In the last quarter of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century, a number of scholars, mostly folklorists, concentrated specifically on collective memory and the ways memories (re)construct history/ies, identity/ies, genres, nations, ethnic groups, gender, and social class. Much folklore scholarship during this time has explored the interplay among narrative, structure, individual creativity, performance and their power to formulate, preserve, and transmit group identity. Despite all the efforts, both private and governmental, that went into creating a volunteer force to counteract the General Strike, few scholars have taken seriously the political and symbolic import of the volunteers' activities. Corpus volunteers were responding to the atmosphere of the day; there was not much more on their minds than enjoying a patriotic lark and doing their duty. Much of the article is devoted to describing the activities of Corpus men in 1926.

Much of the inquest for Pace case considered circumstantial evidence: the state of the Pace marriage, the rumours of Beatrice Annie Pace's affairs, the course of Harry Pace's illness and the care he received. Inquest juries not only declared a cause of death but also, if relevant, named a suspect or suspects. Their charge would lead to a trial at what was then the main court for dealing with serious crime: the centuries-old, semi-annual circuit court known as the 'assizes'. Beatrice was represented by G. Trevor Wellington from the Gloucester firm of Wellington, Clifford and Matthews. The evidence presented at the inquest fell roughly into many categories. One of the categories include that there was testimony from the Pace family. This chapter considers the vivid testimony given by the Pace children, the police, family friends and forensic experts.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book traces the creation, maintenance, and contestation of the militarized environments from the establishment of France's first large-scale and permanent army camp on the Champagne plains in 1857, to military environmentalism in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It argues that army commanders have kept faith with the belief that a soldier is moulded through a combination of military culture, discipline, and training that takes place within the environment despite the possibilities offered by computer-simulated training. The book shows how militarized and civilian environments overlap, as well as oppose, each other. The fluid military-civilian boundary illustrates the complexity of the history of French militarized environments and the military mobilization of nature.

This chapter suggests a number of ways in which Sappho, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Amy Lowell are connected. It argues that Sappho's influence on Swinburne and Lowell is instrumental in creating an anxiety that subsequent readers and critics 'ward off ' by 'forgetting' their work. This results in the devaluation and neglect of both poets despite their considerable contributions to poetry. The chapter demonstrates how Amy Lowell's response to Sappho is mediated by Swinburne's earlier versions of the 'Tenth Muse'. In order to ward off the threatening aspects of Swinburne and Lowell's verse critics directed their own form of critical 'abuse' at the corpus of the two poets by attacking and insulting their physical bodies. Antony Harrison expands on Swinburne's engagement with medieval literature, discerning 'formal and thematic similarities' between Swinburne's work and troubadour poetry, demonstrating his 'deep engagement with the values and ethos of courtly love literature'.

To many contemporary observers and some later historians, one of the most perplexing and puzzling questions of the Highland clearances was the failure of the people to show more active resistance to landlord policies. The economic transformation had caused social havoc, enormous displacement of populations and the destruction of an ancient way of life, yet, the people had apparently remained quiet and accepted their fate. It became common to contrast the violent truculence of the Irish and their bitter struggle against an alien landlord class with the passive stoicism of the Scottish Gaels. It is also interesting to note that virtually all the famous incidents of the Crofters' War were the results of the initiative of the local population rather than responses to landlord action as had been the pattern in the past.

From 1923, responsibility for proletarian education had been prised away from that which the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) derided as the unaffiliated intellectual fringe of the labour movement. Proletarian culture within British capitalism was, therefore, by necessity, bound to be immature and under-developed. Convinced that 'bourgeois' culture aimed to secure the docility, passivity and ultimate compliance of the masses, the CPGB sought to dislodge apparently corrupting bourgeois thoughts from the minds of its activists and replace a bourgeois cultural perspective with a communist one. The communist approach to culture not only marked a departure from the perceived deficiencies of bourgeois culture but also from that of earlier positions on culture taken by the British Left. Maurice Dobb glanced, approvingly, at developments in Soviet Russia in the fields of drama, literature, music and particularly literacy to give him a sense of the new culture.

This chapter considers all the defectors who left the Liberal/Liberal Democrat Party to join the Labour Party. The existence of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) attracted potential anti-war recruits to the Labour Party, while at the same time acting as a divisive influence. As a divisive influence, it was more attractive to the middle class than to the workers to whom it was directed. In some cases the War Policy Objectors defected from the Liberal Party, but for reasons other than the war. Between 1919 and 1920 a small group of idealistic former Liberals left for the Labour Party. The Disillusioned Progressives were the most numerous of the defectors to Labour and were highly significant as they included many individuals of prestige, wealth and ability. The events of 1915 to 1918 had created and solidified the split between the followers of Asquith Coalition and those of Lloyd George.

During the interwar period, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) worked to create a separate space for its members to enjoy leisure outside the dominant commercial framework which was said to be infused with bourgeois values. Despite being over-burdened with Party tasks and other responsibilities, Britain's interwar communists did find space to play. Communist political values would be affirmed through leisure, while the Party and Young Communist League (YCL) would pursue wider political goals through leisure activities. Through participation in Party, YCL and British Workers' Sports Federation (BWSF)-run leisure, communist allegiance was affirmed and stridently announced. Although activists young and old were encouraged to play at Party or YCL-run social occasions, communist leisure was never free from the imperatives of the political struggle. The communist-led United Mineworkers of Scotland (UMS) sought to build model youth organisations with a robust leisure orientation.

This chapter discusses the extension of ‘early adulthood’ in contemporary Ireland. It traces changes in the transition to independent household formation amongst young adults, from tightly ordered and sequenced around the middle of the twentieth century, towards a pattern of ‘unbundling’ from the latter half of the twentieth century onwards. Unbundling is explained in the context of changing meanings and values around sexual intercourse, cohabitation, birth outside marriage and lone parenthood throughout this period. Narratives from the Life Histories and Social Change collection reveal how such experiences were often disguised in the past and how, just as today, middle and upper-class people were frequently better able to cope with the consequences of disorderly transitions. They also show how young adults worked to maintain family relationships in the context of migration and return in different historical times. The authors show how the transformation of early adulthood took place in the context of changing inter-generational power relations, as Ireland moved from a social structure centred on small property holding to one with increasing opportunities for economic survival through waged employment. The chapter includes a discussion of public debates around the ‘de-institutionalization of marriage’ and marriage equality for same-sex couples.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the development of the concept of the author-portrait in early modern England. It begins with a reconsideration of Elizabeth's famous characterization of herself as her tragic ancestor. The book offers a radically unorthodox reading of John Milton's Maske, and focuses on both the nominal villain and the place of women in the society for which the work was composed. It takes a broad view of the question of performance through disguise. The book also focuses on the growing influence of women on literature and drama in the English Renaissance. It proposes that forgetting, or the suppression or subversion of memory, is an essential creative principle. The book discusses the history of attitudes toward plagiarism, and its relation to concepts of literary creativity.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the details of the Beatrice Annie Pace case while also considering what one woman's story reveals about the history of the police, the development of celebrity culture and the interests of the public in inter-war Britain. It then focuses on the police investigation and the lengthy coroner's inquest, the most extensive of the legal tribunals Beatrice would face. The book also focuses on the evidence given by Harry Pace's kinfolk, and considers the vivid testimony given by the Pace children, the police, family friends and forensic experts. A general conclusion and a postscript evaluate the case's significance and examine what happened to some of its key figures after the name 'Mrs Pace' had, once and for all, faded from the headlines.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the way in which abandonment to the Foundling Hospital developed, how it was used as a strategy by parents and parish officials and how it was mediated into health and survival outcomes for the infants involved. It examines the characteristics of groups of foundlings to discover where they came from, how old they were and what their family backgrounds had been. The chapter investigates the mortality of the same sample of infants to provide an estimate of death rates, which is properly comparable with those of infants outside the hospital. It presents the results of a statistical analysis of the factors which made the foundlings die in such numbers, and discusses how this related to their birth conditions, as opposed to their experience of hospital life.