerals, every stage in the life-cycle of Tudor and Stuart England was accompanied by ritual. Even under the Protestantism of the reformed Church, the spiritual and social dramas of birth, marriage, and death were graced with elaborate ceremony. Powerful and controversial protocols were in operation, shaped and altered by the influences of the Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration. Each of the major rituals was potentially an arena for argument, ambiguity, and dissent. Ideally, as classic rites of passage, these ceremonies worked to bring people together. But they also set up traps into which people could stumble, and tests which not everybody could pass. In practice, ritual performance revealed frictions and fractures that everyday local discourse attempted to hide or to heal. Using first-hand evidence, this book shows how the making and remaking of ritual formed part of a continuing debate, sometimes strained and occasionally acrimonious, which exposed the raw nerves of society in the midst of great historical events. In doing so, it brings to life the common experiences of living and dying in Tudor and Stuart England.

This book explores the history of a Native American family using a rich collection of sources, including G. W. Grayson's never-before studied forty-four volume diary. At the heart of the narrative is a fact suppressed to this day by some Graysons: one branch of the family is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, this book reveals the terrible compromises that Indians had to make to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy of the United States, American Indians disowned their kin, enslaved their relatives, and fought each other on the battlefield. In the 18th-century native South, when the Graysons first welcomed Africans into their family, black-Indian relationships were common and bore little social stigma. But as American slave plantations began to spread across Indian lands, race took on ever greater significance. Native American families found that their survival depended on distancing themselves from their black relatives. The black and Indian Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by US troops in 1813 and again in 1836, endured Indian removal and the Trail of Tears, battled each other in the Civil War, and weathered the destruction of the Creek Nation in the 1890s. When they finally became American citizens in 1907, Oklahoma law defined some Graysons as white, some as black. By this time, the two sides of the family, divided by race, barely acknowledged each other.

This book traces the influence of Anglican writers on the political thought of inter-war Britain, and argues that religion continued to exert a powerful influence on political ideas and allegiances in the 1920s and 1930s. It counters the prevailing assumption of historians that inter-war political thought was primarily secular in content, by showing how Anglicans like Archbishop William Temple made an active contribution to ideas of community and the welfare state (a term which Temple himself invented). Liberal Anglican ideas of citizenship, community, and the nation continued to be central to political thought and debate in the first half of the 20th century. The author traces how Temple and his colleagues developed and changed their ideas on community and the state in response to events like the First World War, the General Strike and the Great Depression. For Temple, and political philosophers like A. D. Lindsay and Ernest Barker, the priority was to find a rhetoric of community which could unite the nation against class consciousness, poverty, and the threat of Hitler. Their idea of a Christian national community was central to the articulation of ideas of ‘Englishness’ in inter-war Britain, but this Anglican contribution has been almost completely overlooked in recent debate on 20th-century national identity. The author also looks at rival Anglican political theories put forward by conservatives such as Bishop Hensley Henson and Ralph Inge, dean of St Paul's. Drawing extensively on Henson's private diaries, it uncovers the debates which went on within the Church at the time of the General Strike and the 1927–28 Prayer Book crisis. The book uncovers an important and neglected seam of popular political thought, and offers a new evaluation of the religious, political, and cultural identity of Britain before the Second World War.

This book is a study of fetal health from the 17th century to the present day principally among European and American populations. It is a contribution to both medical and demographic research using distinctly long-term and comparative perspectives. It provides an account of how fetal health and the risks facing the unborn (miscarriages, abortions, stillbirths) have changed, but it also offers an interpretation of the causes, one that focuses on the role of obstetrics and the epidemiology of maternal infections. The following themes are given particularly detailed treatment: varying cultural practices in the recognition of stillbirths, especially the critical ‘signs of life’; the age pattern of mortality risk between conception and live birth; comparative trends in late-fetal mortality and their causes; fetal mortality and obstetric care during the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries; the contrasting approaches of the pathology and social obstetrics to the causes of fetal death. The study concludes with a discussion of the fetus as patient, which includes issues surrounding the legalization of abortion in many western countries and the public health challenges of persistently high mortality in less developed countries.