This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the professional roles, identities, activities and experiences of women police in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) from a historical perspective, using a range of oral testimonies, documentary and visual sources. It argues that women police negotiated their own distinct occupational identity in relation to masculine police cultures, other professional groups, and the women and young people whom they encountered on a daily basis. The book examines the ways in which policewomen's identities and work roles at the interface of policing and welfare were constituted through the cultural and structural formation of a 'feminine' professionalism. It also examines women's operations within the technologies of physical surveillance, dealing with both uniform beat patrol and undercover observations.

Deaf clubs would have remained to some extent isolated, self-contained communities without some means of maintaining contact and sharing information with each other. The main form for this communication was provided by a series of publications aimed at deaf people, the most important being British Deaf News (BDN). These newspapers and magazines allowed deaf people to keep abreast of events outside their own club and helped to maintain contact across the British deaf community, with large sections of each issue devoted to the social activities of the various deaf clubs and their members from across the United Kingdom. Because of this, BDN provides a wealth of information on the social and leisure activities of deaf people. This chapter outlines the history of deaf newspapers, emphasising their importance as historical documents and defining the unique insight they provide into the lived experience of being a deaf sign language user in post-war Britain.

This chapter outlines the Revolution's wider trajectory as a process of political and social change over fifty years, suggesting how people might view the cultural trajectory within that. The whole social revolution was fundamental to support for the Revolution, thus the 1990s' crisis threatened that support, obliging the authorities to maintain at cost the levels of provision. The chapter also identifies the general patterns of the evolution of culture within the Revolution.

The traditional date of Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes's birth is 5 August 1578, and most historians agree he was born sometime during that year. Some sources give his birthplace as Mornas in the Comtat Venaissin, making him Comtadin by birth and a papal subject. Other sources give Pont-Saint-Esprit as his birthplace, making him Languedocian and French by birth. Honoré d'Albert de Luynes had challenged an officer in the Scots royal guards for making insulting remarks about his role as a conspirator and then killed him. This thereby earned him the court's respect for his courage and prowess, except the king's favor or trust. Contemporaries joked that a hare could quickly jump across the Albert family lands, an exaggeration, but Honoré's difficulties in paying the Pont-Saint- Esprit garrison indicate that he was not a wealthy man.

In the nineteenth-century, millennial hopes have arrived for neither combatant in British preserved railways' most notorious struggle. A light railway order permitted the company to build a three-quarter-mile track along an abandoned standard-gauge formation from their new station to meet the Croesor Tramway's historic trackbed at Pen-y-Mount. This chapter shows that in 1990 Welsh Highland Railway passenger traffic presented no threat to Festiniog Railway prosperity; but it also shows that by then the Festiniog's best traffic years lay well in the past. The Welsh Highland Light Railway's brief and inglorious interwar existence might be expected to inspire no enthusiast to propose the doomed line's revival; but new times bring new opportunities. Though the old 1922 Company's attempt to commodify scenery crashed spectacularly, postwar success in packaging Welsh narrow-gauge steam for a booming tourist market suggested a second turn round this whirligig.

This chapter looks at how Jean Genet's 1958 play The Blacks opened the hidden wounds of the period, namely those related to insecurities about France's 'racial identity' on the eve of decolonisation. In The Blacks, the object of détournement is limited, since it is focused on reversing the tropes and clichés of 'black theatre', which were rooted, at the time, in popular entertainment forms such as clown shows, music-hall routines and circus acts. The post-Lacanian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's words highlight the extent to which objects of filth in abjection are metaphorical. Like The Mousetrap in Hamlet, the play-within-the play of The Blacks is designed to make the French spectators feel guilty, to remind them of their whiteness. The new configurations of identity are dependent upon the disclosure of a wrong that invited French subjects to disidentify with the French nation-State and to hear the call of the immigrant Other.

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.