Recent Publications

US Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy

Candidates, Campaigns and Global Politics from FDR to Bill Clinton

Andrew Johnstone and Andrew Priest

While domestic issues loom large in voters’ minds during American presidential elections, matters of foreign policy have consistently shaped candidates and their campaigns. From the start of World War II through the collapse of the Soviet Union, presidential hopefuls needed to be perceived as credible global leaders in order to win elections—regardless of the situation at home—and voter behavior depended heavily on whether the nation was at war or peace. Yet there is little written about the importance of foreign policy in US presidential elections or the impact of electoral issues on the formation of foreign policy. In US Presidential Elections and Foreign Policy, a team of international scholars examines how the relationship between foreign policy and electoral politics evolved through the latter half of the twentieth century. Covering all presidential elections from 1940 to 1992—from debates over American entry into World War II to the aftermath of the Cold War—the contributors correct the conventional wisdom that domestic issues and the economy are always definitive. Together they demonstrate that, while international concerns were more important in some campaigns than others, foreign policy always matters and is often decisive. This illuminating commentary fills a significant gap in the literature on presidential and electoral politics, emphasizing that candidates’ positions on global issues have a palpable impact on American foreign policy.

New Histories of the Andaman Islands

Landscape, Place and Identity in the Bay of Bengal, 1790-2012

Clare Anderson, Madhumita Mazumdar and Vishvajit Pandya

This innovative, multidisciplinary exploration of the unique history of the Andaman Islands as a hunter-gatherer society, colonial penal colony, and state-engineered space of settlement and development ranges across the theoretical, conceptual and thematic concerns of history, anthropology and historical geography. Covering the entire period of post-settlement Andamans history, from the first (failed) British occupation of the Islands in the 1790s up to the year 2012, the authors examine imperial histories of expansion and colonization, decolonization, anti-colonialism and nationalism, Japanese occupation, independence and partition, migration, commemoration and contemporary issues of Indigenous welfare. New Histories of the Andaman Islands offers a new way of thinking about the history of South Asia, and will be thought-provoking reading for scholars of settler colonial societies in other contexts, as well as those engaged in studies of nationalism and postcolonial state formation, ecology, visual cultures and the politics of representation.

• The first study of the Andaman Islands to cover the period from colonization to the present day
• Provides a theoretical focus on space and place that has clear relevance to other global contexts
• Retrieves voices of indigenous communities and locates their historical experiences within the larger history of colonization.

The Habitable City in China

Urban History in the Twentieth Century

Toby Lincoln

This book offers a new perspective on Chinese urban history by exploring cities as habitable spaces. China, the world’s most populous nation, is now its newest urban society, and the pace of this unprecedented historical transformation has increased in recent decades. The contributors to this book conceptualise cities as first providing the necessities of life, and then becoming places in which the quality of life can be improved. They focus on how cities have been made secure during times of instability, how their inhabitants have consumed everything from the simplest of foods to the most expensive luxuries, and how they have been planned as ideal spaces. Drawing examples from across the country, this book offers comparisons between different cities, highlights continuities across time and space—and in doing so may provide solutions to some of the problems that continue to affect Chinese cities today.

Spirits of Community

English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750-2000

Keith Snell

Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past – whether for good or ill – with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community.

It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.

Obligation, Entitlement and Dispute under the English Poor Laws

Steven King

This volume brings together the world's leading poor law historians to reflect on the character and sentiment of welfare structures in Britain between the 1600s and early twentieth century. At its core is the question of how ordinary people experienced welfare and how they might seek to navigate and find power in local and state welfare systems which generally afforded them few concrete opportunities for agency. The chapters deal directly with the words and lives of the poor but also wider questions about the spatial dimensions of welfare, the construction of official attitudes and the conflicts felt by individual officials as they attempted to balance their potentially (and often actually) competing duties to taxpayers, the poor, fellow officials and even themselves.

Urbanizing China in War and Peace: The Case of Wuxi County

Toby Lincoln ISBN: 978-0-8248-4100-3

Urbanizing China in War and Peace rewrites the history of rural-urban relations in the first half of the twentieth century by arguing that urbanization is a total societal transformation and as important a factor as revolution, nationalism, or modernity in the history of modern China. Linking the global and the local in space and time, China's urbanization was not only driven by industrial capitalism and the expansion of the state, but also shaped how these forces influenced daily life in the city and the countryside. Although the conflict that beset China after the Japanese invasion in 1937 affected the development of cities, towns, and villages, it did not derail previous changes. To truly understand how China has emerged as the world's largest urban society, we must consider such continuities across the first half of the twentieth century—during periods of war as well as peace. The book focuses on Wuxi, a city that lies a hundred miles to the west of Shanghai. In the early twentieth century local industrialists were responsible for it quickly becoming the largest industrial city in China outside treaty ports. They built factories, roads, and other infrastructure outside the old city walls and in surrounding towns and villages. Chapters examine the county's transformation as recorded in guidebooks and travel magazines of the time and the role of the state in the early 1920s and into the Nanjing Decade, when new administrative laws led to the continued expansion of the city under both municipal and county officials. They explore the revival of the silk industry during the Japanese occupation and the industry's role in driving urbanization, as well as efforts by Chinese leaders to carry out prewar development plans despite lockdowns and qingxiang (clean the countryside) campaigns. In the midst of the barbed wire and watch towers, plans to shape the built environment in Wuxi County and the region as a whole persisted and were carried out. Ambitious and well researched, Urbanizing China in War and Peace will appeal to scholars and students of Chinese urban history, the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and the Republican period. Its engagement with issues of urbanization in general will interest urban historians of other times and places.

Exodus and Liberation: Deliverance Politics from John Calvin to Martin Luther King Jr.

John Coffey (Oxford University Press) ISBN 9780199334223

This book offers the first survey of Protestant Exodus politics from the Reformation to the African American freedom struggle. It documents the deployment of biblical texts at critical junctures of British and American history, including the revolutions of the 1640s, 1688 and 1776 and the abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book shows how African Americans appropriated and reshaped this inherited tradition, forging a distinct identity as the Children of Israel and throwing into question the scriptural construction of the United States. Using sermons, speeches, pamphlets, song, verse, and iconography, Exodus and Liberation argues that the political reading of the Bible powerfully informed Protestant debates over slavery and liberty.

Crime and Punishment in African American History

James Campbell (Pagrave Macmillan, 2012) ISBN 978-0-230-27381-8

African American history has been scarred by violent and discriminatory law enforcement—from the mass executions of rebel slaves, through to the present day in which more black citizens are incarcerated than ever before.  This book provides an in-depth overview of crime, punishment and justice in African American history. It presents cutting-edge scholarship on major issues of criminal justice in the United States, and explores everyday African American experiences alongside famous trials and court decisions. It also highlights the way in which resistance to oppressive policing, punishment, and vigilante justice has advanced the broader struggle for black freedom, and driven an ongoing process of criminal justice reforms.

The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales

Edited by Jacqueline Eales and Andrew Hopper Studies in Regional and Local History, 5 (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2012) ISBN 978-1-907396-70-0, 164pp.

This volume honours the memory of Professor Alan Everitt, a former head of Leicester's Department for English Local History. It explores the legacy of his research through a re-examination of his 'County Community' hypothesis, intending to signpost future directions for research into the relationship between the centre and localities in seventeenth-century England. The collection of essays extends the debate into periods and territories previously left largely untouched by it, such as early modern Wales and the post-Restoration period. Other chapters assess the cultural horizons of the gentry and ways of analysing their attachment to contemporary county histories. There is a methodological focus throughout on how to contextualise the local experiences of the civil wars into wider interpretative frameworks. Whatever the limitations of Everitt's original thesis may have been, historians studying early modern society and its relationship to the concepts and practice of governance must still reckon with the county and the primacy of local experiences which were at the heart of Everitt's work.

Cities and the Grand Tour. The British in Italy 1690-1820

Roey Sweet (Cambridge University Press, 2012) ISBN: 978-1-107-02050-4, 338pp.

How did eighteenth-century travellers experience, describe and represent the urban environments they encountered as they made the Grand Tour? This fascinating book focuses on the changing responses of the British to the cities of Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice, during a period of unprecedented urbanisation at home. Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material, including travel accounts written by women, Rosemary Sweet explores how travel literature helped to create and perpetuate the image of a city; what the different meanings and imaginative associations attached to these cities were; and how the contrasting descriptions of each of these cities reflected the travellers' own attitudes to urbanism. More broadly, the book explores the construction and performance of personal, gender and national identities, and the shift in cultural values away from neo-classicism towards medievalism and the gothic, which is central to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and the transition to modernity.

Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550-2000

David Gentilcore (Continuum, 2012) ISBN: 9781441140388, 272pp.

Italy, like the rest of Europe, owes a lot to the ‘Columbian exchange’. As a result of this process, in addition to potatoes, Europe acquired maize, tomatoes and most types of beans. All are basic elements of European diet and cookery today. The international importance of the potato today as the world’s most cultivated vegetable highlights its place in the Columbian exchange. While the history of the potato in the Ireland, Britain and other parts of northern Europe is quite well known, little is known about the slow rise and eventual fall of the potato in Italy. This book aims to fill that gap, arguing why the potato’s ‘Italian’ history is important. It is both a social and cultural history of the potato in Italy and a history of agriculture in marginal areas. David Gentilcore examines the developing presence of the potato in elite and peasant culture, its place in the difficult mountain environment, in family recipe notebooks and kitchen accounts, in travellers’ descriptions, agronomical treatises, cookery books, and in Italian literature.

The Indian Uprising of 1857-8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion

Clare Anderson (Anthem Press India, 2012) ISBN: 9789380601526, 220pp.

This fascinating book, based on extensive archival research in Britain and India, examines why mutineer-rebels chose to attack prisons and release prisoners, discusses the impact of the destruction of the jails on British penal policy in mainland India, considers the relationship between India and its penal settlements in Southeast Asia, re-examines Britain’s decision to settle the Andaman Islands as a penal colony in 1858, and re-evaluates the experiences of mutineer-rebel convicts there.

Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c. 1834-1929

Dr Elizabeth Hurren (Palgrave) ISBN 978-0230219663

In the nineteenth century the business of anatomy was very profitable. However, existing in a Victorian underworld, its shadowy details and potential links to the Jack-the-Ripper murders were seldom exposed. In this accessible and vibrant account, Elizabeth Hurren brings to life lost pauper stories recovered from the asylums, infirmaries, workhouses, body dealers, railway men and undertakers that supplied the medical profession with dissection subjects. The details of those trading networks, corpse sales, body parts fees, railway transportation costs and funeral expenses have never been documented before now, yet this economy of supply in the dead underpinned modern medicine. In Dying for Victorian Medicine, Hurren allows us to look for the first time into the human face of abject poverty, working back in the archives from death to touch the lives of those compelled by pauperism to give up a loved one's body for dissection.

The Papers of the Hothams: Governors of Hull during the Civil War

Edited by Andrew Hopper (Camden Society, 5th series, 39, 2011).

The role of Sir John Hotham in denying Charles I entrance into Hull in April 1642 was a critical moment in the outbreak of the English Civil War. This volume publishes the civil war letters and papers of the Hotham family, along with the accounts of their garrisons at Hull and Beverley. The evidence highlights their kinship networks, military resources and place within the parliamentary coalition, connecting northern affairs to Westminster. The book also reconnects the trial of the Hothams for betraying their trust in December 1644 with the simultaneous Self-Denying Ordinance and the formation of the New Model Army.

Research Methods in History

Edited by Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) ISBN: 978-0-7486-4204-5 paperback, 978-0-7486-4205-2 hardback, 256pp.

A new book has been published that aims to put methods and methodology back onto historians’ agenda. Research Methods for History contains essays by leading historians like R.J. Morris and Ludmilla Jordanova on approaches such as visual methods, GIS and life-stories. Historians from Leicester’s Centre for Urban History, Simon Gunn and Prashant Kidambi, contribute chapters on the concept of performance and time respectively. Ranging across topics from landscape to ethics, the essays encourage historians and postgraduate researchers to think anew about the rich variety of ways now available to investigate the past.

New Directions in Local History since Hoskins

Edited by Andrew Hopper, Christopher Dyer, Evelyn Lord and Nigel Tringham (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011) ISBN: 978-1-907396-12-0

Local history in Britain can trace its origins back to the sixteenth century and before, but it was given inspiration and a new sense of direction in the 1950s and 60s by the work of W.G. Hoskins. This book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his Local history in England which was designed to help people researching the history of their own villages and towns.

Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865

Edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey (Oxford University Press, April 2011) ISBN: 978-0-19-958548-9, 224pp.

As historians have gradually come to recognize, the involvement of women was central to the anti-slavery cause in both Britain and the United States. Like their male counterparts, women abolitionists did not all speak with one voice. Among the major differences between women were their religious affiliations, an aspect of their commitment that has not been studied in detail. This book examines the part that the traditions, practices, and beliefs of English Protestant dissent and the American Puritan and evangelical traditions played in women's anti-slavery activism. Focusing particularly on Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian and Unitarian women, the essays in this volume move from accounts of individual women's participation in the movement as printers and writers, to assessments of the negotiations and the occasional conflicts between different denominational groups and their anti-slavery impulses.

Sport and the Military: The British Armed Forces 1880-1960

Tony Mason and Eliza Riedi (Cambridge University Press, 2010), ISBN: 978-0-521-70074-0, 298pp.

On battleships, behind the trenches of the Western Front and in the midst of the Desert War, British servicemen and women have played sport in the least promising circumstances. When 400 soldiers were asked in Burma in 1946 what they liked about the Army, 108 put sport in first place - well ahead of comradeship and leave - and this book explores the fascinating history of organised sport in the life of officers and other ranks of all three British services from 1880–1960. Drawing on a wide range of sources, this book examines how organised sport developed in the Victorian army and navy, became the focus of criticism for Edwardian army reformers, and was officially adopted during the Great War to boost morale and esprit de corps. It shows how service sport adapted to the influx of professional sportsmen, especially footballers, during the Second World War and the National Service years.

The US Public and American Foreign Policy

Edited by Andrew Johnstone and Helen Laville (Routledge, 2010), ISBN 978-0-415-55315-5, 232pp.

Though often overlooked, public opinion has always played a significant role in the development and promotion of US foreign policy and this work seeks to comprehensively assess the impact and nature of that opinion through a collection of historical and contemporary essays.

Deserted Villages Revisited

Edited by Chris Dyer and Richard Jones (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2010), ISBN 978-1-905313-79-2

Thousands of villages and smaller settlements were deserted in England and Wales during all periods, though many of them were abandoned between 1340 and 1750. Why were they deserted? Why did some villages survive while others were abandoned? Who was responsible for their desertion? What can we learn about life in the countryside from a study of the deserted sites?

Since the 1970s these questions have been set aside while interest has shifted to the origin and planning of villages, and the regional differences which led to a 'village England' developing across the middle of the country, while everywhere else people lived in hamlets and individual farms. Now seems the right moment to return to the subject and with fresh eyes reopen the important questions which were not fully answered in the early days. In this book ten leading archaeologists, geographers and historians have come together to revisit the deserted villages and reveal much new evidence and new thinking about these fascinating sites.

Imprisoned by History. Aspects of Historicized Life

Martin Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), ISBN: 978-0-415-99520-7, xiii + 259pp.

Imprisoned by History: Aspects of Historicized Life offers a controversial analysis, grounded both in philosophical argument and empirical evidence, of what history does in contemporary culture. It endorses and extends the argument that contemporary society is, in historical terms, already historicized, shaped by history – and thus history loses sight of the world, seeing it only as a reflection of its own self-image. By focusing on history as a way of thinking about the world, as a thought-style, this volume delivers a major, decisive, thought-provoking critique of a crucial aspect contemporary culture and the public sphere.

Seeing Things Their Way. Intellectual History and the Return of Religion

Edited by Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad S. Gregory (Notre Dame Press, 2009), ISBN 978-0-2680-2298-3, 280pp.

'This terrific collection of essays will give intellectual historians a lot to think about. With learning, courtesy and precision, the authors make clear that historians of early modern and modern thought, in Britain, Europe, and America, need to pay far more attention than they have to religious ideas and categories. At the same time, though, they show that historians of ideas can provide historians of theology with important methodological lessons'.

Dilemmas of Internationalism. The American Association for the United Nations and US Foreign Policy, 1941- 1948

Andrew Johnstone (Ashgate, January 2009), ISBN 978-0-7546-9315-4, 212pp.

Dilemmas of Internationalism is a new political history of the 1940s which charts and analyses the efforts of private internationalists to define US internationalism and promote the establishment of the United Nations. Internationalists hoped that the United States would shake off the fear of entangling alliances that had characterised the nation's history, replacing isolationism and unilateralism with a new, involved and multilateral approach to foreign affairs. During and after World War II, a number of private individuals and organisations were at the forefront of the fight to change the nature of US foreign policy. This book focuses in particular on the most important internationalist organisation: the American Association for the United Nations (AAUN), known as the League of Nations Association through 1944. It situates the AAUN in the vast network of private organisations promoting an internationalist foreign policy during and after World War II, and analyses the connections between the AAUN and the US government and key public figures who proposed a more internationalist foreign policy.

Ordinary People as Mass Murderers- Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives (The Holocaust and its Contexts Series)

Edited by Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008), ISBN 978-0-2305-5202-9, 256pp.

Ordinary People as Mass Murderers offers a series of essays that explore one of the most fundamental questions of humanity, and a topic that is currently widely discussed within societies: How do ordinary people become mass murderers? Recent scholarship has presented a complex and heterogeneous picture of ‘ordinary’ perpetrators, and shows that no age group, gender, social, ethnic, religious or educational cohort proved immune to becoming mass murderers. This book brings together a mix of established and younger experts, to provide a unique and up-to-date overview of the current state of research that has either not been published in English, or makes accessible interpretations by well-known Anglo-Saxon scholars. Nine contributions and an introduction present complex findings in an accessible format, approach the topic from a variety of perspectives (history, gender, sociology, psychology, law, comparative genocide), address several unresolved questions, and show that our knowledge has moved on considerable since Christopher Browning’s path breaking Ordinary Men from 1992. This book is of crucial relevance for contemporary society seeking to understand various forms of genocide.

With contributions from Andrej Angrick, Donald Bloxham, Thomas Kuehne, Harald Welzer, James Waller, Christina Herkommer, Irmtraud Heike, Gerd Hankel and Chris Szejnmann.

Falling from Grace: Reversal of Fortune and the English Nobility 1075- 1455

James Bothwell (Manchester University Press, July 2008), ISBN 978-0-7190-7521-6 h/b, 978-0-7190-7522-3 p/b, 288pp.

This original study examines how members of the English medieval nobility and their families fell, usually dramatically and often violently, from position and power in the period 1075–1455. It also considers what those who survived this fall did while out of favour and what some families did to attempt to revive their fortunes. For those noble dynasties that managed to survive such downturns, there was usually an attempt to return to position, if not power – though the road was never easy and, this book argues, increasingly involved sustained efforts by wives, mothers and daughters.