Unlike the real goodby-ees and whizz bangs of the Great War, the playful frame the media drew around the 1926 General Strike transformed it into a joke, a lark to be remembered and passed on as such for vicarious newspaper-reading participants. But of course it was not 'just play' for everyone, and there remained something tragically incomplete, naive even, about the closing rituals and ceremonies that marked the transition back to 'normality'. Most letters to the editor, maintained the widely held view that it was the average volunteers who had defeated the strikers with the 'astonishing good nature of the amateur drivers and conductor. Letters in other papers provided a similar view of the volunteers' importance in defeating the strike. Such letters further reveal that not all volunteers were from the leisure classes, or even the middle class, or they would not have needed to make temporary jobs permanent.

This chapter presents new quantitative data on the trade of Manchester canals drawn from a number of corporate and institutional sources. It highlights the remarkable diversity of commodities carried on the canals, emphasising not just intra-regional shipments of coal and stone but also inter-regional conveyances of high-value raw materials, foodstuffs and manufactures. The chapter explains the data sources and compares the relative extent of the trade on Manchester canals. It provides a detailed examination of trade from the point of view of each of Manchester's canals and examines Manchester's waterborne trade by commodity. The chapter argues that micro-research can yield detailed estimates of the quantitative dimensions of canal trade. It concludes that Manchester's canals earned the bulk of their incomes from the long-distance, extra-regional trade in industrial inputs, foodstuffs and manufactures rather than in short-haul movements of heavy minerals.

The decline in Scotland was paralleled to some extent in nineteenth century Ireland and Wales, but the collapse in Gaelic-speaking in northern Scotland was much greater and more rapid than in either Wales or Ireland. It is sometimes argued that the victory of English speech and literacy was a result of modern educational policy. The fundamental Act of 1872 ignored Gaelic entirely in its plan for a national system of compulsory education and even in the more sympathetic legislation of 1918 there was still no requirement to teach the language. The schools system in the Highlands therefore used English as the medium of instruction and state education became a means of anglicisation. From the early seventeenth century state policy in the Highlands until after the last Jacobite rebellion was directed to the repression and eradication of 'the Irische language'.

On the eve of the neoconservative war against Iraq, Admiral Timothy Keating evoked an old mainstream hip-hop hit as his battle cry. Gangsta rap irrupts in the midst of this war in which deregulated capitalism provides the conditions of survival and combat. The term 'niggativity', indeed, which would seem a highly appropriate term to describe the attitude of Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), was actually coined by Chuck D himself on his solo album the Autobiography of Mistah Chuck. On this album, the ambivalence of niggativity is directly addressed and clear lines are drawn between progressive and non-progressive forms of African-American negativity. In academic commentary on the aesthetic of hip-hop, claims have been made for it as both a postmodern form and a form that is intrinsically African-American in its rejection of linear Western musical models.

This chapter considers a wider European context. It recalls the story of Anglicanism in terms of debates about its place in a spectrum of foreign churches. Standard histories of the Anglican Church between 1660 and 1714 combine the story of its relations with dissenting rivals and its record of defence against Catholicism with accounts of internal tensions between church 'parties'. If the Church of England was justified by Erastianism, then the church elsewhere was the communion endorsed by the local ruler. Facing pro-comprehensionists who cited international Protestant opinion in favour of their scheme, their opponents went on insisting that most Reformed Christians abroad revered the Church of England in its exact current form. The transformed polemic was the church's Protestantism, including its declared fraternity with Reformed Christians abroad. Under the Tudors and early Stuarts, this conception of the national establishment had been used to prove its credentials.

This concluding chapter, teases out the lessons learned and lessons lost from these Cold War programs, and relates these to current policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Described are Nixon's philosophy and rationale for turning away from nation building, his Nixon Doctrine, and his subsequent emphasis on bolstering authoritarian gendarmes as a means of withdrawing the US from nation building and development programs abroad. The chapter goes on to critique the US policies under study, and attempts to identify lessons that seem to have been learned or lost based on America's conduct of its ambitious wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.

In the Second World War, women were involved in undercover work but they were concentrated in particularly female-appropriate positions. This chapter is an exploration of textual accounts which narrate how femininities, which were strategic and empowering, could be mobilised and how the necessities of war impacted upon femininity. It explores testimonies that narrate the ways that female agents employed conventional forms of temporally specific attractiveness in order to assist passing. The private, domestic tasks traditionally performed by women offered female agents immunity and provided them with a cover for their clandestine work. The chapter discusses accounts that record the effectiveness of enactments of traditional feminine conduct. Some tasks were explicitly denied to women as a gendered division of labour was developed within the Special Operations Executive (SOE) with women being sent into France only as wireless operators and couriers.

The subject of 'Negative Creep', one of the highlights of Nirvana's first album Bleach, is generally taken to be the singer himself, Kurt Cobain. Almost as memorable as the music it contained, the album's cover nicely catches the negativity of the record that locates its interior to a contradictory logic of (anti-)capitalism. As Alexander Kojeve's Hegelian story unfolds, the pure negativity of desire becomes the inhuman machine of historical becoming. American rock music seems an ideal place to look at the conjunction between American culture, economy and the various forms of negativity that characterise it. By 1989, one social form in particular, rendered heterogeneous by the neoliberal economic policies of Ronald Reagan's government, came to negatively exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit of American capitalism. Ironically, the negativity of this form was noted by neoconservatism, even as it was abjected as its social antithesis.

This chapter describes how both sociological and lay understandings of family change have been informed by the belief that modern families are fundamentally different from traditional families. It reveals the origins of this idea in nineteenth century evolutionary thinking and shows how it was developed by twentieth century sociologists. The chapter introduces some of the iconic studies on Irish families from this period and evaluates them in light of recent scholarship. It describes how qualitative research on contemporary families and new findings on historical households, together with the growing influence of feminism, prompted the development of more critical perspectives in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter introduces some of the concepts and theories that are essential for understanding family change, including kinship and family systems and the demographic transition.

The Restoration church and dissent might continue to be conceptualised, in terms used by Collinson of the earlier church and Puritanism, as two halves 'of a stressful relationship', defining and shaping each other. In their relationships with the Church of England, dissenters came to rely on a vigorous, often polemical, print culture that represented and conceptualised the church in robust terms as a persecuting authority. Patrick Collinson dated the end of the birth pangs of Protestant England to the Restoration. The Welsh Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell, entering into the debates about the Restoration church settlement of 1660-1661, produced a pamphlet against the prayer-book and episcopacy that went through four editions in those years. The Presbyterian poet Robert Wild, who had produced robust verses, larded with scatological humour, throughout the early years of the Restoration, wrote his The Loyal Nonconformist in response to the Five Mile Act.

This chapter identifies the scale and pattern of defections and some of the attributes which distinguished those who defected from those who stayed loyal. The vast majority of the defectors were actively seeking a political role, aiming to apply their skills in opposition to the Liberals. There was a preponderance of departures to Labour among the early defectors, followed by clusters of defections to the Conservatives and then to the Liberal Nationals. The difference between the rates of military service of the defectors and the loyalists is statistically significant. On average, defectors started their political careers at a younger age than the loyalists. In many cases this was possible because the defectors came from wealthier backgrounds. There was no significant difference between the electoral success rates of the defectors and the non-defectors.