History Of England Research Articles

Medical Futurology: The National Health Service and the Politics of Inevitable Conclusions

AbstractThe history of Britain's National Health Service is a history of crises: staffing shortages; insufficient capital investment; and a lack of infrastructure rendered worse by the absence of the long‐term funding settlements needed to ensure the service's future. The “critical condition” (Darzi 2024:131; https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent‐investigation‐of‐the‐nhs‐in‐england) of the NHS in the present makes reflection on the future of the health service essential and unavoidable. However, the NHS is characterised by “forms of inertia” (Powell 1966:73; A New Look at Politics and Medicine) that, even as public dissatisfaction hits record levels, consistently undermines arguments for necessary change. Drawing on the example of workforce planning, I examine how efforts to imagine the future of and a future for the NHS have taken three forms: planned; tethered (to the past); and resisted. In this, I draw out why the NHS as an institution needs to be more central to radical geographical agendas and why geographers should be engaged in its future.

Wrigley, Tony, 1931-2022

Tony Wrigley played a central, indeed pioneering, role in determining how the demographic history of England would be measured, described and explained between the middle of the 16th century and the mid-Victorian period. Furthermore, he situated his analysis of demographic history within another element of his career, as an economic historian who made unique and fundamentally important contributions to the understanding of how England moved from being a second rank European economy to the most heavily urbanised and industrial society globally. He maintained a striking momentum in his research and publication, whilst having a significant impact on a remarkably large number of institutions to which he belonged and whose development he nurtured. He was a truly interdisciplinary social scientist who held academic posts in UK university departments of geography, demography and history. He displayed a noteworthy capacity to collaborate with others, whether in group-based research or working as a chair or president at the helm of numerous institutions (including President of the British Academy 1997–2001). He was always careful to be well briefed, reaching deeply considered views which he presented with great clarity and not a little determination. He remained an intellectually driven figure throughout an academic career lasting almost three quarters of a century, which brought him notable public recognition. Nonetheless he never lost a noteworthy modesty, and maintained a distinctive lightness of touch in debate that was a key feature of his personality.

Czy Agata, żona anglosaskiego księcia Edwarda Wygnańca, mogła być córką Mieszka II?

One of the mysteries in the history of eleventh-century England is the origin of Agatha, the wife of the Anglo-Saxon prince Edward the Exile. After the death of his father – Edmund Ironside – in 1016, he and his brother Edmund were expelled from England by Canute the Great. Edward probably first stayed in Sweden and Rus’, and then settled in Hungary; in the meantime, his brother died. While in exile, he married Agatha, with whom he had three children: Margaret, Cristina and Edgar Aetheling. In 1057, Edward returned to England, where he soon died. His children played a significant role in history. Edgar Aetheling fought against William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Margaret became the wife of King of Scotland, and their daughter Matilda married King of England in 1100. Due to imprecise and relatively late information in sources, there are many hypotheses regarding Agatha’s ancestors. According to the most popular ones, she was of imperial, Rus’ or Hungarian descent. A different hypothesis suggests that she came from the Piast dynasty – she was the daughter of and Richeza. However, all the hypotheses have considerable gaps that make them difficult to accept. We believe that Agatha was of high birth but did not come from the main branch of a ruling family or was an illegitimate child, and the source references to her imperial or royal descent are a political legend created at the court of her granddaughter Matilda, wife of King of England. It seems probable that she came from Rus’.

“Travel Inter-City like the men do”: Marketing British Rail’s Inter-City in Britain 1964–1979

The change in brand from British Railways to British Rail (BR) marked an important moment in the history of Britain’s railway. Running alongside BR’s modernization was a wider process of “professionalization” within the field of marketing. This paper explores how the wider professionalization of marketing impacted BR’s own marketing practices, showing that after 1965 BR opened its doors to new methods, means, and perhaps most importantly, specialists from outside the railway industry. Such marketing efforts helped to frame the railway in terms of individual travelers’ specific economic needs: by 1968 it had effectively segmented its passengers into demographic audiences, and by 1975, BR had a much better understanding of its markets. These individual economies were often highly gendered and saw only mixed success, but ultimately demonstrated an application of research, advertising, and promotion.

Future-Oriented Science Learning and its Effects on Students’ Emotions, Futures Literacy and Agency in the Anthropocene

AbstractScience education bears the broader objective of nurturing students today to be scientifically-literate citizens of tomorrow who are able to foresee challenges, invent solutions and make responsible decisions for global issues. As a prelude to the new focus of agency in the Anthropocene, this paper presents an intervention on climate change with upper secondary students in a museum of natural history in England. Instructional strategies such as infusing scenarios and arts into scientific discussions were adopted to induce imagination, future-oriented thinking and emotional responses. Statistical results showed that the intervention significantly enhanced participants’ futures literacy, environmental agency and positive emotions. However, it did not increase their interests in learning science in out-of-school context. Implications of this study will shed light on futurising science and climate education in research and practice.

Politics of England and the Common Law: A Reading of David Hume's The History of England

Politics of England and the Common Law: A Reading of David Hume's The History of England

English Nationalism and the Study of the History of Anglo-Saxon England

The author in the presented article analyses the features and directions of development of English academic historiography, focused on the history of England before 1066, as a form of political memory. It is assumed that UK political elites do not pursue memorial politics in its classical forms. Therefore, the author notes that the role of a similar historical policy in Europe and in England is played by academic historiography.The purpose of the study is to analyse the role, place and significance of research focused on the history of Anglo-Saxon England in the context of the development of memory policy and memorial culture. The novelty of the research lies in the study of academic historiography as a form of historical policy in a society where there are institutions of memory and memorial laws.The article shows that 1) Anglo-Saxon narratives in modern memorial culture have become a form of nationalist historical interaction, 2) actors and agents of English politics are both historians and the intellectual community in general, since the ruling elites distance themselves from participation in the politics of collective historical memory, 3) Anglo-Saxon narratives in the historical general began to show interest in English cultural nationalism, since its political forms and dimensions are undeveloped.It is suggested that academic historians in modern England have become both important and forced participants in the politics of history, nationalizing history before 1066, drawing attention to the significance of the past in modern identity.The article shows that modern English historiography in the field of memory and memorial culture actually plays the role of a political expert and agent who shapes and promotes ideas about the past, instrumentalizing history as a political resource.

‘Much in the Wrong’: A New History of British Involvement in the Belmonte Letter Incident

ABSTRACT This article reopens the case of British involvement in the Belmonte Letter by mining insights from thousands of primary documents that have lain either undiscovered or untapped at various archives in Britain, the United States, Bolivia, and Colombia, including a cache of recently released material. The resulting analysis generates novel findings that challenge conventional understandings and suggest a new history of Britain’s role in the incident, with the Foreign Office taking centerstage.

Tobias Smollett’s and John Campbell’s Contributions to the American Volumes in The Modern Part of an Universal History

ABSTRACT The second edition of the influential An Universal History (1747–1754) was entitled The Modern Part of an Universal History (1759–1766). Modern Part’s volumes 38–41, in octavo, cover the discoveries, settlements and conquests of the Americas. These American volumes were written, according to Guido Abbattista, by the mid-eighteenth-century Scottish-born historian, John Campbell (1708–1775). Tobias Smollett (1711–1771) will be shown, however, to be a significant contributor to the American volumes, which is most evident in passages or sections that draw from his histories, A Complete History of England (1757–1758, 2nd edition 1758–1760) and Continuation of the History of England (1760–1765). Smollett’s contributions to the American volumes likely prompted him to borrow from them to write his American section in his later work, The Present State of All Nations (1768–1769). Smollett’s politics and correspondence, along with textual and stylometric analysis, specifically the “rolling classify” function in R, will demonstrate Smollett’s contributions to Modern Part’s American volumes.

State of the Field: The New Administrative History

AbstractThis article discusses the development of administrative history from ancient times to the present day. It explains the importance of Thomas Madox, T. F. Tout and other pioneers of administrative history in modern England and France. It also discusses the golden age of early modern administrative history (roughly 1950–1990), in which administrative methods thrived under the auspices of Sir Geoffrey Elton. The final section discusses a recent resurgence of administrative history, which some have referred to as the New Administrative History. It makes a case for the continuing importance of administrative history.

Heroines and Villains, Orphans and Thieves: The Motley Melodramas of Oliver Twist

Abstract This essay examines Charles Dickens's incorporation of Georgian- and early Victorian-era theatrical melodrama into his 1837–39 novel Oliver Twist. It studies Dickens's text against genre theories of melodrama, Dickens's own staged readings of Twist, social histories of contemporaneous England, and highlights from the era's English melodramas (including The Castle Spectre and A String of Pearls; or, The Fiend of Fleet Street). Crucial to Twist's literary history was Dickens's engagement with a pervasive London theatrical culture, a move that both trained his readers and led to the book's enduring afterlife as a melodrama itself. The essay argues that Dickens utilizes consumers’ preconceived understandings of popular theatrical tropes to guide their expectations when reading Twist. Moreover, by tweaking recognizable melodrama tropes—altering genders, multiplying villainies—Dickens finally suggests that familial reconstruction and moral collectivity can counter society's ills.

Infant mortality and social causality: Lessons from the history of Britain's public health movement, c. 1834-1914.

What are the historical conditions under which a sociologically informed understanding of health inequality can emerge in the public sphere? We seek to address this question through the lens of a strategically chosen historical puzzle-the stubborn persistence of and salient variation in high infant mortality rates across British industrial towns at the dawn of the previous century-as analysed by Arthur Newsholme, the Medical Officer of the Local Government Board. In doing so, we retrace the historical processes through which the evolving public health movement gradually helped crystallise a scientific understanding of the social causes of excess mortality. We map the dominant ideology of the public sphere at the time, chart the shifting roles of the state, and retrace the historical origins and emergence of 'public health' as a distinctive category of state policy and public discourse. We situate the public health movement in this historical configuration and identify the cracks in the existing ideological and administrative edifice through which this movement was able to articulate a novel approach to population health-one that spotlights the political economy of social inequality. We relate this historical sequence to the rise of industrial capitalism, the social fractures that it spawned, and the organised counter-movements that it necessitated.

Violence in the History of England's Christianity: A Study on the Basis of Religious and Literary Discourse

The current article is concerned with the dialectics between power, society and religion at a most dramatic period of the English history – the Tudor Reformation, a time when prevalent Catholic ideas were challenged by the new faith creating a conflict which could not be reconciled for centuries. The transition to a new social order took a strongly religious character. The schism triggered a tsunami of violence that permeated and shaped all aspects of life, polity, and culture. In the current article, politico-theological foundations of violence are viewed in historical perspective including both ideology and practice. Making violence a focal point of the research, we study all the means mobilized to justify it as well as mechanisms and venues of propaganda whose aim was to exert influence on people's mind-set.

Roundtable: Four Nations.

Nations have long since preoccupied historians. Histories of how nations came to be, how they persisted, and how nations were unmade are innumerable. As a political unit of analysis, the nation has fascinated and divided. On the one hand, histories of the nation have traced the origins of particular nation states, analysing how a large body of people becomes united within a geographic territory through a shared language, a shared identity, and a shared culture. On the other hand, such histories have been criticized for reifying the nation-state, stressing the majority over the minority, and ultimately for obfuscating differences. The nation as a structure can indeed serve the needs of the ruling establishment to create a governing society. How then, can historians retain the nation as a unit of analysis without for example valorizing England in histories of the UK? Why is it so often that in histories of Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are mentioned as a comparable case and not the focus itself? Is it possible to ensure that histories of the British Isles reject and refuse implicit hierarchies that routinely prioritize one nation over other nations? Fundamentally, is it even worthwhile to study the nation instead of, for example, focusing on specific gendered groups, or ethnic communities or labour movements for instance? By focusing on thematic experiences rather than the nation-state can historians avoid inadvertently reproducing structural inequality in twenty-first-century Britain?

Finding modernity in England's past: Social anthropology and the remaking of social history in Britain, 1959–77

British historians drew on anthropological exemplars to remake social history between 1959 and 1977. Eric Hobsbawm's ‘primitive rebels’, Peter Laslett's World We Have Lost, Keith Thomas’s studies of witchcraft, and E. P. Thompson's ‘moral economy’ were all inspired by contemporary social anthropology, and they transformed historians’ understanding of the past. Reconstructing this moment of cross-disciplinary research contributes to our understanding of broader changes in the mid-century human sciences. This was a moment of grand theorizing about ‘modernization’, capitalism, and industrialization. Social historians responded to these concerns by drawing analogies between the past and the ethnographic present. The result was a number of hugely influential studies of social change that posed new questions to those seeking to create abstract models of modernization out of the English past.

Exploring Love and Friendship in Jane Austen's Novels

Jane Austen's early works are contained in three notebooks, all of which still exist today in various museums and libraries. "Love and Friendship" and "The History of England" are the two most notable works from her early writings.” Love and Friendship" is an epistolary novella written when Austen was a teenager. It consists of letters from the heroine, Laura, to Marianne, the daughter of her friend Isabel. The story is a parody of romantic novels of the time. In it, Laura falls instantly in love with a mysterious stranger, Edward, who she almost immediately marries. Laura also meets a friend, Sophia, with whom she instantly connects in a way that is so ridiculous that it is clear that Austen was making fun of conventional stories of the day. The complex story has them undertaking perilous journeys, solving mysteries, and having adventures, all while fainting near-constantly in a clear parody of what women in romance novels would do. Ultimately, Edward and Sophia both die and Laura retires to the countryside to mourn. The story is complete with many of the cliches of Romantic era novels, including falling in love and friendship at first meeting, unexpected inheritances, and others.

Krakowskie tradycje badań nad dziejami Wysp Brytyjskich w XX i XXI wieku

The article is devoted to the presentation of the achivements of historians working in Kraków, which are devoted to the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the early modern period. In the inter‑war period (1918‑1939) the works of Władysław Konopczyński and Stanisław Kot are mentioned. The former authored several articles devoted to the English Parliament and English reactions to the partitions of Poland. The latter studied traces of the Polish Brethren in Britain and the consequences of their influence. After World War II it was Stanisław Grzybowski who should be named as the first historian who undertook serious research on British topics. He published a number of popular books, several of which were widely circulated and read, and one original source study on Tudor and early Stuart colonial policy. It is Grzybowski's student, Mariusz Misztal who has published the most widely on the early modern history of England, especially on Mary Stuart, James Stuart to move to 19th century topics connected with Queen Victoria. Andrzej Kuropatnicki is ‑ in turn ‑ Misztal's student. He works and publishes on early modern English cookery and medicine.

Evgenia Vladimirovna Gutnova as a Historiographer of the English Medieval Parliament: The Anglo-American Research Perspective

This article considers the Anglo-American historiography of the early English parliament based on the extensive contribution and heritage of Evgenia Vladimirovna Gutnova (1914–1992), an outstanding Soviet and Russian medievalist and historiographer. E.V. Gutnova was a pioneer and groundbreaker in the historical and historiographical study of the English state and medieval parliamentarism during the 13th–14th centuries. Through her work, she expanded the pool of historiographical sources available to the scientific world. This vast collection included the fundamental works on the English constitutional history of the Middle Ages published by major historians of England and the USA in the middle of the 19th–the first half of the 20th centuries. She performed a detailed analysis of their concepts of the English medieval parliament by comparison of the Whig-liberal (W. Stubbs) and “critical” (F.W. Maitland) models in line with the Marxist methodologies of history. Here, based on the historical-genetic and -comparative methods, along with historical analysis and synthesis, E.V. Gutnova’s role in the study of the early English parliamentarism within the Anglo-American historiography was defined. The conclusion is made that she developed and introduced an innovative historiographical concept, which has become a widely used algorithm for research in the field of foreign history of historical science, with the Anglo-American historiography of early parliamentarism in England as its integral part.

Reconciliation in John Winthrop's History of New England

Abstract: The prominence of dissent and the reconciliation of dissent in John Winthrop's History of New England serves as a useful reminder that Massachusetts was not as monolithic as is often thought and that colony's ability to cope with differences of religious opinion was important to the way it represented itself. Instance of reconciliation in the History also have a face-saving effect in that they cast the colonial government as a reasonable and patient judge of permissible versus intolerable dissent while, at the same time, casting irreconcilable difference as unreasonable and self-interested, and therefore punishable. This essay studies how reconciliation events in the History work rhetorically to validate the colonial government's power both by displaying its capacity for tolerance and by defining the reasonable limits of what is tolerable.

Арт. Феличе. Воспоминания актрисы (Людмила Андреевна Ямщикова-Дмитриева: к 130-летию со дня рождения)

We dedicate the publication of a fragment of the fictionalized autobiography of Lyudmila Andreevna Yamshchikova-Dmitrieva (1893‒1978), “Aktrisa” (“The Actress”), to her memory and her 130th anniversary. Another forgotten name that did not continue the ancestral branch of its famous ancestors Rokotov and Tolstoy. She left no descendants, was a dramatic actress and writer, made a certain contribution to Russian historical prose for young people in the first half of the 20th century and memorably served the theater, playing the main roles in plays of classical and modern repertoire. According to the memoirs of the playwright V.S. Rozov, who personally knew Lyudmila Andreevna and her mother, Margarita Vladimirovna Yamshchikova (1872‒1959), known in literature under the pseudonym Al. Altaev, Lyudmila shone on the provincial stage for about thirty years, quietly, imperceptibly died within the walls of the Leningrad House of Veterans of the Scene, named after her unforgettable teacher M.G. Savina. In literature, Lyudmila Andreevna performed under the pseudonym Art. Felice: that was the name of the “Ovod” (“Gadfly”) in the novel of the same name by E. Voynich, wrote books from the history of England, Italy, and the Netherlands, small biographies for children about great scientists, inventors, was a co-author of her mother in several works. The manuscript “Aktrisa” (“The Actress”), a fragment of which is offered to readers, has two copies. They are kept in the Altaev Memorial Fund (Coll. 1370) and in the fund of the Altaev Literary Memorial Museum, which is located in the village of Lositsy in the Plyussky district of the Pskov region, in the former Log estate. Lyudmila Yamshchikova herself did not intend for the manuscript “The Actress” to be published, but for those who are engaged in the history of the Russian provincial theater, this material will be very useful both in historical and research terms.