" --History of Education Quarterly"A stimulating challenge to traditional assumptions and scholarly commonplaces." --Journal of Communication

Richard Olson's magisterial two-volume work, Science Deified and Science Defied asks how, why, to what extent, and with what consequences scientific ideas have influenced Western culture. In Volume 2, Olson turns to Cartesianism and the extension of mathematical and mechanical philosophies that branched into every aspect of seventeenth-century thought.

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 pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing. Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed. In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.

The study of past society in terms of what it consumes rather than what it produces is - relatively speaking - a new development. The focus on consumption changes the whole emphasis and structure of historical enquiry. While human beings usually work within a single trade or industry as producers, as, say, farmers or industrial workers, as consumers they are active in many different markets or networks. And while history written from a production viewpoint has, by chance or design, largely been centred on the work of men, consumption history helps to restore women o the mainstream. The history of consumption demands a wide range of skills. It calls upon the methods and techniques of many other disciplines, including archaeology, sociology, social and economic history, anthropology and art criticism. But it is not simply a melting-pot of techniques and skills, brought to bear on a past epoch. Its objectives amount to a new description of a past culture in its totality, as perceived through its patterns of consumption in goods and services. Consumption and the World of Goods is the first of three volumes to examine history from this perspective, and is a unique collaboration between twenty-six leading subject specialists from Europe and North America. The outcome is a new interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that shapes a new historical landscape based on the consumption of goods and services.

For nearly 30 years the work of the Swedish Lutheran pastor and pioneering social historian Egil Johansson astonished the international scholarly world. Working initially with parish registers, especially examination registers, from northern Sweden, Johansson discovered the extraordinary usefulness of these documents to detail the history of universal literacy in Sweden. In this book a group of renowned scholars review and explore the possibilities for the wider circulation and broader application of central dimensions of the early literacy studies. The active thrust and exceptional growth in historical literacy studies over the past two decades has propelled the subject into a new prominence that has come to be the legacy of Egil Johansson's path breaking discoveries. Literacy in Sweden occurred well before any other European nation, despite the fact that Sweden was industrialised about 100 years later than the European norm. Egil Johansson also developed imaginative data analysis techniques that help historians around the world to better picture the complete human cast of the past. With the help of numerous contributors Johansson founded a giant data base of church records and other information, which now can help the understanding of pre-industrial society. Johansson's work spans over many aspects of literacy and social history and their respective relation to religion and gender. The contributors to this volume are influential academics in disciplines such as social history, history of literacy and gender research, and they work in all parts of the world - Australia, Great Britain, Scandinavia as well North America.

In 1750, half the population were unable to sign their names; by 1914 England, together with handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time in history achieved a nominally literate society. This book seeks to understand how and why literacy spread into every interstice of English society, and what impact it had on the lives and minds of the common people.

This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women's and men’s letters written from and to Britain, North America, Europe, India and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite. In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different methodological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social historical analyses of large corpora and a material culture approach to the object of the letter. This research includes personal letters exchanged among family and friends, formal correspondence and letters that were incorporated into published forewords and appendices, journals and memoirs. Part I explores the letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined physical encounters and performances envisaged by letter writers and the means through which these imagined sensations were conveyed. Part II examines the letter as a material object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the material body and as an instrument for embodied encounters. Part III focuses on how correspondents purposefully used their bodies in letters as a means to create intimacy, to generate social networks and build a ‘body politic’. This interdisciplinary volume centred around letters will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields including eighteenth-century studies, cultural history and literature.