This book traces the social backgrounds, educational experiences and subsequent lives of women who attended the university colleges in Wales from their inception to the outbreak of the Second World War. Using a sample of 2,000 graduates, the book foregrounds the experience of working-class women and critically assesses the claim of social inclusivity built around education in Wales. It charts changes and continuities in women’s career prospects; explores graduates’ relationship with the communities in which they studied, lived, and worked; and, finally, examines the extensive networks which underpinned their personal and professional lives.

In 1883 the radical journalist W. E. Adams described community self-government as 'the essence of all political liberalism that is worthy of the name'. This collaborative volume of essays enlarges upon Adams' thesis, applying it to the study of various 'currents of radicalism' in Britain and Ireland, and ranging from Victorian advanced liberals to Irish and Welsh socialists in the 1920s. Citizenship and Community explores the links between liberalism, social democracy and nationalism within the framework of classical republican ideals of 'civic virtue' and active citizenship. Its strong comparative emphasis breaks down conventional views of the state, and focuses attention on the regions of Britain, revealing how different forms of collective identity interacted in popular attitudes to political and social debates at a national level.

Wales has a centuries-long history of interest in Palestine and Israel, and a particularly close interest in Jews and Zionism, which has been expressed widely in the literature. Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine is the first monograph to explore this subject. It asks difficult and probing questions about the relationship that Wales has had with Palestine in the past, and now has with the Israel-Palestine situation in the present, and it challenges received wisdom about Welsh tolerance and liberalism. Using publications in Welsh and in English across several centuries, this survey examines Welsh missionary efforts and colonial desires in Palestine; complex and contradictory attitudes to Jews, and the use of Zionism and the Hebrew language revival as a model for Wales. Beginning with an analysis of a so-called tradition of Welsh identification with Jews, the study locates its origins in the early twentieth century, and moves on to uncover provocative material in Welsh conversionist writing on Jews, Muslims and Samaritans in Palestine in the nineteenth century, and imaging of Jews in twentieth-century fiction and the periodical press. It concludes with a survey of Jewish literary responses to Wales that suggests that some Jewish writers have been active agents in reinforcing Welsh support of Zionism in particular. The evidence uncovered here shows a complex picture of a unique cultural and political relationship. Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine makes an important contribution to international Jewish studies, to the study of British colonial involvement in Palestine, and to Welsh and Jewish literary and cultural history.

This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.

This is the first intellectual biography of John Edward Lloyd (1861–1947), widely regarded as the founder of the modern academic study of Welsh history. Indeed, the compliment that pleased him most was that he had ‘created Welsh history’. Published to mark the centenary of Lloyd’s most important book, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest (1911), the study reassesses Lloyd’s significance by setting his work in its multiple contexts. Part One gives an account of his life, with particular emphasis on his upbringing, education and subsequent career as a historian, viewed against the background both of efforts to give expression to Welsh nationhood through educational institutions and of wider developments in the professionalization of historical scholarship. In Part Two the focus shifts from the biographical to the thematic and examines why Lloyd privileged the early and medieval Welsh past and how he depicted this in his 1911 History. These chapters investigate key themes in Lloyd’s interpretation with reference not only to previous accounts of Welsh history but also to the broader intellectual and scholarly context of his own time. Through its reappraisal of Lloyd the book provides a case study of how the past of a small, stateless nation was reconfigured, at a time of self-conscious national revival, through deploying modern canons of scholarship that served to legitimize a new narrative of national origins. It thus offers a fresh and distinctive perspective on issues of broad significance in modern European historiography and intellectual history.