Revel,Riot and Rebellion Revisited

Abstract

This essay revisits the fourth of David Underdown’s seven books and places it into its historical and historiographical context. It seeks to demonstrate how the book represents a major turning point in his intellectual development and offers, with the wisdom of hindsight, a highly positive account of its ambition and achievement. It then seeks to explain why the books received a much less enthusiastic set of reviews than earlier and later books. It is, the essay concludes, a book that was either published too early or too late.     

Revel,Riot and Rebellion

This article considers the ways in which the question of scale: parish, county, regional and national, operated in David Underdown’s Revel, Riot and Rebellion. It is suggested that Underdown mixed the parish-based approaches of Keith Wrightson and the regional model of the Annales school with his own interest in national politics. These methodological influences helped underwrite and structure the book’s narrative in which older models of local communal identity were fragmented both by the long process of social, economic and cultural change from the sixteenth century onward, but also by the national political developments of the 1640s and 1650s.     

The emerging (national) popular music culture in China

ABSTRACT

Before the emergence of the modern sense of popular music in China, the uses of music in that country have been instrumental in serving political purposes for the state. The modern form of popular music began to enter China through Hong Kong and Taiwan – the two very political locales in which we could observe China’s political economy through the reception of their music in mainland China. How the Chinese authorities coped with the production, distribution and consumption of this ‘foreign’ popular music, is reflective of the swing of the pendulum between relaxation and control, and hence the changing ideologies of the state. Based on the cultural and institutional analysis on a few classical Chinese popular singers since the mid‐1980s, this paper illustrates such a transformation. The paper argues that the Chinese authorities have evolved from a dictatorial authority, which chose to control popular music by means of direct bans and censorship, to an active agent, through various strategies, managing and producing a kind of popular music that can be conducive to, and be resonant with, the national ideologies.     

Religion and Politics in English Monastic Towns

ABSTRACT

This article tackles religion and politics as different aspects of a variety of social practices within a common culture. It examines thie political and religious climate of English provincial towns with a monastic presence in the period before before 1540. It demonstrates the extent to which monastic interests were fused with those of local elites, and argues those elites sought to undercut the process of dissolution and to preserve something of the monastic framework through the unfolding crisis. It challenges the notion of a natural dialect between traditional religion and provincial politics and uncovers a dynamic of negotiation productive for both constituencies before and after the Dissolution.     

Spinoza on the Politics of the Passions

Both Spinoza's replacement of the Cartesian ego by the notion of an all-inclusive substance called ‘Deus sive Natura’ and his analysis of man's passionate life seem to question the relevance of the distinction between the public and private spheres. His emphasis on the need to establish powerful states, however, including his insistence on the necessity to demand obedience to the laws of the land, implies a recognition of the wisdom to uphold constitutional boundaries between the public and the private. According to Spinoza, freedom demands the execution of force by the political authorities, and private sentiments the expression of which may be harmful to the public good should not be tolerated.     

Hot-Heads,Gentlemen and the Liberties of Tradesmen

Abstract

Over the summer and autumn of 1739 Philadelphia’s two newspapers published competing versions of a hearing in the Pennsylvania assembly that was described as the ‘Affair of the Tanners’. What began as a minor property dispute in the colonial assembly became, with the aid of the local press, a citywide paper war for the support of the urban populace. This article argues the affair provides unique evidence for competing conceptions of the common good in the eighteenth-century colonial city, and was an expression of conflict with deep roots in Philadelphia’s history. The affair also shows how the medium of print could reflect both transatlantic cultural processes as well as distinctly local grievances, as a group of prosperous city artisans and their opponents utilized the city’s newspapers to articulate competing commonwealth ideologies.     

The Issues of Culture and Politics in Redubbing Anglophone Films in Iran

ABSTRACT

Audiovisual translation is an extremely influential means of intercultural communication among close or distant cultures. Dubbing is historically the main mode of film translation in Iran and has been increasingly investigated. Redubbing, however, as a form of retranslation, is barely researched in Persian. The main focus of this study is to investigate how the cultural and political issues of the time may influence media retranslation. The findings revealed that the dubbed versions before and after the revolution have been influenced by the dominant culture and politics of the time, but the extent and the subjects of interventions differed.     

Religion and Popular Rebellion,From the Capuciati to Niklashausen

ABSTRACT

The historiography of pre-modern popular uprisings tends to ascribe a religiose ‘naïveté’ to earlier revolts, placing religion as innately antithetical to popular politics. This article challenges that opposition, and argues that whilst (as Sam Cohn has recently demonstrated) medieval revolts were not by any means all ‘religious' in outlook, leadership or inspiration, those which did involve religious elements can be read more sympathetically and with greater nuance. Focusing particularly on structural similarities between the Drummer of Niklashausen (1476) and the Capuciati (1183), the article argues that longue durée forms of revolt persist, driven by a plebeian reappropriation of certain elements in orthodox religion.     

Free Trade and Print Culture: Political Communication in Early Nineteenth-Century England

This article highlights the potency of traditional popular print culture as a form of political communication for one of the pioneering campaigns of the nineteenth century: the free trade agitation of the 1840s. Contributing to recent debates about Victorian political communication, it challenges the view that the spread of literacy and print replaced a more traditional, inclusive, hybrid style of communication. The use and adaptation of broadside culture that blurred literacy, orality and visuality proved to be a more effective means of communicating free trade to popular audiences than ‘modern’ methods of political communication such as official newspapers or mass propaganda. Joseph Livesey, the most successful free trade populariser, was able to bridge the gap between free trade and Chartism, by drawing on elements of radical print culture, while seeking to shift them onto a more respectable trajectory. Livesey and cheap free trade print culture anticipated the shift from popular radicalism to popular liberalism in political culture and popular politics that occurred after 1850.     

Conceit and Capacities of the Vulgar Sort: The Social History of English as a Language of Politics

The growth of England from Norman-Angevin colony to imperial power began with the social development of a national community that conducted its arguments in English. In this sense vernacularization was the constituting process of English history. This article connects the history of language to constitutional history, and affirms recent calls for an approach that transcends conventional boundaries between late medieval and early modern periods, and between intellectual, cultural, social, demographic, economic, political and constitutional histories. Vernacularization is seen as a movement from below. It is linked in various ways to traditions and customs of resistance and rebellion that are seen as having shaped the history of England from the thirteenth century to 1649.     

Eric Hobsbawm and the Significance of Jazz

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Eric Hobsbawm’s interest in Jazz, and argues that he helped popularise the music, gave it intellectual credibility and that his jazz writings are still relevant for jazz scholars and cultural historians. Jazz also influenced his view of history. Drawing on his recently catalogued private papers, it suggests Hobsbawm consistently argued for the historical significance of jazz, was flexible in the use of genre and subgenre and was aware of the role of the music business, and the way critics and writers helped shape the music’s meanings. The paper also argues that Hobsbawm wrote partly as fan, and that his penetrating analysis of jazz sometimes led him to undervalue other popular music forms.     

Evolution,Civilization and History

ABSTRACT

This article will offer a fresh perspective on media attitudes towards working-class youth in late Victorian London by looking in detail at a case study of violent youth crime. It offers an analysis of gang crime in the late nineteenth-century capital and explores the use of class and stereotyping in the reporting of working-class youth. It considers the extent to which the problems of violent youth gangs were manipulated by the press to portray the capital as a ‘city out of control’. Finally, it will argue that these contemporary representations of youth helped create a fear that exaggerated the threat posed by gangs.     

The Affair of the Plan De L'Olivier

ABSTRACT

In France, the Revolution of 1848 reshaped politics as it drew heretofore excluded groups into politics. In Montpellier, these changes provoked contests over the place of new citizens in the body politic and urban space. In August 1848 tensions reached their zenith as royalist residents of a lower-class neighbourhood clashed with the forces of order. Moreover, they defended their neighbourhood from intrusions on the part of their political opponents. Not only did these struggles concern the issue of command over space, but they also showed that the purportedly uncouth men intended to take part in the formulation of politics too.     

The Singing Postman: The Mobility of Traditional Culture in Nineteenth-Century France

Nineteenth-century French traditional culture was not immobile. Nor was it a conservative impediment to ‘modernization’. Focusing on the ethnographic work of two folklorists – Félix Arnaudin (1844-1921) in the Landes, and Victor Smith (1826-1882) – this article explores the ways that traditional culture circulated, and the people that carried it. Far from sedentary ‘peasants’, many of the singers and storytellers the folklorists collected from were actively involved in modern transport networks and worked in new occupations. These hybrid networks suggest a picture of nineteenth-century culture ‘from below’ that flows along informal, regional conduits, both within and beyond the borders of France.     

Consuming Popular Music: Individualism,Politics and Progressive Rock

Historians have maintained that popular music had an influence upon individuals and in turn society. Yet the historiography of popular music has focused far more on bands and wider social reactions to the music than on understanding how and why fans consumed music. This article demonstrates how a more fan-centric approach can allow for more subtle understandings of the influence and role of popular music in the twentieth century. During the 1970s, progressive rock was an important part of life for many young music fans. It provided them with escape, entertainment and a sense of individualism, community and intellectual reward, much of which centred upon the idea that the genre was different, uncommercial and difficult to access and understand. Progressive rock also encouraged some debate around issues of class amongst the young and helped cement the importance of individualism in middle-class and educated circles. However, many of the values articulated in progressive rock, not least the discontent with contemporary society and the emphasis on intellectual values, were also shared by many within the broader social framework that fans wanted to rebel against. Moreover, other musical subgenres liked to imagine themselves as similarly ‘different’ and thus progressive rock shows that the real significance of popular music for historians is not the music itself but rather how it was consumed and thought about by the fans themselves.     

Comfort,Class and Climate Change: The Rise of Glass in Late Medieval and Early Modern Domestic Architecture

ABSTRACT

In the modern world, glass windows are considered an indispensable element of the built environment. Throughout premodern times, however, glass was not universally used in European architecture. This article argues that the rise of glass in Western architecture was neither an inevitable nor a linear process, but rather a response to certain social, cultural and environmental factors that gained increasing relevance from the late medieval period onwards. In other words, glass windows are a cultural convention, reflecting some of the wide-ranging and transformative challenges that Europeans faced in the late medieval and early modern period.     

Time and the Shape of History. By Penelope J.

ABSTRACT

In the interwar period, women formed an ever-growing share of the press market. They were an increasingly important target for advertisers, and newspapers were intent on securing the maximum number of women readers. The press turned its spotlight on female politicians in an attempt to attract women readers. Some politicians, such as the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson, collaborated with the press to increase their media exposure and promote an image of themselves as political ‘celebrities'. In so doing, they simultaneously perpetuated and destabilized assumptions about women as frivolous, superficial and uninterested in serious political debate. Wilkinson was ultimately able to turn her celebrity to political advantage, using the press as a pulpit to expound her progressive political agenda. However, her successful manipulation of her public platform should not obscure the gendered assumptions behind the press coverage that helped to propel her to political stardom.