Society In England Research Articles

RPS urges government not to end state-backed indemnity for pharmacists delivering COVID-19 vaccinations

The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) in England has said it is “surprised and concerned” to learn that community pharmacists providing booster COVID-19 vaccinations will, from 31 August 2021, be asked to cover the cost of indemnity insurance themselves. NHS Resolution, which was the NHS Litigation Authority, had previously said that pharmacies delivering COVID-19 vaccinations operating […]

Wider Still and Wider: Local Population Studies in England and Continental Europe Local Population Studies Society Spring Conference 2021

Wider Still and Wider: Local Population Studies in England and Continental Europe Local Population Studies Society Spring Conference 2021

Table of Contents: Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 52(1)

Issue information for Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 52(1).

The structure of aristocratic society in England and Tuscany

Review of Peter Coss, The aristocracy in England and Tuscany, 1000-1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 499 p., ill., index).

Commerce and Settlement: Rethinking Early New England History

This paper addresses the long and structuring impact of the Puritan paradigm on early New England history and historiography. It highlights the tendency of the religious model to obscure or marginalize the entrepreneurial and commercial impulse inherent in the colonizing project of the Massachusetts Bay Company. It argues that settlement, or the action of appropriating and transforming indigenous land for the benefit of the corporation, provides a salutary, contextual perspective on the role of commerce and expansion in shaping New England societies at their founding. The original documents and the promotion of the corporation show that John Winthrop and his colonial government embraced the economic implications of land appropriation and commercial development, managing labor and trade with a view toward colonial and financial success on an Atlantic scale. Their expansionist policies and their concern for the protection and preservation of the property and the privileges of the entire corporate body transformed the Company into a proto-state defined by and attached to its sovereignty.

The specifics of the national form of society of Britain and Kievan Rus in their reliability on the Byzantine state model

The purpose of the study is to identify the specifics of the national form of society, as well as to identify common features in the state model of Britain and Kievan Rus. The research methodology assumes the unity of such methodological approaches as the system-historical and comparative method. The system-historical method made it possible to identify the specifics of the national forms of society in Britain and Kievan Rus. The comparative method helped to identify similarities in the state of Britain and Kievan Rus. The scientific novelty lies in the attempt to determine the common features and points of contact in the state model of Britain and Kievan Rus. Conclusions At a certain historical level, Byzantine Christianity, with its Hellenistic philosophy, alienated the Western churches and did not allow to accept the "authenticity" of the Christian foundations of Orthodox teaching. It is revealed that similar features of the ruling republican forms of power institutions of Britain-England and Rus-Ukraine are connected with the common Byzantine traditions. It is determined that the aristocratic principle of self-identification and cultural foundations of Byzantium became widespread and became part of European cultural, educational, religious, and pedagogical structures. It is emphasized that since the triumph of atheism and progressivism in Europe there has been a rejection of Byzantine cultural traditions, but in the twentieth century it was English researchers, historians, art critics? and culturologists who revived the theme of Byzantinism.

Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge—Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives. Edited by Vera Keller, Anna Marie Roos, and Elizabeth Yale. [Review

Most extraordinary about this collection of essays documenting the life cycle of archives covering early modern scientific and medical thought, with the exception of one example of born-digital preservation, is that these archives survived at all. Essentially private archives until the papers contained in them had been obtained by institutions such as the Royal Society, the Ashmolean, and the Wellcome Library, the letters, studies, experiments, theories, speculations, and ephemera discussed in the essays underwent unpredictable transformational journeys. The history of these archives will cause archivists, librarians, scientists, and researchers reading the stories to gasp and to pine for lost items. The essays in Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives present eight examples of scientific and medical collections that had been assembled; were transformed through publication, disaster, and handling; and eventually ended up as organized archives that have been preserved and passed on to become an important body of thought informing the modern scientific world. The eight essays, three written individually by the editors, constitute volume 23 of the publisher’s Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions series. The volume is based on a 2015 conference sponsored by the Royal Society in England.

An Asymmetrical Dialectic of Oppression and Act of Political Warfare in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions

The study locates an asymmetrical dialectic of oppression in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. It reveals Nyasha, Tambu, Lucia, Maiguru, and Ma’Shingayi’s experiences with racist-sexist dimensions in the context of a typical Shona society in colonial Rhodesia and England. The study locates cultural and political inscriptions on women’s body and sexuality and the mutually-constitutive intersections which socio-culturally and politically regulate women characters’ beliefs and body. Nyasha goes against existing political dynamics and exhibits subversive body performativeness to claim/redefine her identity and sexuality. It bespeaks of an act of political warfare. She deliberately dismantles the barriers that prohibit entrance to domains reserved for specific gender and race. As such, Nyasha’s relation with her society and the hierarchical structure of race and gender in which her identity is embedded unequivocally signify political implications. This is because Nyasha’s race, gender, and sexuality constitute her social and political identities.

Edmond Halley's Contributions to Hydrogeology.

Edmond Halley's Contributions to Hydrogeology.

Adherence to NHS England-BSTI radiology decision tool in suspected COVID-19 patients

Category: General Background to the audit: Chest radiographs are typically the firstline imaging modality used for patients with suspected COVID-19.1 British Society of Thoracic Imaging (BSTI) and NHS England (NHSE) have released a COVID-19 radiology decision-support tool to aid clinicians on the optimal work-up of suspected COVID-19 patients.2 This audit aims to review adherence to this guidance when healthcare staff suspect hospital inpatients of newly developed COVID-19 infections. Standard: According to the NHSE-BSTI decision-support tool: 1. Every patient suspected of COVID-19 and clinically deteriorating should have a chest X-ray requested along with their COVID-19 swab 2. Clinical deterioration is defined as oxygen saturations < 94% or <90% in patients with COPD or scoring at least 3 on the National Early Warning Score (NEWS). Indicator: Degree of compliance with the standard guidance. Target: 100% compliance. Methodology: A retrospective study design was performed using electronic health records to identify inpatients who received COVID-19 PCR tests. A predetermined exclusion criterion was strictly adhered to: 1. Patients who did not co-present with clinical deteriorations were excluded. Included records were assessed to determine if chest X-rays were ordered alongside the COVID-19 PCR tests. Results of first audit round: 1. 50 hospital admissions who received COVID-19 PCR tests were identified through the electronic health records database. 2. 66.0% (33/50) co-presented with clinical deteriorations and were included. 3. 69.7% (23/33) of the clinical deteriorating patients have been found to not have a chest X-ray requested at the time of their swab. First action plan: 1. Present findings at hospital grand round. 2. Circulate NHSE-BSTI radiology support tool via email communication and posters in hospital wards. 3. Re-audit in three weeks.

On the Essence and Uniqueness of Shakespeare’s Tragedy in Hamlet

Hamlet, written by Shakespeare, profoundly reveals the unbearable and dark feudal society in England. Although the works ended in tragedy, they did not find an entirely feasible way of social transformation. But Hamlett’s character, drama content and plot showed the advanced and unique spirit of humanism, revealing the huge gap between life and ideals. Therefore, the core content of this article is to study the characteristics of Hamlet, and then further explain its value to our society.

Zivilisierte Konkurrenz: Die Entstehung der English Goethe Society und ihr Verhältnis zur Goethe-Gesellschaft Weimar

Abstract The English Goethe Society (EGS) is the third oldest Goethe society in the world. Although it was founded solely as a literary society “to promote and extend Goethe’s work and thought,” at certain points in the Society’s history, speakers such as Friedrich Max Müller and Thomas Mann emphasized its political dimensions. This article demonstrates that from its founding in 1886 to the beginning of the First World War, the EGS experienced various crises, not least in its relations with other Goethe societies in Britain and with the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar.

Patriarchy and Gender Law in Ancient Rome and Colonial America

Roman Antiquity and Colonial America shared much in common regarding limits on women’s legal rights and the role of gender in law. Gendered stereotypes regarding women’s ability and place in society are reflected in the patria potestas and manus of Ancient Roman law, as well as through the patriarchal and pious Puritan laws of New England society during the American Colonial period. Both male-dominated social and legal systems were based on the notion of women’s innate inferiority and female submission to male authority. Gender expectations and biases are also present, not only in family law, but also in law governing sexual behavior and partnerships. While Roman law punishes sodomy and male same-sex relationships on the grounds of contradicting the concept of the pater familias, Puritan New England relied on Christian morals and religious teachings to govern their sodomy laws. However, such gender disparities in the law are also subject to social status and race, leading men who did not reflect the respective society’s preferable identity to face harsher punishments as a result. Regarding the concept of gender and male superiority, family law and the societal expectations that both shaped and were shaped by such laws reflect an ever-present patriarchal structure throughout the Early American and Ancient Roman legal systems. The gendered attitudes toward marriage, rape, sex, and consent in both Roman and Early American society are reflected in the laws that governed the lives of women and gender non-conforming minorities in both societies.

Pandemics and the development of scientific methods in the history of epidemiology

&#x0D; The Covid-19 pandemic has made me see the history of epidemiology differently. Pandemics are such impressive events that they can exert urgent pressure to identify new modes of research and new methodologies to replace methods that have failed in the past. Some examples seem to corroborate this idea.&#x0D; The plagueThere is no doubt that one of the most important events in the history of science occurred in the 17th century when population thinking was discovered. All human and social sciences such as sociology, demography, Darwinian biology, political economy, statistics and epidemiology, have their origin in the discovery that dictates that events in populations can be predictable and have a probability of occurrence. Then the occurrence of events in populations can be quantified, can be compared between populations and can be the source of scientific knowledge. This true revolution in scientific thought is a consequence of changes in society that occurred due to plague pandemics.Since the great pandemic of the 14th century, outbreaks of plague in Europe caused great confusion in cities and increasingly threatened existing powers. It was the case of the monarchical society of England. In the event of an outbreak of plague in London, the nobles, the wealthy, and the army left the city, where only the poor remained. The situation became chaotic in London. It was quickly clear that there was a certain chronological regularity in the outbreaks. They started with a small but growing number of deaths in some parishes before spreading throughout the city. In the 16th century the city of London began to collect data on the number and location of pest deaths. The system was improved in the 17th century and extended to all causes of death, making it possible -by the end of the century- to organize orderly outings from London in the event of an outbreak of plague, preventing chaos. These data were printed and placed on the walls of the city. They were called the “Bills of mortality”, death posters. In this process, a temporal series of mortalitydata was established in London over decades.

Towards a safer past: thoughts on the invocation of English cricket’s soul

This article is, in essence, an extended review of Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of English Cricket, an affectionate biography of two English cricket journalists by the distinguished writers Stephen Fay and David Kynaston, published in 2018. Promotional material issued for the book and the many favourable reviews it received all attested both to the very different temperaments of the two men and to things which, purportedly, they had in common – namely, an opposition to racism and to commercialism in cricket. However, a re-examination of the (much chronicled) lives of the two men and of the times they lived through shows these judgments to be over-simplified and misleading. In particular, assumptions about racism (and, thus, anti-racism) in the book fail to take into account the transition in Britain society from a paternalist, imperialist racism to a racism based on the supposed incompatibility of cultures. The leading exponent of the latter racism was the Conservative MP and theorist Enoch Powell.

Trust Among Strangers: Friendly Societies in Modern Britain. By Penelope Ismay (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 229 pp. $105.00 cloth $29.99 paper

This stimulating history of friendly societies in Britain provides an account of their development from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century, exploring their role in the cultural and moral dimensions of economic life. Ismay is especially interested in the ways in which mutual-aid societies generated social trust in a period of rapid population growth and urbanization, which ostensibly worked to atomize and isolate the individual.The book consists of a series of chronologically overlapping analytical narratives. Chapter 1, “Friendly Societies before Friendly Societies,” examines the early modern history of the term friendly society. Consulting texts from Myles Coverdale to Daniel Defoe, Ismay demonstrates how the term’s usage exhibited an overlap between a particular kind of organization and a larger moral vision of how societies ought to function through friendly relations among its members.Chapter 2, “Friendly Societies and the Meaning of the New Poor Law,” stresses the importance of contributory schemes and mutual-aid societies in the Poor Law debates at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, arguing that failing to take account of this dimension misses the complexity of these discussions. Chapter 3, “The Battle Between Savings Banks and Friendly Societies,” explores the contrasting individualist rationale for savings banks articulated during the political debate surrounding the passage of the 1817 Savings Bank Act and the emergence of the New Friendly Society in its aftermath, which retooled and preserved the mutually supportive dynamic of mutual aid. Chapter 4, “Trusting Institutions: Making the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Manchester Unity,” turns to a detailed examination of the history of the Odd Fellows, one of the largest and most important nineteenth-century mutual-aid societies. Ismay traces its emergence as a model for the Affiliated Order, a new type of friendly society that came to dominate after the 1830s, extending the geographical reach of these organizations through multiple branches. Ismay emphasizes how maintaining the original convivial character of the Odd Fellows proved crucial for the maintenance of social ties among the membership, providing the cultural resources for the reciprocity necessary for the success of a mutual aid society.The final chapter, “Trusting Numbers: Sociability and Actuarial Science in the Manchester Unity,” examines the mid-nineteenth-century worries about the solvency of friendly societies and the increasingly sophisticated application of actuarial science that informed the shift from managing “providence” to managing “risk.” Again, mutual-aid societies proved resilient in the face of this challenge. Not until the passage of the 1911 National Insurance Act did they go into a long-term decline.Methodologically, this study depends upon the traditional tools of the historian, utilizing a close attention to printed texts, Parliamentary debates, government reports, and the archival materials preserved by the Odd Fellows. The interdisciplinary dimensions of the study are found in the larger theoretical context of the analysis, which addresses the nature of modernity and the concept of social trust—issues explored from a historian’s persective by Vernon, from a sociologist’s perspective by Giddens and Misztal, and from an anthropologist’s perspective by Scott.1 The footnotes document the range of primary and secondary works that form the foundation for this study, but the lack of a formal bibliography sometimes makes it difficult to keep track of Ismay’s different historiographical strands, especially given the absence in the index of important theoretical and historiographical matters treated in the notes. Ismay’s discussion follows an arc from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, draws out the mutually constitutive roles of contingency and individual agency at important points of departure in the development of friendly societies, and complicates our understanding of the distinction between the modern and the early modern. Ismay’s fine work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this period and serves as a rich pre-history of the welfare state.

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. By Abram C. Van Engen (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2020) 392 pp. $30.00

On the second day of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in January 2020, House impeachment manager Adam Schiff invoked President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” He rebuked Trump for conduct in office that threatened America’s historic role as a model of democracy to the world. “America is not just a country,” he warned, “but also an idea.” Schiff’s deployment of the words that Reagan borrowed from Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop show the surprising resilience of a metaphor that no Puritan 400 years ago could have imagined would be used to project American exceptionalism. Trump himself never used it to define “America First.”Van Engen’s work joins a body of scholarship that has reconstructed the strange journey of the “city on a hill” from an obscure lay sermon to a mainstay of modern presidential rhetoric. Van Engen builds on Gamble’s In Search of the City on a Hill (New York, 2012) and Daniel T. Rodgers’s As a City on a Hill (Princeton, 2018). In this valuable addition, he proves that still more remains to be said. Van Engen deftly combine the tools of historical and literary analysis to understand Winthrop’s world, and his purposes, and to trace the reception, publication, and remanufacturing of this now-famous speech.There was never anything inevitable about Winthrop’s discourse becoming canonical in American literature surveys, political theory anthologies, and history source books. For more than 200 years, from its creation in 1630 to its first publication in 1838, Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” was unread, unquoted, and virtually unknown. Its survival was ensured by an antiquarian and his eventual bequest of the text to the New York Historical Society. Its status as a founding document was denied to it, Van Engen shows, by the popularity of the Separatist Pilgrims and the use of the Mayflower Compact as the point of origin for America—at least in New England’s way of telling the story of the traits and aspirations that contributed most to the making of America. Historians ignored the text even after it was published. It made its debut in college classrooms thanks to Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson’s The Puritans (New York, 1938), a hugely successful anthology of Puritan writings, and it entered politics only sixty years ago.One of Van Engen’s significant contributions is to highlight the role of early amateur historians and historical societies in New England in promoting the nation’s Puritan origins. They searched for original documents, preserved them, housed them, and published them. Given their agenda, they “erased” the story of Native Americans and blacks as part of nation-building, as we might expect, but they also erased the South. Their denial of any authentic founding role to Jamestown and the Virginia Colony was perpetuated by Alexis de Tocqueville and a host of popular textbook writers in the nineteenth century who were dedicated to a highly providential reading of America’s rise to greatness.Van Engen’s chapters about Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch—who wrote The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, 1970), as well as other works about Puritan America—skillfully reveal the unintended consequences of making “A Model of Christian Charity” a definitive text. Miller used Winthrop’s vision of communal brotherhood to summon the United States away from smug materialism; Bercovitch used (or misused) it to prove that America had always been driven by Messianic delusions. Reagan embraced the assumption that Winthrop launched America but turned Winthrop’s speech into a blueprint for material prosperity.In the last few pages of his study, Van Engen speculates that Trump’s silence on Winthrop, and his replacement of an idealist American exceptionalism—embraced by both Republicans and Democrats—with the principles of America First may spell the death of the “city on a hill” as a metaphor for the United States. Indeed, Schiff’s use of the phrase seemed to ring hollow—a rhetorical holdover of a bygone era. But as Van Engen rightly notes, the life and death of a metaphor is impossible to predict. What has been made can be remade and unmade again and again.

Gossip and Sexual Transgression in ‘English Society’ in 1790s’ Naples

AbstractThis essay analyses Lady Elizabeth Webster's journal, in which she chronicled her travels across Europe in the 1790s. Her journal suggests that there was an English community in Naples, whose codes of conduct were modelled on those that regulated elite society in England. Elite women who transgressed the rules could face consequences: Naples was not a place where women could hide from gossip and scrutiny. The journals also provide a fascinating insight into an elite woman's approach to sexual mores and demonstrate that, while attitudes towards sexual behaviour were highly internalised, how individuals put codes into practice was far more complex and open to discrepancies.

Julia Gordon Arrowood (1900 – 1984): A Brilliant Anesthesiologist and a Woman of Many Firsts in Medicine

After a brief “golden age” in the late 1800s, the patriarchal establishment fought back and women faced increasing restrictions in practicing medicine. In 1900, 18.2% of all physicians in the city of Boston were women, but this number decreased to 8.7% by 1930. The relatively young field of anesthesiology was one of the more welcoming specialties for women during this time. History has been unkind to these early female trailblazers who have often been overlooked in favor of the men in their fields. Julia Gordon Arrowood (1900–1984) was a forerunner for women in medicine and a prominent anesthesiologist in Boston from the 1930s until the 1950s. Her work included not only clinical medicine, but also research and teaching. She attended Boston University School of Medicine, graduating as valedictorian in the class of 1933. She interned at Belmont Hospital in Worcester, MA where she decided on a career in anesthesiology. She was accepted as a resident at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) by chief-anesthetist Henry Beecher in 1935, thereby becoming the first woman anesthesiology resident in Massachusetts. She remained at MGH and was named Acting Chief of Anesthesia in 1943. In 1944, she became president of the New England Society of Anesthesiologists, another first for a woman. In 1946, she joined Reginald Smithwick's team as Chief of Anesthesia at Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, Boston, and concurrently held the position of Professor of Anesthesiology at Boston University School of Medicine. Arrowood led many of the earliest studies on spinal anesthesia, muscle relaxants, and spinal headaches. In 1957, she moved to Kentucky and joined the United Mine Workers hospital system where she worked until her retirement in 1970. Women such as Julia Arrowood remain underrepresented in the annals of the history of medicine. Much work is needed to recognize the many contributions made by women physicians and to provide equal opportunities, pay, and status.

Modernity, Mass Culture, and Self-Delusion in Nabokov’s Lolita and Martin Amis’ Money

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Martin Amis’ Money (1984) discuss the disadvantages of mass media. Amis uses John Self to reflect the disintegration of the self in the modern, Capitalist society of England in 1980s. Self represents the failure of the postmodern world by portraying a dystopian society. Amis and Nabokov tackle subjects pertaining to money, incest, delusion, and disappointment. Lights are shed on the moral aspect of the characters. The modernity of Amis’ fiction lies in its double deception of its characters; there is the American motif and a character who is not able to resist the magic of such motif. It is about consumerism or how aspects of post modernity and the consumer culture are portrayed. This paper aims to show the impact of mass media on the characters who are self-deluded and indulged in loving money, advertisements, and sex. It also aims at showing duality and corruption in both texts, John Self is bankrupt and wants to commit suicide. Humbert cheats many and is imprisoned and Lolita dies. Lolita becomes the victim of incest. It is an attempt to urge human beings to refuse cultural divisions and encourage human spirituality instead of Materialistic point of view.