Why did the English Nonjuror Richard Rawlinson promote the 1729–30 English translation of Pietro Giannone's Civil History of Naples? The Nonjurors in England espoused ecclesiastical independency from the state, which they derived from the thought of Restoration High Churchmen and from the French Gallican Louis Ellies Du Pin. Giannone, a Neapolitan lawyer, proposed a similar “two powers” model of strict autonomy for both church and state. Giannone's concept was later rejected by enlightened writers like Viscount Bolingbroke and Edward Gibbon, who associated it with high church prejudices. It was defended by the Dissenter Joseph Priestley, who combined it with his own theory of religious sociability. The impact of Giannone on the Nonjurors and on Priestley illuminates the complex religious background to what is often seen as a fundamentally secular doctrine: the separation of church and state.

In 1967, when the BBC was faced with a petition by the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination requesting an end to the televised variety program the Black and White Minstrel Show (1958–1978), producers at the BBC, the press, and audience members collectively argued that the historic presence of minstrelsy in Britain rendered the practice of blacking up harmless. This article uses critical race theory as a useful framework for unpacking defenses that hinged on both the color blindness of white British audiences and the simultaneous existence of wider customs of blacking up within British television and film. I examine a range of “screen culture” from the 1920s to the 1970s, including feature films, home movies, newsreels, and television, that provide evidence of the existence of blackface as a type of racialized custom in British entertainment throughout this period. Efforts by organizations such as the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, black press publications like Flamingo, and audiences of color to name blacking up and minstrelsy as racist in the late 1960s were met by fierce resistance from majority white audiences and producers, who denied their authority to do so. Concepts of color blindness or “racial innocence” thus become a useful means of examining, first, the wide-ranging existence of blacking-up practices within British screen culture; second, a broad reluctance by producers and the majority of audiences to identify this as racist; and third, the exceptional role that race played in characterizations of white audiences that were otherwise seen as historically fragile and impressionable in the face of screen content.

This study investigates children's real time incrementation of language change as it is impacted by community-wide patterns of linguistic variability. The investigation combines apparent time analyses across an age-stratified sample of adult speakers, with real time analyses across a panel of speakers spanning childhood to adolescence. Three variables are analysed: GOOSE-fronting, a socially unmarked change; TH-fronting, a socially stigmatised, rapidly expanding change; and T-glottaling, a socially stigmatised, steadily shifting change. Variables are selected based on their social and generational profiles which present learners with more or less challenging community patterns to extract. Real time analyses confirm that community variance impacts on speakers’ ability to increment change in real time. Findings provide support for the momentum-based model of language change and builds on Labov's (2012:267) theory of the ‘outward orientation’ of children, which views learners as capable of extracting age vectors from generational differences. (Language change, incrementation, real time, GOOSE-fronting, TH-fronting, T-glottaling)*