Known in his day as the man who built the Town Hall, Abel Heywood was a leading Manchester publisher who entertained royalty at his home and twice became Mayor of Manchester. Yet before he found success his life was one of poverty and hardship, marked by a prison term in his pursuit of a free press. A campaigner for votes for all and social reform, Heywood attempted to enter Parliament twice, but his working-class origins and radical ideas proved an insurmountable obstacle. As councillor, alderman and mayor, he worked passionately and tirelessly to build the road, railway and tram systems, develop education, improve the provision of hospitals, museums and libraries, better the living conditions of the poor, and make Manchester a great city. Going beyond the experiences of one man, this book explores the wider political, cultural and class context of the Victorian city. It is an honest tale of rags to riches that will appeal to all who wish to discover more about the dramatic history of industrial Manchester and its people.

Known in his day as the man who built the Town Hall, Abel Heywood was a leading Manchester publisher who entertained royalty at his home and twice became Mayor of Manchester. Yet before he found success his life was one of poverty and hardship, marked by a prison term in his pursuit of a free press. A campaigner for votes for all and social reform, Heywood attempted to enter Parliament twice, but his working-class origins and radical ideas proved an insurmountable obstacle. As councillor, alderman and mayor, he worked passionately and tirelessly to build the road, railway and tram systems, develop education, improve the provision of hospitals, museums and libraries, better the living conditions of the poor, and make Manchester a great city. Going beyond the experiences of one man, this book explores the wider political, cultural and class context of the Victorian city. It is an honest tale of rags to riches that will appeal to all who wish to discover more about the dramatic history of industrial Manchester and its people.

At the end of the 1970s, Manchester seemed to be sliding into the dustbin of history. Today the city is an international destination for culture and sport, and one of the fastest-growing urban regions in Europe. This book offers a first-hand account of what happened in between. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine City Life before working for the Manchester Evening News and creating his own PR firm. In a forty-year career he has encountered a who’s who of Manchester personalities, from cultural icons such as Tony Wilson to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and influential council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein. His remarkable account traces Manchester’s gradual emergence from its post-industrial malaise, centring on the legendary nightclub the Haçienda and the cultural renaissance it inspired.

Fifty years before women were enfranchised, a legal loophole allowed a thousand women to vote in the general election of 1868. This surprising event occurred due to the feisty and single-minded dedication of Lydia Becker, the acknowledged, though unofficial, leader of the women's suffrage movement in the later 19th century. Brought up in a middle-class family as the eldest of fifteen children, she broke away from convention, remaining single and entering the sphere of men by engaging in politics. Although it was considered immoral for a woman to speak in public, Lydia addressed innumerable audiences, not only on women's votes, but also on the position of wives, female education and rights at work. She battled grittily to gain academic education for poor girls, and kept countless supporters all over Britain and beyond abreast of the many campaigns for women's rights through her publication, the Women's Suffrage Journal. Steamrollering her way to Parliament as chief lobbyist for women, she influenced MPs in a way that no woman, and few men, had done before. In the 1860s the idea of women's suffrage was compared in the Commons to persuading dogs to dance; it was dismissed as ridiculous and unnatural. By the time of Lydia's death in 1890 there was an acceptance that the enfranchisement of women would soon happen. The torch was picked up by a woman she had inspired as a teenager, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Lydia's younger colleague on the London committee, Millicent Fawcett. And the rest is history.

A landmark new history of the great English county of Lancashire, exploring its people's impact on Britain and beyond.

Did You Know? In 1824 a Pendleton tollkeeper set up Britain's first true public bus service, thought to be one of the first in the world. Communism can claim to have been conceived, if not born, in Manchester as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx used to meet in the city. Manchester has the grim distinction of being the place where the first death of the English Civil War occurred. The Little Book of Manchester is an intriguing, fast-paced, fact-packed compendium of places, people and events in the city, from its Roman origins to the present day. Here you can read about the important contributions the city made to the history of the nation, learn about the individual communities and how they came together to form the modern city and meet some of the great men and women, the eccentrics and the scoundrels with which its history is littered. A reliable reference book and quirky guide, its bite-sized chunks of history can be dipped into time and again to reveal some new facts about the story of this amazing city. This is a remarkably engaging little book.

‘Adolf Island’ offers new forensic, archaeological and spatial perspectives on the Nazi forced and slave labour programme that was initiated on the Channel Island of Alderney during its occupation in the Second World War. Drawing on extensive archival research and the results of the first in-field investigations of the ‘crime scenes’ since 1945, the book identifies and characterises the network of concentration and labour camps, fortifications, burial sites and other material traces connected to the occupation, providing new insights into the identities and experiences of the men and women who lived, worked and died within this landscape. Moving beyond previous studies focused on military aspects of occupation, the book argues that Alderney was intrinsically linked to wider systems of Nazi forced and slave labour.

Directly elected mayors are political leaders who are selected directly by citizens and head multi-functional local government authorities. This book examines the contexts, features and debates around this model of leadership, and how in practice political leadership is exercised through it. The book draws on examples from Europe, the US, and Australasia to examine the impacts, practices, and debates of mayoral leadership in different cities and countries. Themes that recur throughout include the formal and informal powers that mayors exercise, their relationships with other actors in governance - both inside municipalities and in broader governance networks - and the advantages and disadvantages of the mayoral model. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used to build a picture of views of and on directly elected mayors in different contexts from across the globe. This book will be a valuable resource for those studying or researching public policy, public management, urban studies, politics, law, and planning.

Explore the fascinating history of Manchester in this fully illustrated A-Z guide to the city's people and places.

Historians often assume a one-directional transmission of knowledge and ideas, leading to the establishment of spatial hierarchies defined as centres and peripheries. In recent decades, transnational and global history have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges that profoundly challenged the ways in which we draw our mental maps. Covering the early modern and modern periods, Re-Mapping Centre and Periphery investigates the asymmetrical and multi-directional structure of such encounters within Europe as well as in a global context. Exploring subjects from the shores of the Russian Empire to nation-making in Latin America, the international team of contributors demonstrates how, as products of human agency, centre and periphery are conditioned by mutual dependencies; rather than representing absolute categories of analysis, they are subjective constructions determined by a constantly changing discursive context. Through its analysis, the volume develops and implements a conceptual framework for remapping centres and peripheries, based on conceptual history and discourse history. As such, it will appeal to a wide variety of historians, including transnational, cultural and intellectual, and historians of early modern and modern periods.