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The massacres of Indians in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by the Paxton Boys in December 1763, have long been a notorious event in that part of the globe. A glance at Kevin Kenny’s bibliography provides a sense of the continuous interest in the killings since the 19th century.

The title of Susan Whyman’s The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800 suggests two potentialities at once: The Pen and the People indicates a comprehensive study of popular letters and letter-writing practices during the long 18th century (1660–1800); yet the subtitle, English Letter Writers, implies focused and discrete analyses of specific letter

In 1886 the Glasgow Prayer Union (GPU) remembered in their customary prayers a woman across whom one of its ‘ladies’ had come. She had been ‘found lying very drunk near Cattle Market with young infant’. Concerned for the infant’s life, the unnamed philanthropist (not a word Smitley uses) takes the child to the nearby police station, ‘where the woman was also taken’ (p. 44).

Happiness is researching someone with a unique name. At least, that’s the case in the research environment created by the brilliant new resource, London Lives 1690–1800 – Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis.

If the debut of the Illustrated London News (ILN) in May 1842 signalled ‘a revolution in journalism and news reporting’, as the introduction to this remarkable on-line collection contends, there can be little doubt that an equally revolutionary transformation has occurred over the c

The centrality of Punch to the study of Victorian politics and culture is well-established.

Reports of the death of the Mediterranean – on some accounts from pollution, on others from conceptual redundancy – have proved exaggerated. Conceptually, at least, ‘The Mediterranean’ flourishes as never before: an idea more than a sea. It seems ubiquitous on web sites and in book and journal titles as well as on conference posters, not to mention political action plans.

I suspect that, at some level, Eric Foner was always going to write this book. He openly acknowledges in The Fiery Trial that Lincoln has always loomed large in his research – even if he had not hitherto taken centre stage as subject – ever since he wrote his doctoral dissertation over four decades ago.

Often forgotten in any analysis of American constitutional rights is the extent to which those rights are grounded in the state-level revolutionary settlements prior to 1787.

In the late 1980s, a promising young African-American actor named Denzel Washington was asked to take a leading role in the movie, Glory. Directed by Edward Zwick, a white liberal, Glory told the story of a relatively minor action in the American Civil War.