Category: Publications

Dr. Sara Wolfson, Staff Tutor and Lecturer in History, has published a co-edited volume with Dr. Marie-Claude Canova-Green on The Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, 1625: Celebrations and Controversy .

Professor David Vincent has published A History of Solitude. Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. David Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. A History of Solitude is the first full-length account of its subject.

David Vincent has also written a blog post On Epidemics and Loneliness for The Social History Society, drawing on his research.

Karl Hack, Professor of Asian and Imperial History, has published this article that includes a sweeping view of British imperial history as seen through the eyes of John Darwin’s works, and a survey of the state of the ‘decolonisation’ field. The article locates John Darwin’s work on decolonisation within an Oxbridge tradition which portrays a British world system, of which formal empire was but one part, emerging to increasing global dominance from the early nineteenth century. In this mental universe, decolonisation was the mirror image of that expanding global power. According to this point of view, it was not the sloughing off of individual territories, but rather the shrinking away of the system and of the international norms that supported it, until only its ghost remained by the end of the 1960s. The article then asks, echoing the title of Darwin’s Unfinished Empire, whether the decolonisation project is all but complete, or still ongoing. In addition, what is the responsibility of the imperial historian to engage with, inform, or indeed refrain from, contemporary debates that relate to some of these issues? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the toolkit that the Oxbridge tradition and Darwin provide remains relevant, and also useful in thinking about contemporary issues such as China’s move towards being a global power, the United States’ declining hegemony, and some states and groups desires to rearticulate their relationship with the global. On the other hand, the decline of world systems of power needs to be recognised as just one of several types of, and approaches to, analysing ‘decolonisation’. One which cannot be allowed to ignore or marginalise the study of others, such as experience, first nations issues, the shaping of the postcolonial state, and empire legacies. The article concludes by placing the Oxbridge tradition into a broader typology of types and methodologies of decolonisation, and by asking what a new historiography of decolonisation might look like. It suggests that it would address the Oxbridge concern with the lifecycles of systems of power and their relationship to global changes, but also place them alongside, and in dialogue with, a much broader set of perspectives and analytical approaches.

Paul Lawrence, Asa Briggs Professor of History at the OU, has published “Policing, ‘science’, and the curious case of foto-fit” in The Historical Journal. The article analyses the curious development and subsequent refinement of the Photo-FIT system for the identification of criminal suspects, used by police forces around the world from the 1970s. Situating Photo-FIT in a succession of other technologies of identification, it demonstrates that, far from representing the onward march of science and technology (and the way in which both were harnessed to the power of the state in the twentieth century), Photo-FIT was the brainchild of an idiosyncratic entrepreneur wedded to increasingly outmoded notions of physiognomy. Its adoption by the Home Office was primarily determined by the particular context of the later 1960s, and its continued use owed more to vested interest and energetic promotion than to scientific underpinnings or proven efficacy. It did, however, in the longer term, provide the impetus for the development of a new sub-field of psychology and pave the way for the development of increasingly sophisticated facial identification technologies still used today. Overall, the article demonstrates the long persistence of physiognomic thinking in twentieth-century Britain, the way in which new technology is socially constructed, and the persuasive power of ‘pseudo-science’.

Emeritus Professor Rosemary O’Day has published An Elite Family in Early Modern England, a full, detailed picture of the life of an aristocratic family in early modern England.

The Temples of Stowe were a leading Midland landed family, owning land in, and with strong connections to, Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. In the seventeenth century they were one of the wealthiest and most prominent local families, building in the eighteenth century a large and beautiful country house, now Stowe School. The family also left voluminous records, housed mainly in the Huntington and the Folger Shakespeare libraries. Based on very extensive research in these records, this book provides a detailed picture of the family life of the early Temples. It examines household, financial and estate management, discusses social networking and the promotion of family interests, and considers the legal disputes the family were engaged in. It focuses in particular on the happy and effective marriage of Sir Thomas and Lady Hester Temple, exploring their relationship with each other, with their children, and with their siblings. Lady Hester, who outlived her husband by twenty years, is a good example of a formidable matriarch, who took a strong lead in managing the family and its resources. Overall, the book provides a full and detailed picture of the family life of an aristocratic family in early modern England.

Our Associate Lecturer in History Dr Dan Weinbren has published a chapter on students in prison, ‘Prisoner Students: Building Bridges, Breaching Walls’, in
Jodi Burkett (ed.) Students in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland.

He has also recently written Now That The War Is Over: Britain, 1919-1920 and Tracing Your Freemason, Friendly Society and Trade Union Ancestors, both with Pen and Sword press.

Associate Lecturer in History Dr. Terence McBride has published ‘Scottishness and “Foreigners”: the role of a developing Scottish  “machinery of government”  before 1939‘ , in the journal Historical Research. Before 1939 continental Europeans were settling in Scotland, in a part of the United Kingdom  that had been shaped by distinct religious and legal traditions.  Government bodies in Scotland that had emerged in the nineteenth century  also gained significant powers over welfare, public health and local government before that date. This article, as the foundation for a wider study on migrants in Scotland, uses government records to examine attempts by these bodies to engage with migrants and also to develop ideas on managing  ‘foreignness’. It concludes that although officials largely engaged on the basis of increasingly restrictive UK-wide immigration legislation from 1905, this was also a period in which migrants could benefit from the efforts of both ministers and mandarins to act in line with what they saw as the particular traditions, practices  and priorities of Scotland.

Associate Lecturer in History Dr. Catherine Lee has published ‘Giddy Girls’, ‘Scandalous Statements’ and a ‘Burst Bubble’: the war babies panic of 1914–1915 in the Women’s History Review journal. During a few short months following the outbreak of war in 1914, Britain’s press was rife with reports of what was heralded as a new ‘social problem’. The alleged impending birth of thousands of ‘war babies’ to unmarried young women and girls, said to have been fathered by men recently departed for the Western Front, was widely discussed but ultimately proved to be largely fallacious. This article examines the extraordinary ‘war babies’ episode through the lens of the moral panic, focusing on the impact of exceptional wartime circumstances upon the shifting and conflicting sets of gendered, moral values and attitudes of the period.