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Now in its second edition, Ian Frederick Finseth has updated and revised this excellent Civil War companion, exploring how literature, poetry and the documentation of history, shaped the way in which the American Civil War is remembered.

With selections from Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Sidney Lanier, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Kate Chopin, and many more, Finseth’s careful arrangement of texts remains an indispensable resource for readers who seek to understand the impact of the Civil War on the culture of the United States.

*Colleen G. Boggs is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College

Teaching a course? Order your complimentary exam copy here

In this exciting new addition to our Critical Moments in American History series, author Katie Oxx brings alive the nativist movement through the use of trial transcripts and newspaper articles, poems, and personal narratives. Oxx draws close attention to the religious dimensions of nativism, illuminating the history of exclusion and the formative clashes between religious groups.

A companion website supports the text providing images, primary doucments, recommended weblinks and a timeline. Follow this link to view sample pages.

*Edward J. Blum is co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America

Join Geoff at the German Historical Institute London 23-25 May, 2013 for the Ethics of Seeing conference which explores 20th Century German Documentary Photography. Copies of Nazism as Fascism will be on display. It has already been praised as a "tour de force" by Professor Dan Stone of Royal Holloway, who also calls Eley, "one of the surest guides to twentieth century German and European history."

For more information on the conference, please visit the GHIL page

For more Routledge titles on the subject of Fascism & Nazism, please click here

Click here to be transported!

Incredible praise for The Pleasures of the Imagination:

"Pleasures of the Imagination paints a kaleidoscopic picture of eighteenth-century culture that is both erudite and accessible." - Heather Mcpherson, University of Alabama at Birmingham

"Like all really original achievements it makes us sharply rethink things we supposed we knew well, but it does so with humour and humanity, and through the text runs Brewer's remarkable intellect: forceful, lucid and penetrating." - Simon Schama

"The marvel of this book is that in writing in exuberant detail about the past, Brewer succeeds in illuminating the present… This book wears its massive scholarship lightly. I hope some of our new political masters have time to read it, for it is a history that teaches us many lessons." - Peter Hall, The Observer

"Brewer ranges over almost every corner of the English mind with sharp, darting observation… This is a book to treasure as it treasures a past we thought we had lost." - Pat Rogers, Sunday Telegraph

"A model of the new cultural history… It shows how the English came to feel not just strong but civilized too, polite as well as powerful. God's chosen people, of the age of Cromwell, were reinventing themselves as Shakespeare's heirs." - Roy Porter, The Independent

A fascinating piece of historical scholarship awaits you. Click here to learn more!
 

Finally, amid the welter of loose, hastily-compiled, journalism following Thatcher’s death, it has been asserted – as if unchallengeable truth – that Thatcher was the greatest peacetime Prime Minister of the twentieth century. There are competitors! Two stand out. On the key criterion of whether policies have been for the nation’s good, the claims of H.H. Asquith (1908-16) and Clement Attlee (1945-51) stand out.

The former headed a Cabinet committed to fundamental constitutional and welfare reforms. Asquith’s government curbed the legislative powers of an unelected House of Lords, provided the first Old Age Pensions and inaugurated schemes for national insurance against sickness and unemployment. These radical changes were enacted against a background of social unrest, the growing likelihood of civil war in Ireland and an increasingly complicated alliance system responsible, at least in part, for the outbreak of the First World War.

The latter had to rebuild a virtually bankrupt nation after the end of the Second World War. During years of ‘austerity’ (the Prime Minister’s own word), both coal and much food were rationed by the state. However, the Attlee governments revolutionized the welfare system, and established the National Health Service in 1948. The other arm of Attlee’s revival strategy was nationalization of previously uncompetitive industries and services, including the Bank of England, Coal, Railways and Iron and Steel.

Asquith, Attlee and Thatcher all inherited serious, deeply entrenched problems. Of the three, however, and despite the fatalism of many contemporaries that, in policy terms, ‘nothing works’, Thatcher’s in 1979 were perhaps the least serious. Asquith faced the sternest, and best entrenched, opposition to his government’s plans while Attlee had to create and sustain unity in a Cabinet stuffed with highly able and experienced, but equally opinionated and pugnacious, ministers. Fortunately, no one slapped down an ego as effectively as ‘Clem’. Historians will disagree on which of these three was the greatest peacetime prime minister. They should, however, acknowledge that this is more than a one-horse race.

Eric J. Evans
Lancaster University, April 2013

What of Thatcher’s impact on the nation as a whole? My book offers a more detailed perspective on this. Unsurprisingly, opinions are bitterly divided because Thatcher inspired such extreme and contrasting views. Not even her greatest admirer would disagree that she provoked extreme views. Along with Enoch Powell in the 1960s and early 1970s, she was the most divisive politician in post-war Britain. She not only caused controversy, she courted it. She believed that a good argument with a worthy political opponent sharpened the brain and helped clarify policy priorities.

The 1980s offer plenty of evidence that, under Thatcher, Britain’s international influence grew. Few prime ministers would risk going to war to defend the Falkland Islands, a remote colony acquired in contested circumstances 150 years previously. It lay in the South Atlantic 8,000 miles away from Britain and with a population fewer than 2,000 in 1982. Thatcher took the risk and won. She gained international prestige, even from those who believed the campaign ill-judged. At home, she milked the propaganda reward for all it was worth, peremptorily telling the nation to ‘rejoice’. No previous Prime Minister would have handled relations with the EU so brusquely but she got both her rebate and an enhanced reputation for ‘getting results’. Along with Reagan, she seemed to be on the right side of history when communist regimes crumbled in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Also, as electronics, light industry, financial and other services all expanded, especially in the South, the country was less of an economic basket case in 1990 than in 1980. Indeed, it seemed that a crucial corner had been turned.

Inevitably, the story has another side. The Thatcher years saw increasing social and economic inequality. Though the average income of British families increased by almost 40 per cent between 1979 and 1992, the proportion containing no full-time worker increased from 29 per cent to 37 per cent. Impoverished families were disproportionately located where the old-established heavy industries were located and which could not compete in world markets. Such industries were themselves regionally concentrated. What were new opportunities for aspirational families in Essex (particularly fertile Thatcher territory) were disasters for mining families in County Durham as pits closed and the free market created far more jobs in the South-East – closer to London and with superior transport links – than in the North-East. Closed pits also devastated communities.

Thatcher relied excessively on ‘supply-side’ economics and the privatization of utilities in state hands. She believed that unregulated markets would, more or less of themselves, provide what she called ‘real’ (i.e. private sector) jobs. As economic growth returned, working families would learn to fend for themselves rather than rely on state ‘hand-outs’. Debates over the role and limitations of market economics continued through the New Labour period and into the present day. Here, as elsewhere, Thatcher cast a long and, for very many a baleful, shadow.

The creation of new forms of wealth led to a less nuanced view of what constituted success. Britain increasingly equated achievement with monetary reward. Likewise, in the financial sector, the incomes of major risk takers were buoyed to levels almost beyond belief by the expansion of a poisonous ‘bonus culture’. Only in the last few years can the deregulation of British banks in 1986 be plausibly presented as perhaps the most important of Thatcher’s radical economic policies. Its consequences have been hotly contested but the banking collapses of 2008 suggested that an economy driven by financial services, and the uncontrolled risk-taking which grew up alongside, is ultimately unsustainable. What many observers considered particularly offensive was risk-taking with other people’s money. Inadequate regulation of banks precipitated an almost worldwide economic catastrophe. Though Thatcher should not be personally blamed for that, the wider economic system in which she placed such faith began to go awry during her period in office. Britain’s economy became increasingly unbalanced and what many saw as wilful neglect of the manufacturing industry was storing up problems for the future long before Thatcher’s grip on office was finally loosened. Nevertheless, both her long-term influence and the consistent support given by the right-wing press to deregulation and free markets made her successors fearful to shift the direction of travel.

Not the least of the malign ironies of the Thatcher years is that her personal beliefs were detached from the culture of excess. She had a strong puritanical side and believed that the rewards of life should go to those who lived by an ethos driven by hard work and thrift. Few worked harder than she. Thatcher also believed that more was expected from those whose abilities enabled them to give more. Yet her government unleashed a monster irrationally dependent on risk which rewarded the lucky and the unscrupulous. Financial deregulation enabled London to become the world’s financial capital but its underlying ethics had little in common with those Thatcher absorbed in her father’s Grantham grocer’s shop.

Thatcher’s reputation stood higher abroad than at home. Nowhere was this more so than in the United States where her close political relationship with Ronald Reagan became the centrepiece of her foreign policy. Both believed in free markets as genuine liberators; both saw the USSR as the main obstacle both to progress and to liberty. Thatcher heartily endorsed Reagan’s description of the Soviet bloc as an “evil empire”. In her words, “They claim to speak in the name of humanity – but they oppress the individual. They pose as the champion of free nations – but in their own empire they practise total control”. As the Soviet bloc began to crumble in the late 1980s, she made highly-publicized and well-received visits to the USSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Her ambition was to see the ‘liberated’ independent states in eastern Europe incorporated into an expanded European Community.

To her many admirers on the right of the Conservative party and further right in the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Thatcher is lauded as the unwavering champion of distinctive British identity against the centralizing, federalist pretentions of a German-dominated European Community. She frequently inveighed against the EU as an overly bureaucratic obstacle to distinctive national identities and individual freedoms. However, her political instincts told her that, beneath her characteristically needling bluster, compromises were necessary. Thus, the same prime minister who in 1984 protested about the need for a financial rebate from the EU and who in her famous Bruges Speech of September 1988 asserted that Britain would take no part in the creation of “a European super-state” signed up meekly enough in 1986 to the Single European Act. This gave the EU powers overriding the policies of democratically elected national governments. Since such powers lie at the heart of increasingly noisy ‘Euro-scepticism’, it is difficult to square support for the Single Act with the unqualified adulation which Thatcher evokes on the right of her party.

Domestically, the base of Margaret Thatcher’s political support was narrow. She was unpopular, not only in the industrial heartlands of northern England fatally wounded by her belief in the efficacy of free markets to meet all challenges, but throughout almost all of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In none of these countries did the Conservatives come close to majority support at elections held either during the Thatcher years or afterwards. Her support came disproportionately from the middle classes and the aspirational working classes of southern England, where free-market policies found much more nourishing soil. She should be seen as much more an English than a British prime minister: Thatcherism significantly accelerated support for devolution in Scotland and Wales.

Important sections of the Conservative party never accepted her as ‘one of them’. Thatcher’s most hostile critics sat in her Cabinets. During the early 1980s, she outfaced an influential group of ‘one-nation’ Tories – the so-called ‘wets’. They believed that her election as party leader in 1975 had been profoundly mistaken and saw her prime ministership as a brief, unnatural and unwholesome interlude before normal Conservative service was renewed. They also believed that her economic policies would lead to political disaster at the next election. From the mid-eighties a now more confident Thatcher ruled her Cabinet with a rod of iron, patronizing members in public and berating them in private. Unsurprisingly, the later stages of her prime ministership saw a succession of high-profile cabinet resignations. Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson and finally even the placidly loyal Geoffrey Howe all departed. Most of those who remained felt that Thatcher was becoming both even more authoritarian and increasingly out of touch with an electorate which hated her attempt to impose the hated ‘poll tax’.

Although Thatcher’s resignation in November 1990 was precipitated by collective action from within the Cabinet, the idea, much bruited on the right of the party, that she was an innocent martyr stabbed in the back by ambitious cabinet ministers with an eye to the main chance is nonsense. Firstly, the campaign waged on her behalf when Michael Heseltine challenged her for the party leadership was woefully mismanaged. Secondly, Thatcher, increasingly imperial in her ways, had underestimated the extent to which support had been draining away since the Poll Tax affair had blown up. Thirdly, MPs in general, but particularly ministers in close contact with her, believed that her leadership was becoming more wilful, less sensitive and unhinged from harsh political reality. MPs increasingly believed that, without a change of leadership, electoral defeat was inevitable. Thatcher should have understood both that and its corollary: historically, Conservatives ditch leaders who are not winners. As it was, the myth of martyrdom spread; long-term rifts within the party resulted, doing substantial damage to its electoral chances for the next twenty years.

The 3rd edition of my Thatcher and Thatcherism was published at the end of January, ten weeks before the Lady died. My timing was clearly awry. Although nothing happened during Thatcher’s last weeks, indeed years, to affect her standing and reputation, it would have been neater for an evaluation to appear as her life came to its close. Tributes, both prolix and incontinent, over-filled both tabloid and broadsheet newspapers in the week following her death. They wrapped a gauze of sentimentality around the least sentimental of politicians and thus distorting perspectives. It is better to stand back from both the raw emotions of loss and the ponderous, if clockwork efficient, machinery of the ceremonial funeral to appraise the achievements of someone David Cameron immediately called ‘a great prime minister’.

Does Thatcher deserve this accolade? What criteria should we apply? Those of longevity are certainly met. She was prime minister for eleven and a half years. You must go back almost two centuries to Lord Liverpool to find someone with a longer period of continuous office (1812-27), though few nineteenth-century historians consider him remotely ‘great’. In a vastly more competitive and democratic age, Thatcher won three successive general elections, the first comfortably and the latter two with landslide majorities. That is an impressive achievement, yet it was soon equalled by Tony Blair.

Let us agree that staying prime minister for a long time is not enough. Two more important criteria are needed: firstly, have the policies put in place by prime minister and cabinets been significant and long-lasting; secondly, considered overall, have they been for the nation’s good?

Few would now disagree that Thatcher meets the first criterion. For the Daily Mail – not, admittedly, an impartial observer - she was ‘The woman who saved Britain’. From what did she save it? Thatcher’s specific targets were an arrogant and over-mighty trade union movement, rampant inflation and ‘socialism’ as the all-enveloping evil at home and abroad. More generally, she believed that Britain’s reputation as a powerful, even civilized, nation had been trashed by post-war decades of pusillanimous, temporizing, compromise-seeking misgovernment and was determined to do something about it. My book devotes considerable space to each of these issues. It concludes that – following a bitterly contested struggle with the miners in 1984-5 – trade union influence and membership both dropped sharply. By the time she left office levels of inflation, well over 20 per cent in 1980, dropped dramatically, bearing favourable comparison with Britain’s international competitors. Britain’s relative economic decline had also been checked, although more because the rate of economic growth in both France and Germany was falling by the late 1980s than because Britain’s was significantly increasing.

Perhaps Thatcher’s most significant political achievement was to persuade the Labour opposition that the only way it could win elections was to abandon many quasi-socialist policies which its core membership held dear. In 1995, the Labour Party deleted the iconic ‘Clause 4’ from its constitution. No longer was the party committed to ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. Although this was on one level a cosmetic change, it nevertheless represented a symbolic turning point for Labour. New Labour proved a pallid, temporizing affair, strong on electoral tactics but much weaker on core beliefs. On many issues, it positioned itself some way to the right of the Liberal Democrats. No wonder Thatcher saw considerable merit in Blair’s leadership. No wonder either that Gordon Brown should invite Thatcher to private talks at No 10 Downing Street in September 2007, weeks after becoming prime minister. Thatcher had not only scotched the socialist snake but killed it. One distinguished journalist called the two New Labour prime ministers ‘Thatcher’s sons’. The two main political parties now agreed on much, not least how best to appeal to a bored, cynical, electorate. Though the quality of political debate stagnated, there was no doubting who had won the key arguments. Thatcher’s distinctive brand of neo-liberalism became the orthodoxy of the age, though after her departure none could match her populist instincts and – so her critics asserted – patronizing inflections.

If you are teaching a course in twentieth-century europe, modern, or social and cultural history and would like to order a complimentary exam copy to inspect for use on your course, please follow this link.

A Social History of Twentieth-Century Europe offers a systematic overview on major aspects of social life, including population, family and households, social inequalities and mobility, the welfare state, work, consumption and leisure, social cleavages in politics, urbanization as well as education, religion and culture. It also addresses major debates and diverging interpretations of historical and social research regarding the history of European societies in the past one hundred years.

Organized in ten thematic chapters, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach, making use of the methods and results of not only history, but also sociology, demography, economics and political science. Béla Tomka presents both the diversity and the commonalities of European societies looking not just to Western European countries, but Eastern, Central and Southern European countries as well. A perfect introduction for all students of European history.
 

More than ever the value of the past is simultaneously recognised and under attack. Who decides what is history and how it should be presented are timely issues. The Public History Reader is the first international reader to explore public history as an everyday practice, combining key texts and material not available either online or in journals.

If you are teaching a course in public history, historiography, history or heritage studies and would like to receive a complimentary copy to inspect, please follow this link.
 

Drawing on theory and practice from five continents The Public History Reader offers clearly written accessible introductions to debates in public history. It places people, such as practitioners, bloggers, archivists, local historians, curators or those working in education, at the heart of history-making. Kean and Martin explore public history as an everyday practice rather than simply as an academic discipline - the idea that historical knowledge is discovered and accrued from everyday encounters people have with their environments and the continuing dialogue that the present has with the past.

This fully revised and updated third edition of Thatcher and Thatcherism examines the origins and impact of ‘Thatcherism’ as a cultural construct and an economic creed from the 1970s to the formation of a coalition government in 2010.

The ideal companion for courses covering British politics and contemporary British history, request your complimentary copy today.
 

Now in its third edition, Evans has updated his text to incorporate research on Thatcher's legacy and the impact of Thatcherism on successive govenments inclduing Major, the New Labour era and today's coalition. Evans argues that Thatcherism was a bold experiment in ideologically driven government and that despite Thatcher’s political dominance, Thatcherism failed to meet its main objectives.

With comprehensive suggestions for further reading and explanation of the economic, social and historical context of Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s, Thatcher and Thatcherism is an invaluable guide to the complexities and paradoxes of Britain from the late 1970’s to the present day.
 

Click here to view sample pages from Thatcher and Thatcherism.

What is gender? A question that provokes much debate in contemporary society and whose answers influence not only analysis of our own social practices, but historical analysis across all periods. But have our own notions of gender affected our understanding of past societies?

Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe is an attempt to challenge the canonical gender concept while trying to specify what gender really meant in the medieval and early modern world. Analysing certain useful notions, such as patriarchy and morality, and seeking to deepen this analysis into studies of female identities in various cultures and dimensions, Muravyeva and Toivo illustrate the fluidity and flexibility of what is called femininity today. In addition, rethinking narratives through case-studies from Northern Europe, Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe explores how conventional ideas of gender did not work in this particular region.

For our Finnish fans, Marianna and Raisa will be hosting a book launch event at the University of Tampere on Saturday, 2nd March 2013 from 9.30am . Featuring an open discussion with volume contributors and review editors from the journals Social History, Scandinavian Journal of History and Renaissance Studies, it promises to be a day of stimulating debate.

Villain, double-crosser, cold-hearted murderer, hero of battle, victim of history, - whatever the verdict, there is no doubting that the last king of the House of York has been portrayed through pages, plays, songs and stories in many, many ways.

For those wishing to learn a little more of this enigmatic figure, David Hipshon's Richard III by is the ideal companion to guide you through the life and times of the last of the Plantagenets.
 

"…this will I think now become the biography of choice on Richard and justifiably so." – Richard Brown, The Historical Association

If you missed the Channel 4 documentary 'The King in the Car Park' view it here.

Taking place at the University of Freiburg from 7th to 9th February 2013, this year’s Swiss Congress of Historical Science will explore the impact of the local-global dichotomy in history and historical research.

Routledge History authors Francisca de Haan and Karen Offen will take to the stage on Saturday 9th February, bringing their wealth of experience on global feminist movements and women’s activism to a panel on “Balancing Local and Global Concerns in International Women's Organizations”. Join them from 3pm for papers on the Nederlandse Vrouwenbeweging, the Women's International Democratic Federation and the International Council of Women.

You can read more about the conference, and Francisca's and Karen’s papers here.

Francisca is the editor of Women’s Activism (Routledge, 2012),
Karen is the editor of Globalizing Feminisms, 1789-1945 (Routledge, 2009) and a contributor to Women’s Activism.