This chapter discusses changes in the ‘middle years’ when people expend most energy caring for those who are younger or older, while also working and contributing taxes that enable the state to subsidize, to a greater or lesser extent, the work of caring, placing the Irish experience in comparative context. Narratives from the Life Histories and Social Change collection are combined with contemporary parent interviews from the Growing Up in Ireland study to trace the changing character of adult partner relationships from undemonstrative affection, to an emphasis on companionship, followed by a shared commitment to active parenting as women increasingly remain in paid employment following the birth of children. Decisions about marriage, work and childcare across the generations are explored with reference to complex gendered moral rationalities. There is a discussion of the changing ways in which couples and parents are embedded in wider kinship networks and community life. The chapter also examines how the continuing tension between the private spaces of families and the public spaces of community and social life creates gaps in which some of the darker aspects of family life are concealed, with a particular focus on intimate partner violence.

German public opinion focused upon almost the reverse of the issues which worried the British. British public and official opinion focused upon the Hun as the central image of Germans. In Germany, press and official opinion painted the reverse picture of the one which existed in Britain, focusing upon the mistreatment of the prisoners of war held by the enemy. The internment campaign in Britain had two key elements: the demand for wholesale incarceration; and the issue of the positive treatment of German prisoners, especially in contrast to Britons held in Germany. Similar to the British one, the German propaganda machine, backed up by official material, claimed that the British mistreated working prisoners, in this case behind the lines in France. This mistreatment of prisoners by the enemy offers one insight into the way in which public opinion in both Britain and Germany understood this issue.

Explores the political culture argument and illustrates it through a description of how political culture shaped threat perceptions and such national security analyses and statements as the Project Solarium position papers NSC-68 in the formative years of the Cold War. The chapter also explores the process by which the US came to view the entire world as its ‘national security zone’, in which virtually every event was of importance to US national security.

This chapter reconsiders the reasons why Francis Hutchinson condemned witchcraft trials in the Historical essay. It is generally agreed by historians of the subject that witchcraft trials in England were sporadic, trying the crimes of individuals or very small groups, and very likely to end in acquittal. The chapter provides a literary critique of the Historical essay, ascertaining how it was constructed and how it works as a text. According to Dr Ian Bostridge, Hutchinson had to wait until 1718 to publish the Historical essay, when witchcraft had become a marginal concern to mainstream, educated culture. Hutchinson may have used the arguments and methodology of witchcraft sceptics and opponents of enthusiasm in the Historical essay, but he nonetheless made deliberate parallels between his book and Sir Issac Newton's Principia Mathematica. It was typical of Newtonian Latudinarians to try to bolster Whig social and cultural ideology by reference to Newtonian science.

Algernon Charles Swinburne's earliest foray into periodical publication occurred in 1857-1858 in the Oxford-based Undergraduate Papers. Swinburne's ideas and writing are often provoked by journalism, and many of his pamphlets, poems, letters, and articles are in dialogue with it. Swinburne's diverse responses resemble those of other late Victorian writers including Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde who valued and denounced the press while persisting in writing for it. Even for Swinburne, with his talent for exploiting fully the scope of the press, his consciousness of its limitations may be seen in his occasional recourse to pamphlets, two of them especially famous. This form has the advantage of free-standing publication, with timing and content in the control of the author than hedged in by the constraints of the politics, format, and frequency of a journal and the gatekeeping and cuts of its editor.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Victorian rewriters portrayed the Saxon as an ideal king, whether that meant an absolute monarch, a limited sovereign, a warrior-hero, or a wise and aged ruler. In using the construction of the Athelney fort as a means of demonstrating exemplary patriotism G.A. Henty was in a minority, far more nineteenth-century writers employed it as a way of demonstrating King Alfred's common touch, his empathy with his subjects. Alfred as a physically pre-eminent warrior and Alfred as a duellist both continued as motifs in early nineteenth-century texts. Thomas Carlyle's sustained importance to the Victorian cult of Alfred is perhaps best demonstrated by his direct and pervasive influence upon a writer working many years after him, Thomas Hughes. Hughes's decision to write a biography of Alfred was an explicitly political action.

Chapter 4 sets out to demonstrate how the global proliferation of the reconciliation discourse not only manifests itself in the spread of the reconciliation language but also in the simultaneous diffusion of a set of reconciliation practices and practitioners in global politics. The chapter argues that from the late 1990s onwards, the truth commission emerged as a standard and increasingly standardized technology of post-conflict peacebuilding and ‘reconciliation through truth-telling’ was increasingly brought to and adopted by countries transiting from war to peace. This development was co-constitutive with the appearance of new agents in global politics, as social actors could emerge as advocates and experts of reconciliation in global politics and carry out political activities in the name of reconciliation. Chapter 4 discusses some of the members of this ‘global reconciliation coalition’ as well as their activities, and shows how the practices and interventions of this expert force were crucial for the further articulation of the reconciliation discourse on the global level and for its proliferation to new local settings.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book looks at the most pervasive forms of American popular music in the post-cold-war period. It also looks at how the term negativity has been adopted, variously, by influential and symptomatic popular cultural forms in the domain of American rap/metal music. The book explores how death metal provides a simulation of Satan's rage not just in the horrific visions that it constructs from 'the clippings and footage of daily carnage and abuse' but also in its visions of apocalypse. It concludes at the point of George W. Bush's declaration of the war on terror, a declaration that formalises the condition of perpetual war that had been raging undeclared throughout the 1990s in the form of supercapitalism.

This chapter begins with some bits of household advice from the sixteenth century. The first group comes from A Thousand Notable things, of sundry sortes. Whereof some are wonderfull, some straunge, some pleasant, divers necessary, a great sort profitable and many very precious, collected by Thomas Lupton, published in London in 1579. There are no love potions in Secrets of Alexis or A Thousand Notable Things, though they imply a relationship between men and women that certainly render a nostrum credible, given what constitutes evidence of success in toothache and earache cures. Remedies are given for impotence, including the impotence caused by witchcraft, a sufficiently attested condition to qualify as one of the very few legally acceptable grounds for divorce in the case of the Earl and Countess of Essex in 1613.

Jacques Aymar's spectacular feat of detection made him an instant celebrity; and it immediately sparked a huge controversy. The reason for the dispute centered around the fact that Aymar had tracked down the killers with a divining rod, a forked stick usually used in the dowsing trade to find underground springs and ores. The discussion sparked by Aymar's solution to the double murder provides a unique perspective on the creation of public opinion during the early stages of the age of Enlightenment. Several dowsers appeared during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, allowing some continuity to the debate over its validity. During the 1770s, the debate picked up steam again with the appearance of Dauphiné's other famed dowser, Barthelemy Bléton. Bléton received his most active individual support from a minor savant named Pierre Thouvenel.