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Clarkson's and Crawford's research at the Centre for Social Research and in this book builds on Kenneth H. Connell's pioneering studies of population and of Irish diet.
This volume is the second published in the Yale University Press series, The New Economic History of Britain. The New Economic History will eventually provide a continuum of scholarly surveys of the British economy from early times to the present, but in a more accessible form: that is, without the usual impedimenta of footnotes or endnotes and with an eye to a less specialist reading market.
As the volume of books and articles on eighteenth-century Ireland continues to expand, so Irish Jacobitism increasingly stands out as a glaring omission.
At least until recently, the explosion in study of the history of mental illness has not been mirrored in comparable studies of the history of developmental disability. In the last few years, that has begun to change, with the publications of major works by Mathew Thomson,(1) David Wright,(2) and this work by Mark Jackson.
In October 2001 the IHR organised a one-day conference, 'Historians on Sport', inviting the editor of the New DNB to give the keynote address. Brian Harrison happily confessed to a poverty of sporting knowledge, but readily conceded the centrality of sport to our understanding of the changing nature of British society over the past two hundred years or more.
That grand old patron saint of London historians, John Stow, currently seems to be inspiring a new wave of historical and literary studies.
The Irish rebellion of 1798 and, more particularly, the act of Union two years later, were significant events in British as well as Irish history and yet their bi-centenaries passed almost without notice in mainland Britain.
The cover is a view from Stirling Castle: in the foreground a carved lion rampant, in the background the Wallace Tower, the Scottish national monument, raised by public subscription in 1859; in the valley below, Stirling Bridge somewhere near the site of William Wallace's victory over the forces of Edward I in 1297; just out of the picture, the field of Bannockburn.
When she was interviewed by Dale Spender in 1983 for a book about early twentieth century feminists, the veteran activist Mary Stott was probed in detail about her life.
In spite of its intellectual, literary and comic brilliance, this book contains a dark and disturbing, but revealing, message. In some ways, my melancholy reading of Bodies Politic has inevitably been shaped by Roy's recent untimely death. Roy Porter was without doubt the finest social historian of medicine this country, or indeed the world, has produced.