Discusses seafaring adventures of modern times, presenting interviews with Thor Heyerdahl and his crewmate, the late Erik Hesselberg. Reviews the books entitled Dove, by Robin Graham; Kon Tiki and I, by Erik Hesselberg; and The Ra expeditions, by Thor Heyerdahl.

How could Victorian capitalist values be harmonized with Christian beliefs and concepts of public morality and social duty? This book explores ideas about citizenship and public virtue and how public morality was reconciled with the market.

Containing over 100 pamphlets, this edition provides a resource for the study of Chartism, covering the main areas of Chartist activity, including agitation for the Charter itself, the Land Plan, the issue of moral versus physical force and trade unionism.

In offering a wide-ranging overview of radicalism throughout the 'long' nineteenth century, from the mid eighteenth century to the aftermath of the First World War, this study contests the methods and findings of recent revisionist interpretations. Radical movements faced a more difficult task than other political formations since they sought not merely to construct an audience - to find a language which resonated with people's material needs and greivances - but to mobilise for change. Options were limited as radicals had to conform to rhetorical, organisational and cultural norms to ensure popular legitimacy and support. This volume pays particular attention therefore to contextual factors: to the changing codes and conventions of political culture and public space. Through critical engagement with revisionist and post-modernist interpretations, it throws new light on factors which often divided liberals from radicals, and indeed, radicals from themselves. This is an accessible and much-needed introduction to the new linguistic and cultural approaches to nineteenth-century popular politics.

Much scholarship on nineteenth-century English workers has been devoted to the radical reform politics that powerfully unsettled the social order in the century’s first decades. Comparatively neglected have been the impetuous patriotism, royalism, and xenophobic anti-Catholicism that countless men and women demonstrated in the early Victorian period. This much-needed study of the era’s “conservatism from below” explores the role of religion in everyday culture and the Tories’ successful mobilization across class boundaries. Long before they were able to vote, large swathes of the lower classes embraced Britain’s monarchical, religious, and legal institutions in the defense of traditional English culture.

This book provides a fresh overall account of organised antislavery by focusing on the active minority of abolutionists throughout the country. The analysis of their culture of reform demonstrates the way in which alliances of diverse religious groups roused public opinion and influenced political leaders. The resulting definition of the distinctive `reform mentality' links antislavery to other efforts at moral and social improvement and highlights its contradictory relations to the social effects of industrialization and the growth of liberalism.

This book reflects on popular politics in Britain during the turbulent period of industrialization, focusing on how political meanings were produced and sustained. It is also a spirited series of responses to the changing terrain of historical studies. It takes as its starting point the goal of defining a middle ground between E. P. Thompson’s concept of cultural materialism and the postmodern view of culture as a system of signs and codes (with emphasis on the linguistic grounding of experience). The first part of the book evaluates and critiques the work of two of the most influential proponents of the linguistic turn in British historical writing: Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. The second part contains four case studies: the first two treating British political culture in the age of the French Revolution, the third dealing with the role of space in historical reasoning, and the fourth assessing the role of gentleman leaders within popular movements.

In 1845 Frederick Engels wrote that 'Manchester is the seat of the most powerful unions, the central point of Chartism, the place which numbers the most Socialists'. There have been many local studies of the Chartist struggle for democratic political reform, but there is no major study of the movement in the Manchester-Salford conurbation, its most important provincial centre. This book brings an innovative approach to an exploration of aspects of the Chartist experience in the 'shock city' of the industrial revolution.

Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

In a period scarred by apprehensions of revolution, war, invasion, poverty and disease, elite members of society lived in fear of revolt. Boyd Hilton examines the changes in society between 1783-1846 and the transformations from raffish and rakish behaviour to the new norms of Victorian respectability.