This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evan's death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing.

Although retrenchment, with its overtones of efficiency and its implied attack on corruption, is a familiar watchword of modern politics, it is difficult today to appreciate the deep ethical and constitutional significance of the issue of economy during the early nineteenth century, or the strong hold which the concept exerted over the attitudes and actions of British politicians and administrators in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty-three years of costly war with France had increased Britain's national debt from £228 million in 1793 to £876 million in 1815, and the laborious process of eliminating this deficit at the rate of a few millions a year by means of a sinking fund was aptly described as ‘the attempt of a wooden-legged man to catch a hare’. The propertied classes in the post-war period considered themselves excessively burdened with taxation, and until the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had been effectively put into operation, they were also called upon to meet the costs of an expensive and inefficient system of poor relief.

Research on the relationship between England and Protestant Germany during the sixteenth century has recently experienced a revival. A significant area of concentration for confessional interests among Lutherans a century ago, Anglo-German relations took a backseat in Reformation historiography during the twentieth century, but during the last decade or so a host of scholars in the UK, Germany, and USA have once again turned their attention to the topic. This review article surveys trends in scholarship on Reformation studies in both England and Germany before turning specifically to works considering instances of interaction, co-operation, and adaptation across the confessional and geographic divides. Gathering a considerable array of secondary materials, the article offers an overview of the merits and criticisms of previous analyses and concludes by pointing out a few areas for future inquiry.

Historians of Britain and the First World War have debated the extent to which there was a rush to colours in August 1914, as well as the consequences of bringing the war effort to the communities and homes of the civilian population. While the historiography has gradually shifted away from accepting that the wave of volunteerism in 1914 was ultimately an expression of patriotism and support for the war effort, there is still little understanding of the impact of the recruitment and propaganda campaigns at the local level. Focusing on newspaper reports and recruitment records, this article offers an examination of how Devonians responded to recruiting agents and their attempts to get men to enlist, and the effect on communities, families, and individuals who were targeted by both civilian and military authorities. This study reveals that Devon's recruitment profile differed from national trends due to occupational and geographical factors, as well as the refusal of small county newspapers to practise self-censorship.

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘… in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers … [which] … saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement…’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’.

The late Habsburg Monarchy produced two of the most renowned peace activists of their day: Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Fried. In comparison to these two Nobel Peace laureates, the main association of Austro-pacifism – the Österreichische Friedensgesellschaft (ÖFG) – is less well known. The article concentrates on this organization, which had been founded in 1891, and it draws attention to the political and intellectual environment in which it operated. The ÖFG originated in the milieu of Austro-German liberalism, but had an ambivalent rapport with liberal politics. The Austro-pacifists’ focus on supranational principles and dynastic loyalty sat uneasily with the national dimensions of Cisleithanian politics. The obstacles encountered by the ÖFG illustrate wider aspects of the political culture of fin-de-siècle Austria, ranging from the question of militarism in Austrian society to the challenges created by socialist and nationalist movements. As a whole, the article highlights the inherent limitations of Austro-pacifism, as reflected in its quest for respectability and its acceptance of the social and political order.

The ordinance 1353, later confirmed in Parliament, introduced an entirely new conception of the office of the Mayor of the Staple. The compulsory marts in which the chief export wares had to be sold were then fixed in English ports, at each of which a Mayor of the Staple was appointed. Until then the Staples had only been fixed in English ports for two very brief periods, from the Kenilworth Ordinance of May 1326 to August 1328, and from September 1332 to February 1334, subject to interruptions owing to the needs of Royal finance: otherwise, from 1313 to 1326 and from 1340 to 1353, the Staple had been fixed in a Netherlands town.

The struggle between Frederick II and the papacy is the most dramatic of all the medieval contests between Regnum and Sacerdotium and has naturally attracted many historians. Frederick's relations to the church of his Sicilian kingdom is a less obviously dramatic theme and has never been treated except incidentally as one of the contributory causes of friction between pope and emperor. It is, however, worthy of independent study, providing as it does a corrective to the idea of Frederick engaged in almost ceaseless warfare against the church, which one derives from excessive concentration on papal and imperial manifestoes. A study of Frederick's Sicilian constitutions, of his charters to churches and his letters to officials and ecclesiastics, reveals a ruler who is far from being the inveterate enemy of churchmen and of church privileges.

This article is based on documents in the archives of the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, many of which have not been previously published. This extra material allows one to see the development of Soviet policy at closer hand though there is still much that remains obscure. The correspondence between Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and Stalin, despite the absence of the latter's answers, is particularly valuable as it further illuminates their working relationship and reveals some of the differences between them. The exchanges between Litvinov in Moscow and the Soviet polpred, Alexandrovsky, in Prague show clearly that the latter was repeatedly cautioned against encouraging the Czech leaders to think that they could rely on the unilateral assistance of the USSR. They reveal, too, the degree to which Litvinov and Potemkin, a deputy commissar, felt that Fierlinger, the Czech minister in Moscow, was misrepresenting the Soviet position in this respect. Additional evidence cited here confirms earlier views that the Soviet leadership was not prepared to act independently of France or outside the League of Nations even when the opportunities for assisting Czechoslovakia were available. The article ends on a cautionary note, pointing out the limitations of the foreign ministry archives as a guide to the inner dynamics of Soviet diplomacy.

Joseph Priestley’s statement in his letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle, 7 March 1793, that: ‘I am not, nor ever was, a member of any political society whatever, nor did I ever sign any paper originating with any of them...‘ seems to be about as unequivocal as it could have been made. It is true that these words were written in reply to Burke’s charge that Priestley had given ‘his name to the sentiments in the Correspondence of the Revolution Society in England with the Jacobin Societies in France’, but the charge was not new, and the danger to Priestley less critical than it had been at the time of the Priestley Riots in July 1791. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, Priestley’s denial has been taken at its face-value, and even those who have had no sympathy with his point of view have been able to regard him as honest if misguided. Two letters recently discovered, however, shed new light on Priestley’s statement and suggest that he was less frank. The first, dated 27 June 1791, just over a fortnight before the riots, is from Priestley to James Watt, inviting him ‘as a friend of liberty civil and ecclesiastical’ to join the Warwickshire Constitutional Society.1 The second is a joint reply from Matthew Boulton and James Watt to Priestley’s invitation. This suggests that Boulton must have received a similar letter from Priestley to that sent to Watt.

The Crimean war has been the victim of much conceptualization. For modern historians, drawn to the phenomenon of a European conflict conveniently sited in the middle of a century of comparative peace, much can be made to hang on it. Whether it is an aberration, or the expression of suppressed feelings, or indeed the beginning of a current that is to grow stronger until 1914, diplomats, soldiers, politicians and economists have taken it as a dividing line. It is simultaneously the continuance of the Peninsular tradition in warfare and an array of technological novelties tempting the variously applied title, ‘the first modern war’. But while its impact on domestic politics and European diplomacy has been scrutinized, and while Captain Nolan has failed to convey his breathless order to the Light Brigade correctly on innumerable occasions, the bridge between the two, between – at its most banal – politics and tactics, has not been so closely examined.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, European and Anglo-American Protestants perceived a crisis of humanity. While trying to determine religion's role in a secular age, church leaders redefined the human being as a theological person in community with others and in partnership with God. This new anthropology contributed to a personalist conception of human rights that rivalled Catholic and secular conceptions. Alongside such innovations in post-liberal theology, ecumenical Protestants organized a series of meetings to unite the world churches. Their conference at Oxford in July 1937 led to the creation of the World Council of Churches. Thus, Protestants of the transwar era supplied the two main ingredients of any human rights regime: a universalist commitment to defending individual human beings regardless of race, nationality, or class and a global institutional framework for enacting that commitment. Through the story of Protestant thinkers and activists, this article recasts the history of human rights as part of a larger history of critical reappraisals of humanity. Understanding why human rights came into prominence at various twentieth-century moments may require abandoning ‘rights talk’ for human talk, or, a comparative history of radical anthropologies and their relationship to broader socio-economic, political, and cultural crises.

This paper assesses the historical validity of the famous tale that, near the beginning of the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), the Hellenic revolutionary army offered lead ammunition to their Ottoman enemies who they were besieging on the Athenian Acropolis. This gift was presented to the Turks in an effort to halt their quarrying of the Parthenon and the other classical monuments on the hill-top, within the masonry of which the Ottoman defenders were searching for the ancient lead clamps which could be melted down and recast into ammunition. This paper will, however, demonstrate that there is a lack of contemporary evidence to support the tale and the earliest recorded references to the story only occur some four decades after the event was claimed to have taken place. Yet despite this lack of eyewitness evidence, from the early 1980s onwards, the tale has been frequently passed off as historical fact and referenced with regularity by campaigners lobbying for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

Conservatism claims to be a philosophy of common sense and everyday experience, in which sensation takes priority over reason. This article asks how this was understood by both Conservative thinkers and grassroots members in mid-twentieth-century England, and how it sat alongside other ways of understanding the feelings and experiences of ordinary people, in a period in which these came to be regarded as a privileged form of political authority. The article shows that the Conservative everyday was rooted in individual sensory experiences, but always underpinned by the collective evocation of reverence, majesty, and awe. It traces understandings of the everyday and the awesome through political texts and grassroots publications, showing that the tension between them is what gives Conservatism its distinctive character. This is conceptualized in Burkean terms as the beautiful and the sublime. The latter guarantees order, hierarchy, and allegiance, while the former works to soften and socialize power – making it seem a matter of custom and common sense. The article suggests that this combination enabled Conservatism to adapt to the challenges of mass democracy but became ever harder to sustain in the emotional culture of post-war England, when feelings became a marker of personal authenticity, rather than cultural authority.

As the sport that purportedly enhanced martial conditioning of the ‘dominant’ race, pig-sticking assumed critical importance for the survival of the British in India. When numerous local insecurities and large-scale anxieties threatened the empire, hunting pursuits involving the wily Indian pig, it was said, made soldiers out of boys; the attendant spectacles of masculinity aimed to exert symbolic dominance over the restive Indian masses. The sport also served as an avenue for upward mobility for the subaltern soldier attempting to upstage aristocratic hunting performances in England and India. While masculinity and symbolic governance have been analysed repeatedly in critiques of hunting, sportsmen's contributions to natural history have seen limited analyses. Here, I show that the local intricacies of pig-sticking motivated a superlative understanding of the Indian wild boar, a tricky, unpredictable customer with a vile temper, and a ready propensity to attack its pursuers. Pig-sticking entailed a multi-faceted immersion with both land and people, incorporating hybrid knowledge-making, shaped within the contact zone of indigenous and colonial encounter. Further, while agreeing with post-colonial critiques on sport and imperialism, I propose looking beyond colonial exceptionalism to situate big-game hunting within the larger scholarship on costly signalling and hunting for prestige among human societies.