Based on vivid court records and newspaper advertisements, this 2003 book is a pioneering account of the expectations and experiences of married life among the middle and labouring ranks in the long eighteenth century. Its original methodology draws attention to the material life of marriage, which has long been dominated by theories of emotional shifts or fashionable accounts of spouses' gendered, oppositional lives. Thus it challenges preconceptions about authority in the household, by showing the extent to which husbands depended upon their wives' vital economic activities: household management and child care. Not only did this forge co-dependency between spouses, it undermined men's autonomy. The power balance within marriage is further revised by evidence that the sexual double standard was not rigidly applied in everyday life. The book also shows that ideas about adultery and domestic violence evolved in the eighteenth century, influenced by new models of masculinity and femininity.

Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law" is a large-scale study of crime, disorder and law enforcement in northern England in the early modern period. London was not the only city where female criminals were common and gangs were feared, nor was it the sole centre of industrial and political agitation. The north was an area of national significance which supplied the capital with its fuel and whose tendency to industrial insurgence commanded the attention of every 18th-century administration.; Arguing that much of the recent work on early modern crime has focused on London and its surrounding counties, which have wrongly been interpreted as typical of the whole country, this study, in contrast, seeks to place the metropolitan image within the wider context of regional realities. As such, it offers a significant antidote to the picture of excessive brutality associated with London and Tyburn, breaking new ground by encompassing crime in an entire region and at all levels of the judicial system. It uniquely reflects upon gender and crime, the development of transportation, the rise of imprisonment and the convergence of military and civil power, in an attempt to contain an assertive and riotous population in a region remote from central authority.; The north-east had a distinctively violent history before 1700 and retained some of its traditionally wild character in the 18th century. The growing contrasts between urban and rural districts provide a revealing backdrop to the different patterns of crime and official responses. In terms of punishments, the region swiftly followed national trends in transportation, but was pioneering in its early use of imprisonment. This study seeks to change the way we think about crime in early modern England.

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.