Agricultural distress following the Napoleonic wars evoked various responses from those classes whose interests were most immediately bound up with the land. Such factors as decreasing market prices and hence wages, a falling standard of living, and rising indebtedness incited, on the one hand, the disciples of Captain Swing to attempt to restore to the agricutural labourer his dispossessed inheritance, or at least to register protest at its loss. For the landowners and farmers, on the other hand, constitutional means of redress were clearly more acceptable, and between 1815 and 1845 there were several attempts to develop a protectionist organization of farmers’ associations, led, particularly in the early years, by George Webb Hall, and in the latter often associated with Lord Chandos.

Purchasing power: consumer organizing, gender, and the Seattle labor movement, 1919–1929. By Dana Frank. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+349. ISBN 0-521-38367-6. £50.00. Paperback 0-521-46714-4. £16.95.

New Deals: business, labor, and politics in America, 1920–1935. By Colin Gordon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+329. ISBN 0-521-45122-1. £40.00. Paperback 0-521-45755-6. £15.95.

The long war: the intellectual People's Front and anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940. By Judy Kutulas. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+334. ISBN 0-8223-1526-2. $39.95 Paperback 0-8223-1524-6. £16.95.

The invisible empire in the West: toward a new historical appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Ed. by Shawn Lay. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. 230. ISBN 0-252-01832-X. $32.50.

‘We are all leaders’: the alternative unionism of the early 1930s. Ed. by Staughton Lynd. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-252-02243-2. $44.95 Paperback 0-252-06547-6. $17.95.

Stalin's famine and Roosevelt's recognition of Russia. By M. Wayne Morris. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. Pp. ix+224. ISBN 0-8191-9379-8. $34.50.

Building a democratic political order: reshaping American liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s. By David Plotke. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+388. ISBN 0-521-42059-8. £40.00.

Forging new freedoms; nativism, education, and the constitution, 1917–1927. By William G. Ross. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. x+277. ISBN 0-8032-3900-9. $35.

Liberals and communism: the ‘red decade’ revisited. By Frank A. Warren. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; originally published 1966. Pp. xxiii+276. ISBN 0-231-08444-7. $45.00. Paperback 0-231-08445-5. $19.00.

Frank, Lay et al., and Ross all deal with the aftermath of the United States's brief involvement in the First World War, and some of its enduring effects – political reaction with devastating results for the labour movement and progressive politics, brutalization of America's then-normal nativism, directed at members of the recent immigrant communities making up about a third of its population.

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history; however, it remains conspicuously undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. While recent historiography has challenged representations of anti-Treaty Sinn Féin as a mindlessly destructive, anti-democratic force, the extent of ideological and rhetorical continuity linking the Provisional Government formed to assume control of the Free State on 7 January 1922 with the pre-Treaty republican tradition has not been understood. This article rejects the historiographical thesis that the Provisional Government abandoned republican ideas. Drawing from the Cambridge School's contextualist account of republicanism as a polysemic and contingent political language, it highlights the vigorously contested nature of republican thought in the intellectual firmament of revolutionary Sinn Féin and argues that the Free State leadership articulated its vision of politics and society through classical republican concepts of ‘civic virtue’ and the ‘common good’. It is suggested additionally that the colonial dynamics of the Anglo-Irish relationship helped to shape the vision of republican citizenship promoted by an administration possessed of a deep-seated determination to refute historical perceptions of the Irish people as congenitally ‘unfit’ for sovereignty.

The article analyses the processes that preceded the construction of sanctuaries in the Holy Land through the prism of the Church of Gethsemane in Jerusalem, deconstructing and uncovering layers of political power struggles which led to its formation and present shape. This study, based on extensive archival research and a field survey, demonstrates how the reconstruction of the basilica of Gethsemane, and hence the concretization in stone of some of the most depicted evangelical traditions, was not merely the result of an ecumenical consideration. In fact, it reflects the narrow, and sometimes very down-to-earth, interests of various denominations and political forces. The study also demonstrates how the unique setting of the Holy Land encouraged simultaneous multi-layered political processes, comparing the case-study of the Church of Gethsemane to those of other symbolic and national religious monuments: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.

The conventional picture of early Virginia suggests an almost exclusively male population, intent on personal profit, ruthlessly ignoring social considerations, lacking stability. This article argues that such a picture is an exaggeration, and draws attention to three communities, the inhabitants of which more closely resembled the rural English societies from which they had come. Particular attention is paid to the Neck of Land in Charles City, upriver from Jamestown close to the falls. The survival of administrative records makes possible an account of this small community between 1613 and 1629, revealing a hamlet of healthy married families whose concerns were sex, land, and status, rather than death and disease or the neighbouring Indian menace; and where stability in the 1620s did not, however, mean the absence of social tensions. Thus the Neck of Land, taken together with the communities at Point Comfort and on the Eastern Shore, demonstrates the inadequacy of current perceptions of early Virginian society.

This article examines the ‘republicanization’ of the Aveyron under the Third Republic, exploring issues of the practice and meaning of politics in this rural département. I look at the impact of the Republic's efforts to secularize education and ask on what grounds a département that emphatically rejected the secular/anti-clerical programme of the Republic could nonetheless eventually vote republican. This opens up questions of peasant understandings of politics. In particular I refer to the work of P. M. Jones who has written on this area, attributing republican success to the material benefits offered by the ‘milch-cow state’ and forceful administrative intervention. I argue that whilst the action of the Republic was significant, the success of the republicans rested on more than their ability to deliver local services. Republican politics in the Aveyron succeeded in redefining republicanism, arriving at an alternative conception of the Republic that was acceptable to the strongly Catholic and politicized electorate. We need to move away from any ideas of a single opportunist republicanism to realize that there were multiple conceptions of the Republic and a range of local republicanisms forged in relation to the circumstances of the individual French peripheries.

When Napoleon returned from exile on the island of Elba, he immediately set about gathering the support that he hoped would re-establish him as ruler of France. No sooner had he disembarked at Antibes on 1 March 1815 than he began issuing proclamations in which he portrayed himself as the leading soldier of the Republic and a man of the Revolution. His appeals found a welcome response in the French populace that astonished his opponents and perhaps surprised the emperor as well. Napoleon had changed the very nature of Bonapartism by allying himself with the tradition of the Revolution, and the federation movement which swept across France during the six weeks prior to Waterloo was a direct response to his new appeal.

Recently several works have illuminated the important role played by diplomats in the course of the religious wars of the latter half of the sixteenth century. We propose to shed some additional light on this general subject by studying the often curious activities of some Spanish envoys to France and England with respect to Spanish Protestants who had taken refuge in those lands. Through a careful scrutiny of related but seemingly minor matters we can frequently learn more about major ones.

In 1791, in one of the most remarkable documents penned in eighteenth-century Georgia, a group of white women petitioned for the life of a male mulatto slave who had been condemned to death not because of the offence he had committed but because of his reputation as ‘villain’. Although barely a page long, the Sunbury petition provides a fascinating statement of the racial attitudes, political consciousness and modus operandi of elite white women in early national Georgia. The women of Sunbury were articulating their understanding of the role and duties of women in the new republic. If necessary, those duties included correcting the civic behaviour of men.

Violence in early modern Europe, 1500–1800. By Julius R. Ruff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+269. ISBN 0-521-59119-8. £13.95.

The London mob: violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England. By Robert Shoemaker. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Pp. xvi+393. ISBN 1-85285-389-1. £25.00.

Outlaws and highwaymen: the cult of the robber in England from the middle ages to the nineteenth century. By Gillian Spraggs. London: Pimlico, 2001. Pp. x+372. ISBN 0-7126-6479-3. £12.50.

The duel in early modern England: civility, politeness and honour. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x+355. ISBN 0-521-82062-6. £45.00.

Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms. By Roger B. Manning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+272. ISBN 0-19-926121-0. £47.00.

Rebellion, community and custom in early modern Germany. By Norbert Schindler, translated by Pamela E. Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv+311. ISBN 0-521-65010-0. £55.00.

The history of violence appears to hold a particular fascination for scholars of the early modern period. This is not least because it is so often deemed integral to the differences between modern and pre-modern culture and politics, despite the fact that this particular difference is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The progressive decline and containment of violence – or at least certain forms of violence – has been central to narratives of state formation, the transition from courtesy to civility, a shift from aristocratic to bourgeois cultural hegemony, and the ‘civilizing process’ first theorized by Norbert Elias. Despite Michel Foucault's complication (if not rejection) of their teleological assumptions, such celebratory accounts of modernization have proved remarkably tenacious, albeit in a fragmented fashion. As the selection of books under review here illustrates, with the exception of Manning and, most notably, Peltonen, current scholarship is more likely to uphold, or to modify subtly, rather than to reject entrenched views of a gradual abeyance of violence in early modern Europe in response to imperatives of civility and politeness and to emergent state control.

Singlewomen in the European past, 1250–1800. Edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999. Pp. vi+352. ISBN 0-8122-1668-7.

Renaissance culture and the everyday. Edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt. Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 1999. Pp. vi+366. ISBN 0-8122-1663-6.

The crimes of women in early modern Germany. By Ulinka Rublack. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. ix+292. ISBN 0-19-820637-2.