Sex, populism, and the search for universal religious freedom were the overwhelming preoccupations of Russia's Silver Age, and no churchman did more to engage with them than Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov). Having spearheaded the Russian Orthodox church's mission to the intelligentsia in the years before 1905, he fell from grace when Russian social Christianity was irrevocably politicized by revolution. Sacked from his chair at the St Petersburg theological academy when he declared himself a Christian socialist, he was unfrocked for converting to the Old Belief, and imprisoned for fomenting sedition. Yet even as he lurched from the established church, via the schism, to a revolutionary form of Golgothan Christianity, obsessed with suffering, Mikhail never abandoned his burning desire to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. His career, which has so far escaped detailed historical investigation, encapsulates most of the ecclesiastical tensions of his time, and reveals in particularly acute form the difficulties experienced by the Russian church when it attempted to respond to modernist intellectuals and to popular spiritual need.

It will be fifty years in 2008 since Oliver MacDonagh suggested that the adoption of new responsibilities by the state in the early nineteenth century was an inevitable response to the social consequences of the industrial revolution, and impervious to ideological and philosophical influences. This article revisits MacDonagh's model by examining the emergence of occupational health reform in the British mining industry in the early twentieth century. Until the introduction of statutory measures in 1905 to protect miners against developing silicosis and basic sanitation provisions to prevent cross-contamination of disease, state regulation of working conditions prioritized the prevention of accidental injuries. It is argued that this decisive shift in the scope and nature of government intervention can be understood as part of a process of institutional expansion of mining regulations that broadly parallels MacDonagh's model. Yet the precise details of when, and how, health reform emerged and the nature of these specific regulatory controls were influenced by a variety of factors, including visibility of risk, human agency, economic performance of the industry, and contemporary thinking in political economy.

This article reassesses interwar French advertising through the case study of alcohol, one of the period's most widely advertised and popular products. Examining the ways in which alcoholic beverages were branded, marketed, and advertised, the article revises the historiography of French advertising in several ways. Histories of interwar French advertising have described an industry that was retarded and underdeveloped, or else slowly progressing through the application and adaptation of American practices. By contrast, this article suggests that during the period French advertising was a remarkably successful enterprise which should be analysed on its own terms rather than through the dominant paradigm of Americanization. French interwar publicity innovations, like the alcoholic beverages that utilized them, were very much ‘home grown’ phenomena. Both were firmly rooted in Belle Époque advertising traditions and contemporary French consumer patterns. Advertising did not create a new consumer culture; instead it reflected and was, in turn, shaped by the society in which it operated and the products being advertised.

This article explores two aspects of the Romanian legionary movement's organization in the 1930s, namely work camps and commerce. These are placed in the context of the Legion's attempts to construct a ‘parallel society’ that challenged the hegemony of the state and the dominant class of Romanian politicians and Jewish capitalists. The Legion's work camps and commercial ventures played a crucial educational role within the movement. The work camps were regarded as ‘schools’ in which the legionary ‘New Man’ was to be created and nurtured. Through its commercial ventures, the Legion aimed to educate a new generation of ‘Christian’ entrepreneurs to win back the economic position which the Romanians had allegedly lost to Jewish traders. This new elite would thus replace the decadent Romanian political and commercial classes which the Legion regarded as devoid of national awareness. The success of the Legion's ‘parallel society’ provoked government counter-measures which culminated in the murder of the movement's leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, in 1938, and the fragmentation of the Legion. The article draws upon hitherto unused Romanian archival sources, as well as legionary memoirs and articles.

This article is an exploration of Diego Rivera's visit to Detroit in 1932–3. It seeks to use his experiences, and in particular the spectacular popular reaction to the Detroit Industry murals he painted, as a prism for analysing varieties of anti-communism in Detroit in the depression era. The article argues that close relationships between private capitalists, most notably Henry Ford and a Mexican communist, expose contradictions in big business's use of anti-communism in the interwar period, and suggest that anti-communism was a more complicated phenomenon than simply a tool for the promotion of ‘free enterprise’. Moreover, by comparing the public reaction to the artists' work with their original intent, it is possible to see how members of Detroit's society unconsciously used anti-communism to sublimate broader concerns over race and ethnicity, gender, politics, and religiosity in a region in the throes of profound social change. The article seeks to highlight elements of these latent anxieties and fears in order to show how anti-communism acted as a vessel for social debate.

State measures to confiscate the ‘illicit profits’ earned from commerce with the enemy and the black market in Occupied France are generally considered to have been an abject failure. Economic collaboration and illicit commerce had been widespread. The need to ‘purge’ the profits from black market transactions and economic collaboration was considered essential at Liberation. An examination of the confiscation effort from archival sources shows that the purge achieved limited success, but that complete success was rendered impossible by factors that limited other post-war purges: the shortage of trained personnel and investigative resources, the need for hard evidence for legal procedures (rather than vigilante justice), the efforts of collaborators to cover their tracks, and the evolution of public opinion, which was quickly disappointed by the slow pace of confiscations. Although success was limited, the effort to punish the profiteers it could convict had been necessary, as a matter of elementary fiscal justice and an essential step in the restoration of the authority of the state.

In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

Between 1957 and 1977 the University of Leeds engaged in a massive programme of rebuilding. Employing the architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, Leeds transformed itself – becoming, in the words of one commentator, ‘Our first contemporary urban university’. Previously ignored by historians, this development in the history of the university illustrates a number of important themes. In the first place, it exemplifies the significance of architecture in defining higher education. Secondly – and more particularly – it shows how both academics and architects hoped to use Brutalist architecture to express the modernity of the University of Leeds. Thus the decision to employ avant-garde designers in the late 1950s and the resolution to dismiss them twenty years later both came from the same modernizing impulse. Thirdly, it shows how personal connection secured architectural patronage in this period. The Development Plan also highlights the way in which architects of the British modern movement used universities as laboratories in which to experiment with ideas about community and proper urban design. The modernist moment at Leeds, then, can be seen as representative of wider trends in British building, not least because it lasted for such a short period of time.

The Young Conservatives were primarily a social club, hosting dances, beauty contests, car rallies and winning endorsements from sports stars. They made a virtue of this apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, middle-class membership, and with rhetoric of service and citizenship embedded themselves in local civil society. This article reflects on why this associational culture has been neglected by political and social historians. In the approach of Raphael Samuel's ‘Lost world of British Communism’, it explores the worldview and lifestyle of YCs in 1950s and 1960s Britain, drawing on national, local, and oral sources. Boasting of being ‘the free world's largest youth political movement’ it was a considerable political resource and confounds Conservatism's aged public image in this period. The article accounts for the Ycs' falling membership through the 1960s and discusses its legacy. Decline came as it experienced social and cultural change, as the value of mass party membership diminished and as, after the Macleod report, YCs sought to become more conventionally ‘political’. The resulting debates about politics–social mix are illuminating about political culture more generally. It argues the YCs were not simply victims of social change, but that the decision to become ‘political’ was also a factor. Until the later 1960s it contends the YCs attest to the persistence of strands of Conservatism described by interwar historians like McKibbin and Light – an associational appeal, whose light touch deftly avoided the appearance of being partisan in anything other than name.

This is a selective survey of books published over the last ten years or so and bearing on British naval history in the second half of the long eighteenth century.

This article presents the full text of a hitherto unpublished letter to Hobbes, and provides details of three other items from his correspondence which have not survived. The unpublished letter is from the Oxford academic Thomas Barlow, thanking Hobbes for a copy of Hobbes's De homine; that copy also survives, and details are given of Barlow's critical annotations on it. Where the three non-extant letters are concerned, some information about them has been gleaned from entries in nineteenth-century dealers' and auctioneers' catalogues; in one case, a letter concerning telescopes from the marquess of Newcastle, those details are supplemented by other evidence, from Newcastle's household papers. Finally, some alleged items of Hobbes's correspondence are described and discounted, and two new manuscripts of known letters are listed.

For some years now, the repression of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) by the Paris police on 17 October 1961 has been a subject of controversy. This is despite the fact that those who have written about this incident are in agreement about its magnitude (more than 14,000 people arrested in two days) and its senseless violence. Yet there remains disagreement over the emotive question of the number of people killed. The recent publication of a study by Jim House and Neil MacMaster provides an opportunity to return to this issue, and to raise important questions about the methodologies and standards of research that have been used.

In the General Introduction and Conclusion to our book, Paris 1961: Algerians, state terror, and memory, we argue that the time has come to move beyond the current phase of political battle, the fixed-position trench warfare, over the events of ‘17 October’ for a more open history that can begin to address some wider and more fruitful questions. At the core of the polemic during the last decade has been the almost obsessive ‘battle of numbers’ that has raged between the maximalist Jean-Luc Einaudi (200–300+ deaths at the hands of the police) and the minimalist Jean-Paul Brunet (at most 30–50 deaths, but only 13 conclusively ‘proven’). In replying to Jean-Paul Brunet, we shall discuss two substantive issues: the nature of the evidence and its interpretation, and inevitably the question of the number of fatalities.

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.

This article examines the impact of the urban social movement active in Lisbon on the Portuguese transition to democracy (1974–6). Academic and public discourse over the last three decades has tended to characterize the movement either as an embryonic form of a participatory society, or an illusion created by the manipulation of a minority of activists. Conversely, this article argues that the movement was largely autonomous and powerful enough to win valuable concessions for the urban poor, in the context of increasing competition between political elites, although more moderate than many have assumed. As the contending political forces fought for supremacy, the urban movement became a coveted ally and potential source of legitimacy. With the political arena becoming increasingly polarized during the course of 1975, movement supporters were faced with a stark alternative between revolution and moderation. It is suggested that their choices were instrumental in making the victory of the moderates possible, revealing the contradiction between the street and the ballot box as a false dichotomy.

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two main strands of historiography. One group of studies has focused on societal culture's influence in shaping the form and functioning of military institutions. A second approach adopted by current scholarship has been to examine societal culture's effect on individual soldiers' resilience and motivation. The article compares and evaluates the results of this research. It concludes that, while sometimes overstressed at other factors' expense, especially combatants' common humanity and the complexity of militaries' own cultures, societal culture has proved to be a subtle yet important influence on martial performance.

This review considers, first, current work on the Napoleonic Empire dealing with Switzerland, the three parts of ‘Germany’ (the Rhineland, the ‘Third Germany’, Prussia), Spain, and the so-called ‘national’ question(s) in these countries and regions. It next focuses on recent work on the three parts of ‘Italy’ (the Kingdom of Italy, the départements réunis, and the Kingdom of Naples). But the main body of the review concentrates on the work of Michael Broers: not only his new and remarkable conceptualization of the Empire as containing ‘inner’, ‘outer’, and ‘intermediate’ zones, but also his creative if controversial application of post-modern colonial theory to an analysis of the French in Italy. The review suggests that Broers, for all his brilliance and mastery, has perhaps pressed his arguments and conclusion beyond his evidence base. The latter, while extensive, is too limited to just French perceptions of Italians before 1815, and does not extensively consider Italian reactions to the French presence; nor does it provide significant evidence to buttress Broers's far-reaching conclusions about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy.

Although the broad outlines of al-Qa'ida's story are well known, less attention has been paid to its early development and evolution. How and why did al-Qa'ida leaders latch on to the United States as a primary adversary? What motivated Usama bin Laden to form al-Qa'ida in the first place? Did this motivation change over time? This article utilizes a series of recently discovered al-Qa'ida documents – such as al-Jihad magazine financed by Usama bin Laden during the 1980s, internal memos written in the early 1990s and captured by the US military in Afghanistan, and autobiographical accounts written since 2001 by former Afghan Arab fighters – to deepen our understanding of a clandestine organization that has caused havoc for the past two decades.