On April 30, 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the New York World's Fair open. Moments later a flood of eager humanity surged onto the one-and-a-quarter thousand acre former municipal dump in Flushing Meadow, Queens, now home to what the New York Herald Tribune termed “the mightiest exposition ever conceived and built by man.” While Europe shivered on the brink of a war, the United States focused its attention on the distinctive silhouette of a seven hundred foot spire and a globe two hundred feet wide: the “Trilon” and the “Perisphere,” centerpieces and emblems of the New York World's Fair. The fair stretched around their base in a teeming sprawl of concrete and electric lights. Its precincts embraced all manner of amusements, including a vast funfair with such thematic attractions as a Cuban village, an African jungle, and a Merrie England area. While most of the visitors seemed intent on enjoying themselves, the fair was intended by its organizers to serve a serious educative purpose. Its theme was “building the world of tomorrow,” with two-thirds of the fair ground given over to exhibitions by corporations, U.S. federal agencies, and foreign governments. The fair's corporate exhibitors vied with each other for the most spectacular vision of what this world might be. General Motors offered the “Futurama” exhibit designed by Norman Bel Geddes, in which 28,000 visitors a day traveled on a conveyor belt ride through a projection of the American landscape forward twenty-five years, to a Utopia liberated by the automobile. In a similar vein, inside the Perisphere visitors could view a diorama of a future metropolis, “Democracity.” But popular acclaim lay elsewhere.

In view of the large number of financial complaints in Tudor diplomatic correspondence, it is entirely understandable why compensation might be considered a central problem of sixteenth-century foreign service. The feeling conveyed by the diplomats is that their pay was haphazard in its conception, irregular in its distribution, and utterly insufficient in its magnitude; that is, it was thoroughly unsatisfactory in every respect. So consistent and so forceful did these envoys make their case that today it is virtually axiomatic for historians to assume that compensation was chaotic, and that service abroad was always financially debilitating. “Upon none of the royal servants did the disorder of sixteenth century fiscal administration bear harder [than upon the ambassadors],” Professor Mattingly notes. Moreover, “for an ambassador, the chance of financial embarrassment was almost a certainty.” Sir John Neale, another of only a few who have addressed this issue directly, is persuaded that, “it was not exceptional for an Elizabethan ambassador to get into financial straits … generally ambassadors had to face making inroads into their private estates.” Or: “His [the ambassador's] was not a happy lot. His profit and loss account was a statement in two terms of which one was never operative …. Their pay was often irregular and never adequate, and they were lucky if their private estates were not hopelessly mortgaged at the end of an embassy.” Other historians, making only passing reference to diplomatic compensation, simply assume the worst.

Yet the diplomats of Elizabeth served, frequently for extended periods, and often repeatedly as well.

The Bristol Bridge Riot of 1793 was one of the most serious riots, in terms of killed and injured, to occur in Britain during the last half of the eighteenth century. George Rudé lists it as second in violence only to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Yet, because it defies classification, it is rarely listed in the categories of riots so meticulously set out by Rudé and others. It was neither a turnpike riot transferred to an urban setting, nor was it the expression of long-held social grievances. It was a demonstration of dissatisfaction with official incompetence and deception. In many respects it was a riot caused by officials whose perception of the crowd led them to overreaction and violence.

The tendency by recent writers has been to see riotous activity in the eighteenth century as a sort of class warfare between the “people” and the “establishment,” represented by land owners, entrepreneurs, or parliament. This class warfare is presented as taking various forms under the categories of food riot, urban riot, country riot, and the like. While classification of riots may serve useful purposes and there may sometimes be more than a grain of truth in the class-war interpretation, it must be acknowledged that the resulting impression of uniformity in eighteenth-century riots is misleading. In the case of Bristol riots, in particular, it is the differences rather than the similarities that are of significance in understanding the changed perception of the crowd that caused the tragedy of 1793.

The America of Boston, bound from its home port to London in December of 1688, began taking soundings that were political as well as nautical as it approached England. Two weeks before an English port was reached, the first news was heard from a shipmaster returning from Barbados, who shared what he had heard earlier from an English vessel out of Galloway. The passengers of the America were told that William of Orange had landed at Torbay early in November, that the prince had taken England, and that King James was dead. The truth, the guess, and the false rumor all came aboard with equal credibility. They were only four days from port before they learned that the king was not dead, though the source was a five-week-old report from the Canary Islands. The occupants of the America could still be buffeted by strange and disturbing tales when they were only one day from Dover. The master of a pink that was two weeks out of Liverpool gave the date of the prince's landing as three weeks later than the event, gave William's force as an astounding 50,000 men and 600 ships, and told the apprehensive colonials that the drowned bodies of Englishmen were being found tied back-to-back and that French men-of-war were cruising with commissions from King James II. All this worrisome “news” proved erroneous but accompanied an account that would prove correct, that the king was not dead but had fled to France.

On August 12,1851, Albert Smith, a middle-aged journalist and entertainer, reached the summit of Mont Blanc with three Oxford students and sixteen guides. Smith and his companions were not the first people to climb Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. In 1786, two Chamonix natives climbed the peak, but over the next sixty-seven years the ascent of Mont Blanc was repeated only forty-five times. Yet after Albert Smith's dramatic account of this ascent made mountain climbing popular among the middle classes of Victorian England, Mont Blanc was climbed eighty-eight times in a five-year span. In 1852, John Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, the bible for English tourists abroad, noted that the ascent “of Albert Smith, in 1851, has effectually popularized the enterprise.” While this could be construed as praise of Smith, it sounded very faint indeed when Murray asserted, “it is a somewhat remarkable fact that a large proportion of those who have made this ascent have been persons of unsound mind.” By 1858, however, Murray mentioned that twenty or thirty people now made the ascent each year, thanked Albert Smith for his help with the text, and purged all references to the mental health of mountaineers.

Over the next decade, Murray's Handbook recorded numerous first ascents in the Alps during what later became known as the “Golden Age” of mountaineering. This article attempts to explain why mountaineering became popular during these years and to suggest the broader significance of mountaineering to the construction of new middle class and imperial cultures.

News of a great victory over Napoleon's forces in Portugal was published in London on the morning of September 2, 1808. The celebrations that began the night before with the firing of cannon in the parks and the pealing of the city's church bells spread from one end of the country to the other and did not subside for nearly two weeks: it was the first important victory for a British army since the war began in 1793. Ever since, the glorious Battle of Vimeiro has been associated with the name of Wellington who, as young General Sir Arthur Wellesley, won his spurs on that occasion by (in his own words) winning “a complete victory” with only half his army over “the whole of the French force in Portugal … under the command of the Due D'Abrantes in person.” Following publication of his vainglorious communiqué and the more sober official announcements, the country waited impatiently for details of the French surrender.

Historical accounts of the event are all in agreement as to what happened after the battle and who was to blame for what proved to be a fiasco in Portugal: after leading his troops to victory, Wellesley (through no fault of his own) had been superseded on the field by General Harry Burrard who, in turn, was replaced on the following day by General Hew Dalrymple. These peculiar revolutions in the command are traceable to political in-fighting at home and the vagaries of travel in the days of sailing ships and have nothing to do with the story except that it was Dalrymple not Wellesley who was in command when the armistice between the contending forces was negotiated. Dalrymple, according to the orthodox exegesis, a stubborn blunderer, negotiated the agreement with the French representative, General Kellermann, and literally gave away the hard-won fruits of Wellesley's victory.

The influence of computer usage upon the landscape of British history has been subtle and often profound. This influence has been one of several historiographical and cultural trends which have changed the nature and scope of “history.” The declining importance of the so-called grand narratives of national and class histories, and the fragmentation and loss of cultural authority of scholarly history in the face of increasingly diffuse popular and political uses of “history,” cannot be separated from the impact of the new technologies. The coherence and accessibility of history is not only challenged by the postmodernist questioning of the very validity of the search for authoritative coherence and by the philosophical assertion of the self-sufficiency of the text as a basis for analysis and explanation. This coherence and accessibility is also being challenged by the increasing importance of information technology in historical research and teaching. The scholarly presentation of computer usage by historians has tended to emphasize technical and methodological aspects. Important as these are, this has tended to conceal the major philosophical issues raised by such computer usage.

There is then a double challenge to historical practice as it has been developed over the hundred years or so since Tout, Firth, and others established a modern institutional structure toward the end of the nineteenth century. The irony of the conjunction of the postmodern cultural and philosophical challenges and the computer user's technologically based challenge is not perhaps so surprising when it is considered that what the computer user is doing is creating metadata from data/sources/texts and producing metanarratives from that metadata.

The abolition of clerical celibacy in England was, according to its first great modern student, Henry Charles Lea, “a process of far more intricacy than in any other country which adopted the Reformation.” Since Lea wrote, historians have come to accept an outline of that process. According to this standard view, it was Henry VIII, acting out of his own personal conservatism, who retained and defended mandatory celibacy in the first stage of the English Reformation. Once the king had died and his leaden foot was removed from the brake, the clergy were able to overwhelm ineffective conservative opposition in the Edwardian government and legalize clerical marriage. The gains of the Edwardian years gave way before the reaction of the Marian period, and they were not reinstated after Mary's death because of the anticonnubial tastes and religious conservatism of Elizabeth I. Throughout this period, so the story goes, the clergy (a majority of them, at least) struggled for the right and privilege of marriage, only to find royal resistance (except briefly under Edward VI) impossible to overcome.

This traditional outline is misleading in several respects. Elizabeth I's attitude toward the marriage of the clergy is far more complex than has been recognized. Specific regulations of such unions developed from her desire to establish an ordered church worthy of popular respect and cannot simply be ascribed to a general, almost pathological, personal distaste for marriage or quirky personal religious views.