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This examination of economic and urban linkages, networks, and patterns of development in the industrial districts of Northumberland, Durham, and the Middlesbrough district of North Yorkshire, or in the territories surrounding the estuaries of the Tyne, Wear, and Tees, is more convincing as an exercise in ‘maritime-industrial’ history than as an analysi
Until relatively recently the in-depth historical analysis of Scottish women’s lives has been the preserve of dedicated gender historians. Although it is fair to say that Scottish historians have recently begun to include the lives of women in their research, this is by no means extensive.
However much cartoon specialists might deplore the fact, the principal academic use of cartoons originally published in newspapers and magazines is as supporting illustrative material for primarily text-based enterprises.
The authors of these two volumes are both young historians whose first books each stake a claim to a portion of the increasingly crowded field of museum studies in general, and of museum history in particular.
Mark Hampton sets out to analyse 'the way in which British elites conceptualized the press between 1850 and 1950', examining the debates that helped to lead the British press to the point where 'informing readers and toppling governments, and never in boring fashion, could appear as the appropriate function of journalism'.
Since the 1960s, popular leisure has been studied by successive generations of British social historians. Questions of class, of culture and of identity have been central to the development of this literature. Celebrations of distinctively plebeian customs have contended with pessimistic analyses of mass culture as a form of social control.
This Fintan Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil edited work is a welcome addition to the existing historiography. It concerns the Irish working class and politics over the course of a century. As the introduction points out, the attention of historians has not been directed towards Irish labour to the extent seen in other western European countries.
Angela McCarthy has written a useful book about Irish emigration to New Zealand, based upon 253 letters that passed between the two countries over a period just short of a century. This review discusses the author's methodology and findings through the perspective of two analytical tools, Alice's Letters and Shanacoole Exceptionalism.
'It is not necessary to be dull to write about history', Ged Martin remarks (p. 8). One suspects that many historians would add, 'but it helps'. This book is a wonderful antidote to that excessive seriousness. The style is crisp, paradox and aphorism abound – 'historians love paradoxes', Martin says (p.
Susan Barton's book lives up to its promise of providing a new and fuller analysis of the ways in which working-class people were able to enjoy holidays away from home, mainly in the 'age of the railway', but with reference also to the tramping artisan tradition that predated the railways, and to the ear