Books in the Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories series

Drawing from a wide range of archival sources, this study illustrates the resonance of radio within early twentieth-century debates. It rejects the idea of radio as a tool for a totalitarian state and instead offers a more nuanced picture of the impact of broadcasting on 1930s politics in interwar France.

Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated the multiple relations between France and England in the long eighteenth century. This is an important reassessment of the history of Britain's deep historical connections with Europe.

Feeding France offers the first comprehensive study of France's industrial food industry in the decades surrounding the French Revolution. Complementing histories of gastronomy and the restaurant, this book rewrites the history of the French relationship with food to show that chemistry, industrialisation and the politics of consumption were intimately intertwined.

Italy's Margins explores how certain places and social groups in Italy have been defined as marginal or peripheral since unification. The author argues that the Italian nation was formed by excluding certain groups of people who did not fit comfortably into a narrative of modernization, growth and social integration.

This compelling cultural history draws on visual, material and textual evidence to investigate the characterization of the sex of adult male bodies before the Enlightenment. Simons redirects attention away from the modern focus on anatomical attributes to find that male bodies were considered in terms of their active physiological processes.

This innovative study of the lives of ordinary people - peasants, fishermen, textile workers - in nineteenth-century France demonstrates how folklore collections can be used to shed new light on the socially marginalized, and reveals how oral culture provided mechanisms for the poor to assert some control over their own destinies.

A study of the relations between nineteenth-century science and Christianity, focusing on London Missionary Society members who became residents in the Pacific. It argues that Britain's providential empire found support from popular views of nature as much as elite science. It will be of interest to cultural historians and anthropologists.

An interdisciplinary study of why a disease that is so difficult to catch has caused such alarm. It examines how the fear of leprosy was part of nineteenth-century imperial expansion, as colonial officials and missionaries were thought exposed to the risk of infection, which might be carried back to Britain.

Based on vivid and compelling oral testimony from a diverse range of people, this book provides the first rounded account of sexuality in marriage in early and mid twentieth-century England. The authors look beyond the conventions of silence among the respectable majority to challenge stereotypes of ignorance and inhibition.

This book examines how, as Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge rippled outward from Italy, French notions of masculinity, sexual agency, and procreation were fundamentally changed. Katherine Crawford reveals that humanists, poets, and political figures contributed to the rapid alteration of sexual ideas to suit French cultural needs.

Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public life in later Georgian and Victorian England. This 2004 book sets out to explore the world of these volunteer networks, their foci of concern, their patterns of recruitment, their methods of operation, and the responses they aroused.

This innovative study of the relationship between language and empire explores the role of language in the greater 'civilising' project of the British Empire through the dissemination and reception of, and challenge to, British English in Australia during the period from the 1840s to the 1940s.

A fascinating account of love, life and domestic service in eighteenth-century England. The book focuses on the relationship between a Church of England clergyman and his pregnant maidservant and sheds new light on the history of domestic service, the poor law, literacy, education and the making of the working class.

Examination of the history of personal debt and credit from 1740 to 1914 from three interlocking perspectives: representations of debt in novels, diaries and autobiographical memoirs; the transformation of imprisonment for debt; and the use of small claims courts to mediate disputes between debtors and creditors. Includes extensive archival research.

In early twentieth-century Russia, suicide became a public act and a social phenomenon; a disquieting emblem of Russia's encounter with modernity. This book draws on an extensive range of sources, from judicial records to the popular press, to examine the forms, meanings, and regulation of suicide from the seventeenth century to 1914.

Based on extensive research across a wide range of sources, this book is the first comprehensive study of the cultural politics of commemoration in Revolutionary France. It explores the political purposes commemorations of the dead served and the conflicts they provoked, while also examining the cultural traditions they drew upon.

An innovative study of gift-giving, informal support and charity in England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The author examines the transformation of varied forms of informal help, arguing that the early modern era witnessed the diversification, increase and invigoration, rather than the demise, of informal support.

The Politics of Commonwealth offers a major reinterpretation of urban political culture in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining what it meant to be a freeman and citizen in early modern England, it also shows the increasingly pivotal place of cities and boroughs within the national polity.

Karen Harvey provides a critique of the orthodoxy of recent work on sexual difference in the history of the body. She argues that eighteenth-century English erotic culture combined a distinctive mode of writing and reading in which the form of refinement was applied to the matter of sex.

Julie-Marie Strange studies the expression of grief among the working class in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, demonstrating that poverty increased - rather than deadened - it. She illustrates the mourning practices of the working classes through chapters addressing care of the corpse, the funeral, the cemetery, and commemoration.

The Grand Tour introduced British travellers to the urban environments of Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice at a time when unprecedented urbanisation was taking place at home. This fascinating study examines how cities were experienced, described and represented in travel literature and how the image of a city evolved.

Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could - or should - be converted or enslaved, maps were uniquely suited for assessing the impact of environment on bodies and temperaments. Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.

A major study of the transformation of early modern London. By focusing on policing, prosecution, and the language and perceptions of the authorities and the underclasses, Paul Griffiths explores the swift growth of London and the changes to its cultures, communities, and environments. Through a series of thematic chapters he maps problem areas and people; reconstructs the atmosphere of the streets; and traces the development of policing in the city. The book provided the first full study of petty crime before 1660, analysing worlds and words of crime, criminal rings and cultures, and tracking changing meanings of crime to reveal alternative emphases on environmental crimes and crimes committed by women. It also examines the key roles of Bridewell prison, hospitals, medical provision, and penal practices, shedding light on investigation, detection, surveillance, and public prosecution. Viewed through this fascinating account, the city will never look the same again.

The book examines what it meant to be a member of the English social elite, the gentry, during the early modern era. It does so by asking how gentility was portrayed through plays at London's theatres (1660-1725). Mark Dawson revises several of social history's conclusions about the gentry.