This chapter explores Grace Ashley-Smith's work as a First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) in Belgium during September and October 1914, and highlights the key theme in the negotiation of gender relations in war. It suggests the ways the sentimental, romantic genre associated with the 'Great War Rhetoric' and women's literary heritage allowed Ashley-Smith the opportunity develop a female heroism. Ashley-Smith's accounts of her first months in Belgian as a FANY are recorded in Nursing Adventures: A FANY in France. Most women attempted to blend old romantic traditions with more modernist approaches and their writing often illustrates what Angela K. The experience saw Ashley-Smith begin as bedside heroine, putting her on a footing with men in terms of the involvement with suffering, and graduates to battlefront heroine where she more actively risked the dangers of war and developed her own notion of personal heroism.

The biographical articles of nineteenth-century reference works such as the Dictionary of national biography have been the only guides available to those interested in Francis Hutchinson's early clerical career and family background. During the course of his life, Hutchinson's father, Edward, became a relatively wealthy yeoman farmer and can be regarded as being of the 'middling' rank in seventeenth-century English society. The Hutchinsons were not only of the middling sort, but also communicants of the Church of England. In early 1692, Hutchinson was presented to the perpetual curacy of St James' in Bury St Edmunds. Fairly soon after his appointment to St James', Hutchinson moved from Hoxne to Bury St Edmunds, a place where he lived and worked for the next 28 years or so. Hutchinson remained rector of the living until the vacancy was filled in 1727 by John Jenkins, an alumnus of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

This chapter analyses the photographic material published in the mainstream press during the events of May of 1968, drawing upon the French dailies published in Paris, that is Le Figaro and L'Humanité and the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. It examines the use of photographs covering the events during May and June and studies whether photojournalism contributes to constructing stereotypes of the events, which informed the construction of subsequent dominant narratives. The existing hierarchy and the separation between the party representatives and the public not only resemble older representations of the labour movement, but also remind us of the representation of mainstream politics. Collectivisation in L'Humanité was associated with either photographs of static workers taken in the occupied factory or photographs of a crowd without particular characteristics. Le Figaro, in contrast with the student press and L'Humanité, covered the demonstrations in support of the General.

On 20 April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold turned up at their school armed with two shotguns, a 9-mm Hi-Point carbine semi-automatic rifle and a TEC-DC9 handgun. Although this attack was preceded by others at Springfield, Oregon, Paducah, Kentucky and Jonesboro, Arkansas, the event at Columbine was by far the most deadly and traumatic, causing recriminations in the national press. In Columbine, the goths were opposed to the jocks who baptised them with their name after the goth fashion for wearing long, black trenchcoats, a fashion that was given further cultural resonance by the Matrix films. In his account of the Columbine event, John F. Murphy Jr cites eye-witness reports that Harris and Klebold 'were ecstatic in their happiness'. One of the curiosities of Harris and Klebold's action in the library and elsewhere at Columbine is that technological objects became their targets as well as the students.

British suppression of the transatlantic slave trade rested on the threat of violent force. On a practical level, the British Royal Navy's interception of transatlantic slave traders preceded Britain's abolition of the slave trade. This chapter examines the periods of British abolition and the West Indian emancipations, the early Victorian crisis of suppression, and the era of the American Civil War, tracing across time the development of priorities, motives and traditions. James Stephen, the dynamic young lawyer who served as secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, worked hard to promote slave-trade suppression as a war measure. A reconfirmation of parliamentary support for suppression only strengthened the government's desires, in 1860, to find a new front against the Cuban slave trade. Brazilian citizens and their politicians had acted decisively against the slave trade after 1850, while in Cuba plummeting sugar prices sapped demand for slaves.

One of the most significant ways of British culture was articulated throughout the Empire was by exporting the nation’s most important political ideology, Liberalism. A good deal of imperial history, from the British side, can be seen as a dialogue over the interpretation of Liberalism. As liberal ideas were carried away from home, two interpretations of the British Liberal heritage emerged, each focusing on one part of that heritage, and fated to clash. The first was widely held by colonists and other “non-official” Britons and the second by officials. The first emphasized the liberty of the individual and the consequent limitation of state power; the second focused on equality under the law for all subjects (including non-Britons), and the use of the state to maintain “ordered liberty,” with equal emphasis on both terms. The most famous clash was, of course, the American Revolution, but a similar dynamic underpinned relations between official and non-official Britons in the Empire through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries virtually down to the Empire’s end.This chapter will explain how these two forms of Liberalism developed and how they came into conflict, citing several examples in the history of India and the West Indies.

This chapter highlights the experiences of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) in the year following the Armistice. It focuses on the development of solidarity and friendship that encouraged a shared feminine identity. The chapter looks back at the various FANY units in service during the war and discusses the ways the FANY constructed and enjoyed the esprit de corps. The FANY working for the British in Calais with Unit 3 celebrated the Armistice early as word ran through Calais on 10 November that peace had been signed. In Grace McDougall's absence, Mary Baxter-Ellis, adjutant and second-in-command with the Belgian convoy, wrote the final demobilization report for the Belgian FANY. McDougall's Corps de Transport attached to the Belgian Army, was the first to cross back into Belgium when the Germans left Bruges in October 1918.

This chapter examines the government’s efforts to maintain public consent and support for the war. Historians have tended to assume that public opinion about the war was overwhelmingly negative; this chapter disputes such a view, and describes a range of more supportive, resolute attitudes. The efforts of the government, both central and local, to encourage support for the war through propaganda, persuasion and the careful provision of legitimation for demands are described. This chapter also considers the extent of resistance to government demands, arguing that historians have overstated this problem. Although there was clearly reluctance to comply with troublesome and expensive demands, in most cases there was a recognition among local elites and the wider political community that the demands were necessary, and there was remarkably little open complaint or protest. Where complaints did arise, they tended to be because of anomalous demands or those perceived as unjust, and resistance tended not to become general or widespread. Finally, this chapter analyses the internal organisation of the lord lieutenancies, describing the mechanism for implementing demands in the localities.

This chapter considers how communists and the Party interred, mourned, memorialised and remembered their dead. It looks at the communist 'Red Funeral', its meaning, ritual, symbolism and place within the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) narrative of mourning and remembrance. British communists fell in combat, as well as at the point of production in the struggle with 'rapacious' capitalism, as in the Spanish Civil War in the fight against fascism, capitalism's supposedly darker, murderous alter ego. This life or death struggle against fascism beyond Britain's shores would add many martyred communist deaths to the CPGB's 'Roll of Honour', not all of them proletarian of course. The chapter also considers another feature of the British communist treatment of death. Communist anger against 'monstrous capitalism' was inflamed further by premature deaths believed to have been caused by the security apparatus of the capitalist state.

This chapter explores the 'greening' of French militarized environments. It argues that since the 1990s the military has tried to 'green' its relationship with the environment, motivated by the desire to reduce the likelihood of civilian complaints and to align itself with an environmentally attuned age. The military mobilizes animals to justify its presence and control of national territory. Sheep, birds, snakes, and butterflies have unwittingly become militarized 'companion species'. The presence of endangered species has drawn the military into collaboration with civilian environmental organizations. Whatever its flaws, the inclusion of militarized environments with the Natura 2000 network aligned military environmentalism with civilian sustainable development goals. Neutralizing the remnants of wars and military training contained within the French soil is an extended and ongoing process. Farmers and others have unearthed the explosive debris of war from former battlefields for decades.

This chapter examines Hong Kong between 1945 and 1979 as an imagined space in which a British “unbridled capitalism” could flourish even as Britain itself developed a welfare state “consensus”. Drawing on political pamphlets, novels, memoirs, journalistic accounts, politicians’ speeches, and trade organizations’ papers, it argues that Hong Kong was widely seen by expatriates as a place in which British values survived after having been quashed in a “declining” Britain. At the same time, Hong Kong provided a foil against which neo-liberal think tanks could highlight Britain’s need to revive an enterprise culture. In fact, Hong Kong’s status as a laissez-faire economy was overstated, as the government increasingly intervened in such fields as housing, public health, education, and infrastructure. In addition, this meme depended on assumptions that the Chinese were compulsive workers uninterested in leisure, and that Hong Kong Chinese were politically apathetic, both of which collapsed in the late 1960s. Despite these tensions, this distinct idea of a Hong Kong Britishness provided a cultural legacy that survived the collapse of the “British world”. At the same time, by preserving what were often called neo-Victorian economic ideals, Hong Kong constituted a model to which anti-Keynesian British politicians of the 1970s could point.

This chapter analyses the impact of canals and rivers on the development of factory industry during the Industrial Revolution. Cotton was Manchester's foremost factory industry in 1850. When the industry began to merchandise in the 1770s, the town was not initially a prime mill location. Manchester's prominence as a market for textiles encouraged the development of finishing trades. The chapter presents new data on the location of factories in the boroughs of Manchester and Salford to test the proposition that water transport infrastructure determined the intra-urban pattern of mill construction. Research on the contribution of transport to Britain's industrialisation has focused on evaluating whether transport improvement stimulated, or merely responded to, industrial growth, on analysing the impact of reduced freight costs brought about by new transport modes.

This chapter considers all the defectors who left the Liberal/Liberal Democrat Party to join the Conservatives. In contrast to the majority of the former Liberals who went to the Conservatives, the first two, Reginald McKenna and Ronald Munro-Ferguson (Viscount Novar), were anti-coalitionists. Reginald McKenna was offered, and negotiated about, the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer under two Conservative prime ministers, Bonar Law and Baldwin. 'Fusion' was the term used for a scheme to merge the Coalition Liberal and Unionist supporters of the Lloyd George Government at all levels. The aims of the Constitutionalists were similar to those of the Fusionists, and some of the groups' membership overlapped. In addition to the Liberals who left the party over their disagreement with Lloyd George's policies, there were also three other defectors (Henry Cowan, Albert Bennett and Walter Forrest) who left, primarily because they changed their views on protection.

This chapter looks at how research into housing has developed. Although housing histories have examined a range of policy issues, few have considered the cultural context in which decisions were implemented. Also, the role of the tenant is too often relegated to the periphery. Consequently, the chapter considers the necessity of reasserting an understanding of civic culture, local discourse, social and physical barriers and the role of the tenant, to appreciate fully the dynamics underpinning the politics of housing. It also looks at the 'structure of feeling', the cultural context in which the key players, the councillors and professionals, made their decisions. Moreover, the chapter argues that any consideration of housing must necessarily consider the role of the tenant and how they moved from being dormant recipients to active consumers. Finally, it presents an outline of this book.