Review: Buildings for Bluestockings: The Architecture and Social History of Women's Colleges in Late Victorian England by Margaret Birney Vickery

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-523
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Edwards Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Women's Colleges ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
History Of

Willingly to School: The Working-Class Response to Elementary Education in Britain, 1875–1918

1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Education ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Large Fraction ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Educational History ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Elementary Schooling ◽  
History Of ◽  
Private Venture

In Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1914, J. S. Hurt employs what has become a classic opening in works of social history. “Much of the history of education,” he declares, “has been written from the top, from the perspective of those who ran and provided the schools, be they civil servants or members of the religious societies that promoted the cause of popular education. Little has been written from the viewpoint of those who were the recipients of this semi-charitable endeavour, the parents who paid the weekly schoolpence and the children who sat in the schoolrooms of nineteenth-century England.”Hurt's point is well taken, but he leaves himself open to the retort that he also draws his information mainly from official sources. The parents rarely speak in his book, the children almost never. One could make the same criticism of Phil Gardner's The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. Gardner claims that the so-called dame schools, the private venture schools that served a large fraction of the Victorian working class, were unfairly disparaged and suppressed by educational bureaucrats. But he too depends largely on bureaucratic reports to reconstruct the history of schools outside the state system. Neither Gardner nor Hurt quite succeeds in plumbing educational history to the very bottom: they do little to reconstruct the classroom experience from the viewpoint of the working-class child.What sources could we use to recover that history? There are, of course, the reports of school inspectors, but Gardner warns us that they had a vested interest in condemning dame shools.

scholarly journals The X-Club. A social network of science in late-Victorian England

1970 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-322 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Professional Networks ◽  
The Social ◽  
Learned Societies ◽  
Probable Significance ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Historian ◽  
Victorian Science

AMONG the more significant features of nineteenth-century British science was the emergence of social and professional networks which helped to shape or influence the course of scientific activity. By and large, the most conspicuous arbiters of scientific values were the learned societies, the British Association and the universities. These formal bodies, however, almost always reflected the attitudes and assumptions of small, informal, often obscure and sometimes anonymous, clusters or networks of individuals. Until recently, most of these groups have been overlooked or neglected (i), but growing interest in the social history of science has stimulated fresh research into the history of scientific societies generally, and into scientific élites in particular. The ‘X-Club’, recalled by the contemporary American historian, John Fiske, as ‘the most powerful and influential scientific coterie in England’ (2), was one of the most important and instructive of these groups. The following pages will inquire into the origins, the development, and the probable significance of this ‘coterie’ in the social climate of late-Victorian science.

Early Cinema in Scotland

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Audience

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.

The perils and dangers of these knights (and undead peasants): Interpreting English and Scottish Extent Rolls of 1297–1305

2016 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Sources

Medieval Scottish economic and social history has held little interest for a unionist establishment but, just when a recovery of historic independence begins to seem possible, this paper tackles a (perhaps the) key pre-1424 source. It is compared with a Rutland text, in a context of foreign history, both English and continental. The Berwickshire text is not, as was suggested in 2014, a ‘compte rendu’ but rather an ‘extent’, intended to cross-check such accounts. Read alongside the Rutland roll, it is not even a single ‘compte’ but rather a palimpsest of different sources and times: a possibility beyond earlier editorial imaginings. With content falling (largely) within the time-frame of the PoMS project (although not actually included), when the economic history of Scotland in Europe is properly explored, the sources discussed here will be key and will offer an interesting challenge to interpretation. And some surprises about their nature and date.

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