This chapter shows how women religious took female elementary education and catholicity in Scotland to a new level. It considers the role that women religious played in the development of Catholic education and examines how this was interlinked with the state's ambition to reduce working-class radicalism and with Scotland's emerging national identity. The chapter outlines educational provision at mid-century and compares it to what existed on the eve of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872. It also considers the impact that state funding and the Catholic Poor Schools Committee, a body largely governed by English interests, had upon the direction of Catholic education in Scotland. Recusants supported the establishment of an education system that would 'denationalise' the Irish and enhance Catholicism's overall image, but they were opposed to a system that would undermine their autonomy or attempt to redefine or Anglicise their identity.

The often contradictory process of symbolic integration into the evolving European political field has had a significant impact on public debates concerning the politics of Europe, and also concerning France as a whole and its political and intellectual heritage. Two models of political engagement for European intellectuals coexist today: the model of the oppositional intellectual and that of the functional intellectual. France is a country where intellectual culture is highly developed and where the oppositional intellectual rules. Specific historical traditions of the status of sociology as an academic discipline enabled Pierre Bourdieu to elaborate his particular political vision of society. In France, starting with Auguste Comte and later Émile Durkheim, sociology has been the intellectual heir of metaphysics, philosophy and religion. In Bourdieu's view, political parties, and especially the French Socialist Party, have neglected social movements and intellectuals.

This chapter argues that comic performance has displayed its intentions more obviously than performance for serious/tragic narratives. The signals associated with comic performance are consequences of the necessity of signalling humorous intent. The movement in British sitcom from performance to acting may be seen as a significant statement about spheres of action inside and outside of broadcasting. The interplay between audiences and performers in comedy is demonstrated by the shooting style of many television sitcoms, which garner a real audience to watch the recording, re-creating the theatrical experience within a television studio. This audience is seen as so vital to the comic performance that its oral responses are recorded, resulting in the laugh track which accompanies many sitcoms. Contemporary comedy continues to construct programmes around successful comedians and comedy performers, who often play versions of themselves.

This chapter discusses the emigration of West Indians after the Second World War. It describes the arrival of black West Indians, generalised as Jamaicans, aboard the Empire Windrush to Britain in 1948. The chapter explores the significance of the migrant journeys of the West Indians, the beginning of black presence in Britain and the contributions of the migrants to the nation's chronological evolution.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English medical culture, a study of what it meant to be a doctor and how this changed over time. It presents a brief overview of the social, economic and cultural landscape of late eighteenth-century York. The book considers how forms of sociability, such as urban club and general social strategies such as marriage and cultivation of patronage, could allow physicians, surgeons and even seemingly lowly apothecaries to fashion themselves as genteel and upstanding local citizens. It looks at medical involvement in the provincial scientific movement, examining how local medical men positioned themselves relative to the so-called 'march of intellect', the cultural and ideological alignment between science and social reform.

Chapter 1 explores the ways in which regionalism, regional culture and regional identity have been defined and discussed by historians, geographers, economists, sociologists and cultural historians, from the Middle Ages to the present day. The aim of the chapter is to provide an overview of these concepts and a theoretical and historical foundation for the discussion of regional broadcasting and regional television drama in subsequent chapters.