Some recent studies have highlighted the importance of sounds for social interaction in the early modern period, yet the consequences for deaf members of society are rarely questioned. Those without the ability to hear lived in a world of sounds controlled by those who heard. This article explores the extent to which the deaf were socially integrated in English society between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It also assesses the disadvantages suffered by those born deaf, or who lost their hearing. Crucial to the discussion is an understanding that experiences were not uniform, as the term deafness covered a wide spectrum of conditions, from temporary hearing loss to profound congenital deafness. Clearly some were more disabled than others, but their disadvantages were more to do with traditional social divisions of wealth and status, rather than the extent of their hearing impairment. Fundamentally, the most inhibiting factor was an inability to apprehend words.

This article highlights the present lacuna in the study of politics and political culture in the Scottish Highlands between the battles of Culloden and Waterloo. It argues that this neglect is symptomatic of the contentious historiography that surrounds the Highland Clearances. Yet politics remained a crucial factor shaping landlord attitudes to improvements and their estates in general. Moreover, in contrast to their well-known failure to manage the region's economic and social development, Highland landlords exhibited a sophisticated understanding of how British politics had been reconfigured by the emergence of the British ‘fiscal-military’ state. The region's elites constructed a distinctive and effective political strategy that sought to place the Highlands in a mutually supportive relationship with the British state. Scottish Highland political culture thus offers a useful corrective to recent debates on the ‘fiscal-military’ state that stress either the centre's overwhelming power or the ability of local elites to resist that power. Although the Highlands is remembered primarily for its hostile relationship with the political centre, the region in fact constituted a prime example of the process of mutual accommodation that underpinned the domestic authority of the eighteenth-century British state.

This article analyses Nathaniel Hone's portrait of Lord and Lady Scarsdale (1761) and the significance that such images have for our understanding of the eighteenth-century family. It first discusses the imagery of the painting and places it in the context of the shift that occurred in family portraiture between 1740 and 1760. Whilst earlier images presented stiffly posed figures, later portraits such as that by Hone came to focus on the sitters' affective relationships. The article argues that, whilst aesthetic influences played a part in this transition, it was chiefly prompted by the sentimentalization of familial ideals. Such ‘promenade portraits’ encapsulated the companionate marriage, hailed as a blend of masculine rationality and feminine tenderness. However, once contextualized within the state rooms for which it was conceived, the Hone portrait also reveals more ‘traditional’ concerns. It makes formal references to accompanying portraits of Stuart monarchs and dignitaries, emphasizing the tory affiliations of the Scarsdales and their loyalty to the Stuart dynasty. The state rooms also contain a portrait of Lord Scarsdale as a baby with his parents and his deceased elder brother. This image affirms the continuation of the male line in the face of high infant mortality rates, a statement that is confirmed in the Hone painting.

In the 1840s the German Romantic August von Haxthausen originated the idea, in a book reporting on his travels through Russia, that collective ownership of land and other assets was integral to the traditional culture of the Russian rural commune. Russian intellectuals accepted this idea and made it the basis for political ideals and social theories (even after 1917, as in the case of Aleksandr Chayanov). The 1861 Emancipation Act had brought collective ownership of land into existence by law, but Haxthausen's own theory – which related to Yaroslavl' province in the first half of the nineteenth century – has never been tested. This article does that, and finds that nearly all parts of Haxthausen's theory, insofar as they are testable, are false. This does not mean that Haxthausen's theory was false everywhere in Russia, but it was false for the place he advanced it about, and may therefore be false elsewhere. No cultural or ownership pattern of rural society, therefore, should be assumed a priori to hold for the whole of Russia. Only painstaking, detailed local studies will tell us which patterns held in which parts of this vast and heterogeneous country.

Prominent French men of letters began to claim that the student body at the acting Conservatory, which bore a morally dubious reputation, was becoming more bourgeois than ever before as the nineteenth century ended. They interpreted the entry of the bourgeoisie as one more manifestation of national decay. In fact, the major shift in recruitment was the growing number of women from respectable, bourgeois backgrounds. The new pattern signalled an expansion in women's autonomy as individuals. Thus, the writers' pessimism obscured the fact that the early Third Republic was keeping some of its democratic promises. The findings indicate that a reassessment of France's capacity for progressive cultural change in the fin de siècle is in order.

Since the late nineteenth century, Western intellectuals have tended to depict ‘modernity’ as being incompatible with ‘enchantment’. Thus Max Weber argued that two aspects intrinsic to modernity, rationalization and bureaucratization, were inimical to the magical attitudes toward human existence that characterized medieval and early modern thought. His gloomy image of the ‘iron cage’ of reason echoed the fears of earlier romantics and was to be repeated by later cultural pessimists through the twentieth century. This article recovers a different outlook that emerged during the fin-de-siècle, one that reconciled the rational and secular tenets of modernity with enchantment and that underlies many forms of contemporary cultural practice. The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is taken as an exemplary instance of a specifically modern form of enchantment. First, Holmes's own form of rationalism, ‘animistic reason’, offered an alternative to the narrower instrumental reason that cultural pessimists claimed as a defining element of modernity. Second, many adult readers at the turn of the century and beyond were able to pretend that Holmes was real, and his creator fictitious, through the ‘ironic imagination’, a more capacious and playful understanding of the imagination than that held by the early Victorians. Both animistic reason and the ironic imagination made Holmes an iconic figure who enacted and represented the reconciliation of modernity and enchantment, whereas Doyle, unable to accept this reconciliation, resorted to spiritualism, a holdover of ‘premodern’ enchantment.

The term ‘policing’ is often used to refer to a broad range of regulatory practices, which have been associated with the development of educative and social work frameworks in the modern state. The relationship between the concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘penality’ (or ‘care’ and ‘control’) has been the subject of a number of recent studies of social intervention in twentieth-century Britain. However, the role of police officers themselves in the ‘policing of families’ has rarely been elaborated. From their initial appointment to London's Metropolitan Police in 1919 until their official integration on the same terms as male officers in the early 1970s, women police officers played a significant role in the detection and prevention of child abuse, neglect, and female delinquency. Through a case study of the work of the Metropolitan Women Police branch, this article considers the negotiation of a social work ethic within policing as well as the shifting configuration of the ‘care’/‘control’ nexus in welfare legislation and professional practice. The Metropolitan Women Police tended to see ‘care’ and ‘control’ as mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting concepts. Such a formulation was resonant with the rhetoric of social work and official legislation until the early 1960s. It also reflected the philosophy of crime prevention laid down as the principal object of policing, enabling women to justify involvement in child protection and welfare as an aspect of police work.

The Fischer controversy of the 1960s was a major landmark in post-war West German historiography. Surprisingly few historians to date have devoted their attention to the East German reception of Fischer's work, however. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at some of the critical reviews published in East German academic journals and also at internal records from the Socialist Unity Party archive. Particular emphasis is placed on the period after 1965 when East German scholars began to explore the historiographical and national implications of the Fischer controversy with a greater degree of sensitivity but also with a greater degree of caution (for strategic political reasons). A mutually beneficial exchange of ideas between Fischer and German Democratic Republic scholars working on the First World War continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, although ironically this was at a time when both sides were moving ever further away from the idea of a possible reunification of the two Germanies in the future.

This article explores the response of the moderate wing of the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. The moderates, made up of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, were initially opposed to the civil rights movement taking a stand against the war. This reluctance was the result of a number of factors, including anti-communism and their own closeness with the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Crucially, it also resulted from their own experiences of the black freedom struggle itself. The article also documents and analyses the growing anti-war dissent amongst the moderates, culminating in the decision of both the NAACP and the Urban League to adopt an anti-war stance at the end of the 1960s. Despite this, they remained unenthusiastic about participating in peace movement activities, and the reasons for this are explained. Finally, the article suggests that the war was important in exposing existing divisions within the civil rights movement, as well as in generating new ones.

Geoffrey Elton's model of Tudor politics, which emphasized the importance of political institutions and which dominated our understanding of Tudor politics for much of the second half of the twentieth century, has been challenged by a number of historians for over twenty years. They have re-emphasized the importance of social connections and cultural influences and turned attention away from studying the privy council to studying the court. In doing so, they have gone back to re-examine earlier approaches by Sir John Neale and Conyers Read which Elton had challenged. Yet, these new socially and culturally derived approaches, recently labelled ‘New Tudor political history’, remain varied and its practitioners sometimes at odds with each other. Focusing on both established seminal works and recent research, this review considers the different elements of these approaches in relation to Tudor court politics. It assesses the methodological problems they raise and identifies what shortcomings still remain. It demonstrates that Tudor politics are increasingly defined as based on social networks rather than institutional bodies, making issues of access to, and intimacy with, the monarch central. Our understanding has been further enhanced by exploration of political culture and its relationship to political action. However, the review points to the need to integrate more fully the political role of women and the relationship between the court and the wider political community into our understanding of Tudor politics, as well as place England into a European context.

The professionalization of history in Ireland resulted from the 1930s effort of T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards to fuse writing on Irish history with a received version of the history of early modern England. This enterprise enhanced the academic standing of work on early modern Ireland, but it also insulated professional history in Ireland from the debates that enlivened historical discourse in England and continental Europe. Those who broke from this restriction, notably D. B. Quinn, Hugh Kearney, and Aidan Clarke, made significant contributions to the conceptualization of the histories of colonial British America, early modern England, and Scotland. These achievements were challenged by the New British History turn which, for the early modern period, has transpired to be no more than traditional English political history in mufti. None the less, writing on the histories of Ireland, Scotland, and colonial British America has endured and even flourished. Such endeavour has succeeded where the focus has been on people rather than places, where authors have been alert to cross-cultural encounters, where they have identified their subject as part of European or global history, and where they have rejected the compartmentalization of political from social and economic history. The success of such authors should encourage practitioners of both English history and the New British History to follow their examples for the benefit of endeavours which will always be complementary.

In July 1768, the Boston merchant John Amory paid cash for two bills of exchange sold to him by a certain Mr Mumford. These bills, valued at £279 4s 3d and £342 10s, had originally been drawn on the London commission house of Lascelles and Daling by two Barbados merchants trading in partnership as Stevenson and Went. The bills were drawn in favour of another merchant called Charles Wickham. Stevenson and Went were in the business of supplying slaves to sugar planters on credits of up to twelve months, but as soon as their slave shipments arrived, however, the partners' own obligations to the merchants and mariners who had fitted out their vessels and supplied them with cargo fell due. To overcome this remittance problem, Lascelles and Daling acted as the slave importers' guarantors by agreeing to accept their bills before receiving the funds needed to pay them. A bill drawn on a sound London house was considered good for payment in any Atlantic port, including Rhode Island where Wickham was based. The bills presented to Lascelles and Daling were due at twelve months' sight, but creditors such as Wickham did not have to wait a full year before receiving their money. Wickham endorsed the bills in favour of Mumford (probably a coastal mariner to whom he owed a debt), who in turn passed them on to Amory. With balances owing in London, Amory was happy to discount the two bills for cash, judging this a better option at the current rate of exchange than sending specie or merchandise across the Atlantic. And cash is what Mumford would have needed to pay his crew members.

Study of French political history for the period of 1789 to 1851 is exceedingly complex. Not only must one possess knowledge of a succession of regimes (with their varying constitutions, institutions, laws, and conventions), one must also grasp the essentials of political traditions such as royalism, republicanism, and liberalism, all of which altered over time, and familiarize oneself with a plethora of groups or sub groups, such as Montagnards and Girondins, authoritarian and Revolutionary Bonapartists, moderate and ultra royalists, that often adjusted their beliefs and positions according to circumstance. Matters become further complicated when one takes foreign relations into account, assessing the impact of France abroad or the role of foreign relations in shaping French domestic politics.