The lurid story of the fall of Anne Boleyn, her trial and condemnation on charges of multiple (and in one case incestuous) adultery has been used to support many different interpretations of the political and religious history of the reign of Henry VIII. This article argues that the fate of the queen and those accused with her was not the result of wider factional battles or a cynical sacrifice, either to appease a jaded king or to enable a shift in religious or diplomatic policy. Nor was it a case of justice catching up with a libidinous woman who was guilty as charged. In fact Anne's fall was far swifter and more dramatic than previous accounts have suggested, the result essentially of just two days of hectic activity at court and their aftermath. Anne fell, it is argued here, not as a result of what she did, but of what she said during the May Day weekend of 1536, in a series of incautious conversations with the men who were to be tried and executed with her.

Hugo Grotius has always been viewed as a theorist of either international or natural law. However, these designations obscure the civic focus of his work, from his early republican treatises through to De iure belli ac pacis. From sixteenth-century humanist and legal-humanist Aristotelianism, Grotius constructed a framework of natural right which enabled him on the one hand to locate the origins of the civil community in natural man's juridical capabilities, but on the other to give this ‘city’ a large measure of juridical autonomy in respect of the moral norms of natural law. In this he diverged significantly from the contemporary scholastic handling of natural law. Grotius further developed his understanding of the civil community and its right through elaborating a theory of the unity of the city, based originally on the Aristotelian notion of reciprocity but ultimately using a range of neo-Stoic sources to conceive of the civil community as a unitary reality.

Georges Clemenceau has traditionally been portrayed as a narrow-minded French nationalist. In spite of this reputation, he had many personal friends in England and was widely considered during his lifetime to be France's most eminent anglophile. Although his biographers briefly mention these ties, no one has systematically explored their political and diplomatic implications. Making use of new archival and journalistic evidence, this article will examine Clemenceau's relationships with several English upper-class mavericks: the positivist Frederic Harrison, the head-strong and opinionated Maxse family, and the idiosyncratic social democratic leader Henry M. Hyndman. Their influence encouraged in him an attitude toward England which blended sincere anglophilia with a deep-rooted distrust of its governing classes. Only by exploring this paradox can we understand the roots of Clemenceau's ultimate disillusionment with England.

The black journalist and politician, Roscoe Simmons, was best known for his ability as an orator. Simmons's lecturing activities reveal the networks underlying a black public sphere upon which ambitious black leaders relied to publicize their political agendas. Those networks expanded in the first half of the twentieth century as blacks exploited the press, radio, and other technologies, and as blacks migrated in numbers from the Southern states. Meetings of African Americans served several functions: as opportunities to debate the race's prospects; to voice political concerns; and as sources of entertainment. Simmons incorporated all these principles in his platform performances, as he worked to secure valuable connections with organizations ranging from churches and fraternal bodies to Republican clubs and urban machines. Beginning with his family connection to Booker T. Washington, Simmons cultivated friendships with influential blacks and whites over a period of fifty years. His conservative ideology, however, did not suit all tastes.

This article traces the history of women's participation in consumer politics and the gendering of the consumer in twentieth-century Britain. It does so by focusing on two important moments in the official discussion of the consumer interest: the Consumers' Council of the First World War and the Molony Committee on Consumer Protection, 1959–1962. It argues that notions of consumer-citizenship have been varied and forever in flux and that the involvement of women in consumer issues within the state apparatus has always been at once both disputed and encouraged. Within this complex history, however, a number of discernible trends are apparent. In the first half of the twentieth century, consumer issues were articulated by women's organizations on the political left and the consumer was considered largely a working-class housewife within official consumer politics. By mid-century, an increasingly dominant view of the consumer was that of the middle-class housewife, and a host of socially conservative women's groups came to speak for the consumer. By the 1950s, while the definition of the consumer remained contested, it had increasingly become a gender-neutral category, as business groups defined consumer interests in government committees and an emerging affluent consumer movement inscribed consumerism with the values of a male professional class.

This article examines policy towards juvenile delinquency in colonial Kenya in the interwar period, arguing that juvenile offenders were the subject of scant official interest until the 1930s, when a series of official reports was commissioned and legislation enacted which attempted to modernize the management of juvenile offenders in keeping with current metropolitan policy. This impulse for reform is placed in the context of colonial discourses on eugenics and the effects of urbanization and detribalization on young Africans, arguing that while key metropolitan principles about delinquency retained their influence on transferral to the colony, they were blended with a distinctive colonial rhetoric about African psychology and capacity for development.

The failure of the socialization of heavy industry in West Germany following the Second World War has often been ascribed to American reluctance to allow meaningful social reform in the face of an intensifying Cold War. But a closer look at the socialization issue during the latter half of the 1940s demonstrates the enormous complexity of transforming Germany's heavy industry. First, the British, who originally advocated socialization, i.e. the public ownership of heavy industry, had done so on security grounds. But when trying to reach out to ‘democratic’ Germans, such as social democrats and left wing members of the Christian democratic union, the British realized the difficulty of cultivating a meaningful consensus within western Germany concerning the fate of heavy industry. In the end, they therefore acceded to American arguments that socialization of such important industries should wait until the creation of a central German government. But once a central German government existed from 1949, socialization did not take place. The chief reason for this was that West German social democrats had already concluded in 1947 that American ‘domination’ of western Germany meant the stifling of social reform. They therefore ceded leadership over German affairs to a Christian democratic union decidedly more favourable to free enterprise. Instead, the social democrats and their trade union allies concentrated their efforts at social reform in the introduction and institutionalization of management–labour co-determination.

Recent scholarship on the Restoration period in Italy (1815–60) has put the accent on regional diversity and on particular developments within the different pre-unification states. In particular, recent studies on the Kingdom of Sardinia have added much to our view of the Piedmontese nobility's peculiar character and ability to maintain its identity through time. Equally, detailed studies of the economy of nineteenth-century Tuscany have emphasized the importance of banking and silk manufacturing, whilst studies of governmental policies in the Papal State have shed new light over a particular administrative monarchy's attempt at pursuing a policy of reconciliation between modernization and conservatism. Whilst these studies have shown the significance of regional developments during the Restoration, other studies have argued that the process of ‘inventing’ the Italian nation-state has led to a conscious obliteration of regional administrative and juridical traditions and have shown the way to the construction of an up-to-date regional synthesis of a historical period which is much more than a simple prelude to the unification of the country.

The idea that the autocracy might have successfully modernized itself has, in recent years, spread widely beyond academic circles. However, a look at traditional and recent historiography shows that very few historians support this line. Even those who argue that Russia itself was developing rapidly have seen little prospect of the autocracy surviving the process. Equally, those who argue that radical socialist revolution might have been avoided tend to suggest, often by implication rather than in an explicit fashion, that a democratic, capitalist, bourgeois, and constitutional revolution was the alternative path. Thus it was not so much a question of tsarism or revolution but rather what kind of revolution was Russia facing?

This review examines some of the recent British, American, and Russian scholarship on a series of important international transitions that occurred in the years around 1945. One is the shift of global leadership from Great Britain to the United States, in which, it is argued, the decisive moment was the fall of France in 1940. Another transition is the emergence of a wartime alliance between Britain and America, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, followed by its disintegration into the Cold War. Here the opening of Soviet sources during the 1990s has provided new evidence, though not clear answers. To understand both of these transitions, however, it is necessary to move beyond diplomacy and strategy to look at the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the Second World War. In particular, recent studies of American and Soviet soldiers during and after the conflict re-open the debate about Cold War ideology from the bottom up.

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

It is nearly a quarter of a century since the publication in 1978 of Mark Girouard's magnificent study, Life in the English country house. The book appeared at what we can now recognize to have been an important moment for the stately homes of England. After the years of post-war austerity, the growth in private car ownership had begun to make the countryside increasingly accessible. Many of the weekend journeys spawned by this new affluence were to country houses, a trend speeded up by the exposure several high profile houses enjoyed as period settings for television dramas. Brideshead revisited in 1981 was the pioneer, set as it was in the grounds of Castle Howard. In many respects it has never been bettered, but it has certainly been followed, to the extent that hardly a great house has failed to attract a film crew and some have been visited repeatedly. Nor has this new exposure been confined to the cinema and television. The private mansions from which the working classes were traditionally excluded have opened their doors to paying customers, and their shops to anyone with cash and credit cards.