History : Great Britain

Written by some of the leading authorities on British politics, this dictionary is a wide-ranging, comprehensive guide to the lives of Britain's prime ministers from Sir Robert Walpole to Tony Blair. more...

Price: $69.95

Birthing the Nation analyses two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British state, and the emergence of the man-midwife as the pre-eminent authority over sex and childbirth. By exploring peculiar episodes in the history of the reproductive body and the body politic, from stories of pregnant men to rumours that a midwife had foisted a 'suppositious' child on the nation as the Prince of Wales, this original and. provocative work proposes how national, religious, ethnic, and gendered identities were experienced through and symbolized by birth and midwifery. - ;How could the professional triumph of man-midwifery and contemporary tales of pregnant men, rabbit-breeding mothers, and meddling midwives in eighteenth-century Britain help construct the emergence of modern corporate and individual identities? By uncovering long-lost tales and artefacts about sexuality, birth, and popular culture, Lisa Forman Cody argues that Enlightenment Britons understood themselves and their relationship to others through their experiences and beliefs about the. reproductive body. Birthing the Nation traces two intertwined narratives that shaped eighteenth-century British life: the development of the modern British nation, and the emergence of the male expert as the pre-eminent authority over matters of sexual behaviour, reproduction, and childbirth. By. taking seriously contemporary caricatures, jokes, and rumours that used gender, birth, and family to make claims about religious, ethnic and national identity, Cody illuminates an entirely new view of the eighteenth-century public sphere as focused on the bodily and the bizarre. In a monarchy arbitrated by its official religion, regulation of reproduction and childbirth was vital to the very stability of British political authority and the coherence of British culture, challenged as it was by Catholicism, the French Revolution, and social change. In the late seventeenth c more...

Price: $39.95

This is the first modern book-length study of the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the sometime University of Edinburgh student who in 1697 earned the unfortunate distinction of being the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain. Taking a micro-historical approach, Michael Graham uses the Aikenhead case to open a window into the world of Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain in its transition from the confessional era of the Reformation and the covenants, which placed high emphasis on the defence of orthodox belief, to the polite, literary world of the Enlightenment, of which Edinburgh would become a major centre. Graham traces the roots of the Aikenhead case in seventeenth-century Scotland and the law of blasphemy which was evolving in response to the new intellectual currents of biblical criticism and deism. He analyzes Aikenhead's trial and the Scottish government's decision to uphold the sentence of hanging. Finally, he details the debate engendered by the execution, carried out in a public sphere of print media encompassing both Scotland and England. Aikenhead's case became a media event which highlighted the intellectual and cultural divisions within Britain at the end of the seventeenth century. more...

Price: $99.99

Centered on practices of the body—human bodies, the “body politic”—Bodies and Disciplines considers a fascinating and largely uncanonical group of texts, as well as public dramas, rituals, and spectacles, from multidisciplinary perspectives. The result is a volume that incorporates insights from history, literature, medieval studies, and critical theory, drawing from the strengths of each discipline to illuminate a relatively little-studied period. more...

Price: $72.00

This account of the Peasant's Revolt of 1831 remains the classic authoratative text on the 'English Rising'. more...

Price: $32.95