This lively new study covers the dramatic expansion of the press from the seventeenth century to the mid nineteenth century. Hannah Barker explores the factors behind the rise of newspapers to a major force helping to reflect and shape public opinion and altering the way in which politics operated at every level of English life. Newspapers, Politics and English Society 1695-1855 provides a unique insight into the political and social history of eighteenth and nineteenth century England as well as an important study of the history of the media.

"Newspapers were vital not only in putting 'the people' into English politics, but in politicising and thus uniting sections within the increasingly powerful body of 'the public'. The newspaper press not only altered the manner in which politics was conducted at the centre, but also the way in which it operated at every level of English life. As such it played a crucial role in the political change which occurred in England between 1695 and 1855."--BOOK JACKET. "The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the political and social history of the period, as well as those examining literature, print culture and the history of media and communications."--BOOK JACKET.

In this succinct one-volume account of the rise and fall of the English press, Jeremy Black traces the medium's history from the emergence of the country's newspaper industry to the Internet age. The English Press focuses on the major developments in the world of print journalism and sets the history of the press in wider currents of English history, political, social, economic and technological. Black takes the reader through a chronological sequence of chapters, with a final chapter exploring possible scenarios for the future of print media. He investigates whether we are witnessing the demise or simply a crisis of the press in the aftermath of the News of the World scandal and Levinson Inquiry. A new title by one of the most eminent historians of Britain and a leading expert on the history of the press, The English Press will appeal to undergraduate students of British and media history and journalism, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the history of England and the media.

In 1644, the news that Antonio de Montezinos claimed to have discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel in the jungles of South America spread across Europe fuelling an already febrile atmosphere of messianic and millenarian expectation. By tracing the process in which one set of apocalyptic ideas was transmitted across the Christian and Islamic worlds, this book provides fresh insight into the origin and transmission of eschatological constructs, and the resulting beliefs that blurred traditional religious boundaries and identities. Beginning with an investigation of the impact of Montezinos’s narrative, the next chapter follows the story to England, examining how the Quaker messiah James Nayler was viewed in Europe. The third chapter presents the history of the widely reported - but wholly fictitious - story of the sack of Mecca, a rumour that was spread alongside news of Sabbatai Sevi. The final chapter looks at Christian responses to the Sabbatian movement, providing a detailed discussion of the cross-religious and international representations of the messiah. The conclusion brings these case studies together, arguing that the evolving beliefs in the messiah and the Lost Tribes between 1648 and 1666 can only be properly understood by taking into account the multitude of narrative threads that moved between networks of Jews, Conversos, Catholics and Protestants from one side of the Atlantic to the far side of the Mediterranean and back again. By situating this transmission in a broader historical context, the book reveals the importance of early-modern crises, diasporas and newsgathering networks in generating the eschatological constructs, disseminating them on an international scale, and transforming them through this process of intercultural dissemination into complex new hybrid religious conceptions, expectations, and identities.

Through case studies from diverse fields of cultural studies, this collection examines how different constructions of identity were mediated in England during the long eighteenth century. While the concept of identity has received much critical attention, the question of how identities were mediated usually remains implicit. This volume engages in a critical discussion of the connection between historically specific categories of identity determined by class, gender, nationality, religion, political factions and age, and the media available at the time, including novels, newspapers, trial reports, images and the theatre. Representative case studies are the arrival of children's literature as a genre, the creation of masculine citizenship in Defoe's novels, the performance of gendered and national identities by the actress Kitty Clive or in plays by Henry Fielding and Richard Sheridan, fashion and the public sphere, the emergence of the Whig and Tory parties, the radical culture of the 1790s, and visual representations of domestic and imperial landscape. Recognizing the proliferation of identities in the epoch, these essays explore the ways in which different media determined constructions of identity and were in turn shaped by them.

First published in 1987, this is a comprehensive analysis of the rise of the British Press in the eighteenth century, as a component of the understanding of eighteenth century political and social history. Professor Black considers the reasons for the growth of the "print culture" and the relations of newspapers to magazines and pamphlets; the mechanics of circulation; and chronological developments. Extensively illustrated with quotations from newspapers of the time, the book is a lively as well as original and informative treatment of a topic that must remain of first importance for the literate historian.

This comprehensive history (first published in 1987) covers the whole period in which books have been printed in Britain. Though Gutenberg had the edge over Caxton, England quickly established itself in the forefront of the international book trade. The slow process of copying manuscripts gave way to an increasingly sophisticated trade in the printed word which brought original literature, translations, broadsheets and chapbooks and even the Bible within the purview of an increasingly broad slice of society. Powerful political forces continued to control the book trade for centuries before the principle of freedom of opinion was established. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the competition from pirated USA editions - where there were no copyright laws - provided a powerful threat to the trade. This period also saw the rise of remaindering, cheap literature, and many other 'modern' features of the trade. The author surveys all these developments, bringing his history up to the present age.

Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past – whether for good or ill – with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community. It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.