Category: Publications

Donna Loftus, Senior Lecturer in History, has published an article entitled “Time, History and the making of the industrial middle class: the story of Samuel Smith” in Social History. The article argues that anxieties about the decline of industry and the future of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century fuelled a small explosion in life writing and popular history. Accounts combined anecdotes about everyday life and reminiscences of the great civic age in a network of texts that attempted to recreate the associational life of the industrial middle class and present it as the foundation of national progress. However, slips in time between retrospection, nostalgia, memory and history reveal the complexity of late-Victorian anti-industrialism and the tensions in liberalism between a political culture that was inclusive and open and a social world that was not. The article combines a deep reading of the autobiography of the cotton magnate and liberal politician Samuel Smith alongside popular local history and collective biography. In so doing it shows how life stories were consciously composed as history, intent on shaping the provincial middle class as a historical force at a time of uncertainty about the future of industry and of liberalism.

Paul Lawrence, Asa Briggs Professor of History, has recently published an article entitled “The Vagrancy Act (1824) and the Persistence of Pre-emptive Policing in England since 1750” in The British Journal of Criminology (May 2017). This article argues that research into preventive and pre-emptive crime control in the United Kingdom has marginalized the historical persistence of the power to arrest and convict on justified suspicion of intent. It traces the genesis of this power in statute law (particularly the Vagrancy Act of 1824) and demonstrates its consistent use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Overall, the article argues that ‘pre-emptive’ arrest and conviction on suspicion of intent have been a significant component of UK police powers since the later eighteenth century, and seeks to demonstrate the value of historical criminology in problematizing contemporary debates.

Catherine Lee, Honorary Associate, has recently published an article entitled ‘“Giddy Girls”, “Scandalous Statements” and a “Burst Bubble”: the war babies panic of 1914–1915’ in a special themed issue of Women’s History Review on ‘Representing, Remembering and Rewriting Women’s Histories of the First World War’ (online, print issue forthcoming early 2018). The article investigates the moral panic surrounding the alleged impending birth of ‘war babies’ to thousands of unmarried young women and girls, said to have been fathered by men recently departed for the Western Front in late 1914. The rumour ultimately proved to be largely unfounded – but not before it had attracted widespread press and public attention.

Edinburgh University Press has just brought out a new updated edition of Historic New Lanark by Ian Donnachie, Emeritus Professor of History at the Open University, and George Hewitt.

According to Gregory Claes, Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, London, this ‘admirably concise, readable and informative introduction … provides the best account of the famous New Lanark Mills’.

For further information, please click here to visit the publisher’s website.

Pickering and Chatto have just published The Making of the Modern Police 1870-1914. These 6 volumes of source material cover the history of policing.

Four of the volumes were edited by Paul Lawrence and Rosalind Crone of the History deptartment and by Robert Morris and Janet Clark, two former OU History PhD students.  For further information, see the publisher’s website.

Lotte Hughes, Annie E Coombes and Karega-Munene have just published Managing Heritage, Making Peace: History, Identity and Memory in Contemporary Kenya (I.B. Tauris 2013).  Kenya stands at a crossroads in its history and heritage, as the nation celebrates its fiftieth anniversary of independence from Britain in 2013.

At this important juncture, what parts of its history, including the Mau Mau uprising, do citizens and state wish to remember and commemorate and what is best forgotten or occluded? What does heritage mean to ordinary Kenyans, and what role does it play in building nationhood and forging peace and reconciliation?  Find out more about this book.