{"title":"The Athenaeum: More Than Just Another London Club","authors":"R. McWilliam","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148613","url":null,"abstract":"nature of these life-stories, which touched on many of the same major life-course events that structure the book, could have been situated in multiple chapters, and some were more strongly connected to the overall argument than others. As Watkins acknowledges, the limitations of the sources shape the lives presented: the biographies of repeat offenders are more complete than those who quickly desisted from crime; and women’s work is lost to the state bureaucracy upon their marriage. Though Watkins presents a mix of typical and atypical cases, the exceptional stories draw the readers’ attention the most – whether it is serial recidivist Charles Brewer’s successful mutiny and commandeering of a ship before being lost at sea (pp. 59–61); or Ellen Caley aka Hunt (pp. 113–5), the former sex-worker who was the only female juvenile denied a marriage licence. Once again, the youth of the convicts stand out: unlike their adult counterparts, all of their major life-events occurred in the colony. Their choices over where they lived, worked, or married were all curtailed (at least until gaining their freedom) by the state. Watkins’ prose is clear and coherent in explaining the possibilities and limitations of archival evidence, and the colonial and criminal context that shapes these juveniles’ life outcomes, individually and collectively. This renders it an extremely useful introduction to students or scholars new to the field of crime history, whilst simultaneously having much to offer to those interested in histories of poverty and crime in London, the convict system in Australia, juvenile offending, and youth more generally.","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"622 - 624"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43565971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Memory and Foresight in the Celtic World: Perspectives from the Late Medieval through Modern Periods","authors":"M. Carew","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148610","url":null,"abstract":"thetic qualities, often noted in the records: for instance, a royal letter requested the replacement of the wooden gatehouse at Worcester Castle with a ‘fine and beautiful’ stone one (p.158), and the king’s expenditure upon landscape features with economic value – fishponds, dovecots, and of course hunting parks – are carefully scrutinised. Nor was court life confined to permanent residences such as palaces and fortresses: an array of expensive pavilions eased the discomforts of John’s campaigns, while his incessant travels were reflected in the prominence of palfreys (riding horses) in royal financial transactions. The court culture that emerges from Thomas’ meticulous study is one where, he argues, ‘soft power’ played an important part. Ceremonies, public gestures, and symbolic gift-giving formed an integral part of the exercise of royal power, but John’s personal flaws and crass misjudgements frequently undercut his acts of largesse, limiting his attempts to use conspicuous display to bind his courtiers to him; unsurprisingly, many joined the great revolt against him. The book’s final chapter compares John’s with other courts, both from his own time, including in the Byzantine and Islamic spheres, and from other periods: Thomas concludes that despite regional variations, much of the protocol and practice of John’s court was similar to contemporary courts elsewhere in Europe and in the Mediterranean countries, but pales in comparison with late medieval and early modern court culture. Here the author engages with Norbert Elias’s argument that early modern European princely courts had a ‘civilising process’ that tamed previously turbulent warrior aristocracies: while recognising the limitations of using a single reign to test Elias’s interpretations, Thomas argues instead that the courts of the early thirteenth century should be seen as just one stage in a much longer process of evolution from early medieval courts to their lavish Renaissance and early modern counterparts. The intricacies of one court from that process are revealed here in vivid detail, thanks in part to the very records that have distracted historians from its cultural life until now.","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"606 - 608"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42226569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century","authors":"J. Whittle","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148622","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":" 9","pages":"614 - 615"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41253596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marriage, Household, and Home in Modern Russia: From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin","authors":"Katy Turton","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148620","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"612 - 613"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47912521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Power and Pleasure: Court Life under King John, 1199-1216","authors":"D. Power","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148615","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"605 - 606"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46103504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women’s Experiences of the Second World War: Exile, Occupation and Everyday Life","authors":"C. Gorrara","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148611","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"628 - 629"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45021475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Life Courses of Young Convicts Transported to Van Diemen’s Land","authors":"Katherine Roscoe","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148616","url":null,"abstract":"experience, finding only minor change during Georgian period – a more formalised market and a richer variety of lodgers than the cultural stereotypes suggest. Lodging, it is suggested, was ultimately part of the new consumer society of eighteenth-century London–‘an unconstrained capitalist supply-and-demand marketplace’. There is much to enjoy here: the stories of notable landlords, landladies, and lodgers are vivid and told with humour and insight. The available sources have been mined skilfully and good use has been made of contemporary prints and engravings. In some ways, though, this lively survey leaves one wanting more: the avowed exclusion by the author of common lodging houses is to be regretted. Some readers might come away with the erroneous impression that metropolitan lodgers were mostly from the middling and upper stations. In fact, lodging was a common life-cycle experience of the poor. Any discussion of cheap lodgings, might also, arguably, include the eighteenth-century workhouse movement. Their construction presumably did considerable damage to the bottom end of the lodgings market – how many paupers preferred free short-term accommodation in a workhouse? In addition to wanting to hear more about downmarket lodging, one also wondered whether it might have been worth adding a further chapter on what lodgers were not. The focus in this book is on the impact of lodging on the household and family – on the domestic life of the landlord/landlady. Arguably just as important is the somewhat disconnected nature of lodging life: such people were not full parishioners, they did not pay parish taxes, could not vote, and could not serve as parish officers – they were not housekeepers. Lodgers and lodging were part of those urban forces that challenged the sociological urban ‘community’ and diluted a sense of local belonging in towns and cities. This excellent pioneering survey, then, is far from the last word on lodging – but it is a lively and perceptive start.","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"620 - 622"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43094061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain","authors":"Emily Rutherford","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148617","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"626 - 628"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42908533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lodgers, Landlords and Landladies in Georgian London","authors":"J. Boulton","doi":"10.1080/14780038.2022.2148609","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2148609","url":null,"abstract":"European interactions with native peoples, such as the Miskito Indians and the Black Caribs, have sometimes emphasised local agency and negotiation, especially Peter Linebaugh’s latest study of Edward Marcus Despard and his clashes with the white Baymen or loggers in British Honduras in support of the Miskito. Once again, Rogers has little time for this. ‘Recent attempts to dress these Zambos and Amerindian Miskito as freedom-loving smallholders and fishermen outside the parameters of capitalism will not do’ (p. 164), he says, arguing instead that the Miskito ‘were hard-headed ethnic soldiers between empires, part of a predatory landscape of adventurers and slavers’. This is a bleak, desperate world he offers instead, in which the British cynically exploited the Miskitos and then abandoned them to their fate under the Spanish after 1783. Rogers, therefore, offers a powerful set of arguments and proofs, ones intended to shake the twin narratives he identifies of complacent British imperial nostalgia and triumphalism on the one hand, and the ‘identity politics and racial reductionism’ (p.10) of the Black Lives Matter movement and its fellow travellers on the other. This may limit its impact, but that would be regrettable, since Rogers offers a sober, serious attempt to assess the truth of these matters, one which tries to see the past on its own terms rather than reading modernity back into it. It does so though using much the same approach as its predecessors, a series of case studies – in some cases the same case studies – that have been used to make different points elsewhere. The interpretive and analytical mutability of such case studies, and the question of whether they are representative of wider experiences, suggest that this approach may be reaching its limits, and that a wider analytical framework is needed, one which can adequately contextualise and appropriately weight all of these singular experiences. For the meantime though, those looking for an alternative to existing interpretations will find much in this book that is of value.","PeriodicalId":45240,"journal":{"name":"Cultural & Social History","volume":"19 1","pages":"618 - 620"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48486155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}