This chapter is concerned with the events that led to, and followed, the small and unsuccessful rising in Ballingarry in July 1848. It examines the role of key protagonists and antagonists, in particular how their actions were informed by external events, notably in France and the United States. When it was clear that the rising had failed, the British government commenced a propaganda campaign which characterized the revolt as a farce and its participants as buffoons. The Confederate leaders, however, continued to have widespread respect and sympathy regardless of the unimpressive way in which their revolutionary aspirations had ended. Despite being routed at Ballingarry, the revolutionary threat was not totally extinguished. In 1849, a further uprising took place in Cappoquin in County Waterford. It too was easily defeated. By the end of 1849, as the old order was re-establishing itself throughout Europe, Ireland was coming to terms with not only a failed uprising, but with the loss of almost two million people as a result of mortality and emigration.

This chapter reveals Irigaray and Hegel's ideas of a woman's sexuality. Irigaray rejects Hegel increasingly conservative and ultimately inconsistent treatment of women, which subordinated them ‘to destiny, without allowing them any access to mind, or consciousness of self and for self’. According to Irigaray, women can become both initiators and partners in a revised model of the relationship that incorporates a positive mode of sexual difference. The postulate of ‘taking the negative upon oneself’ involves certain tasks, specific to each gender. Given the nature of Hegel's curtailment of women, both theoretically and physically, it is not problematic to appreciate Irigaray's call for liberty for women. Irigaray's proposal of sexual difference is not simply a confirmation of women's irreducibility and resistance to preordained categories, it is rather an acknowledgement that women themselves will no longer conform to definitions of femininity that do not respect a woman's integrity and her responsibility for her own becoming.

This chapter pursues some of the implications of William Weber's contention that although they are related in some ways, social class and musical taste must be considered as ‘quite distinct factors’. It develops this theme through a consideration of some of the historical research into the growth of musical institutions in urban areas since the eighteenth century, with particular reference to the situation in Manchester, often considered to be the world's ‘first industrial city’. Here, the emergence of Charles Hallé's orchestra and its symphonic concerts are not seen as the inevitable outcome of class-based ideology, but as a consequence of the successful promotion of a relatively new discourse of aesthetic appreciation by various ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ and the establishment of a ‘classical’ music art world.

This chapter discusses Logue's death as a watershed in some respects. The hierarchy had already begun the process of necessary adaptation to life in the two Irelands. Before his death, Logue acknowledged the depth of division within the Irish Free State. His support for the government had remained constant after the end of the civil war and on the eve of the general election, at the end of 1923, he told the electors of Dundalk to ‘go forward as a body in support of the Ministry’. The politicization of the sacraments during the civil war had separated a large section of the population from the Church. In some respects, Logue's death marked a turning point in the relationship between nationalists and the state of Northern Ireland. With his passing, the policy of non-recognition lost one of its most distinguished and consistent proponents. The commission sat in 1925 amid a general election on the border issue. There was a dawning realisation among nationalists, however, that the commissions merely confirm the boundaries of Northern Ireland and not redraw them.

The eighteenth century witnessed significant developments in the ‘medicalisation’ of problem drinking. The key features of the modern ‘disease model’ of addiction emerged in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, and had become fairly well established by the 1770s. Related to the burgeoning medical discourse on drink were long-running philosophical disputes over the nature of consciousness. These fuelled heated speculation over what drunkenness told us about the relationship between mind and body, and what the moral implications of that relationship might be. The Enlightenment sparked innumerable controversies as to the nature of reason and its relationship to moral responsibility. In Britain, the neat Cartesian division between body and mind had always been treated with some scepticism. Far from the health of the mind being divorced from the actions of the body, it seemed self-evident to many that physical well-being was inextricably, and causally, tied to mental health. This chapter explores early medical literature on drink in England and discusses the link between sobriety and sanity.

This chapter explores the system of intergovernmental relations and tries to determine if it functions as a vehicle for powersharing in state European Union (EU) decisions. It takes a look at the adaptations within Spain and the effectiveness of the channels for Basque participation in state decisions on EU matters. It also examines the Basque involvement in state intergovernmental and parliamentary bodies, and then discusses the importance of informal links between political parties ruling in multiple territorial arenas.

This introduction discusses the Annals of Fulda (AF) and their authorship, earlier editions and translations. It also provides a brief overview to the political world during which the AF was written.

This chapter traces the emergence of the moral agenda as a key issue in American public opinion and in U.S. politics. It explains that moral and cultural concerns became frontline political issues from the late 1960s onwards, as a result of the sexual revolution and the loosening of established moral codes, particularly among the Woodstock generation. The chapter also highlights the role of the Christian right, which had established itself as an important constituency that could exert significant political leverage, in reshaping judicial politics, interest group activity and the character of the party system. It also investigates the variables that might account for the growing tolerance of premarital sexual relationships and homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s, and discusses George W. Bush's electoral strategy and his handling of moral issues in his campaign.

This chapter assesses the impact of the Millennium Dome, a structure that is believed to have been a part of an ideological project to negotiate the seeming fracture of a unified British ‘identity’. It introduces the ‘spectator of modernity’, which is the flâneur, who is able to take in the city as a totality, and a formulation that joins together with the subjectivity questioned by the modern nation-state. It then looks at Sinclair's move from the centre to the margins and his interest in studying the repressed, forgotten and suppressed. Finally, it shows how London is marked with histories of oppression and histories of resistance.

In order to understand the commonwealth position, this chapter puts on one side the issue of constitutional forms and focuses instead on the principles, values and practical measures that the commonwealthmen saw as uniting them with the republicans of the mid-seventeenth century. It is clear that the commonwealthmen were much more closely in line with the seventeenth-century republican tradition than their rejection of kingless government would initially suggest. In their emphasis on the concept of liberty and their concern with both civil and religious freedoms, they were following directly in the earlier tradition. The real achievement of the commonwealthmen was to bring the works and ideas of the mid-seventeenth-century republicans to the attention of a new generation and to render their ideas applicable in the very different circumstances of eighteenth-century Britain.

This chapter considers a legend of integration, a narrative that may be said to constitute the English answer to problems of stable governance. It comments on Krishnan Kumar's The Making of English National Identity, in which he claimed that there are virtually no expressions of English nationalism and no native tradition of reflection on English national identity. The chapter suggests that the link between the history of a people and its political institutions was a key feature of English reflection on the modern state, and that the lack of an overtly defined nationalism did not and does not mean the absence of a profound sense of nationality or even a certain idea of England. It also discusses the English claim of exceptionalism.