The tales of divine judgements on sinners which are found throughout John Foxe's famous martyrology, the Acts and monuments, and also collected in a concluding appendix to the work, have often been dismissed as the products of gossip, while Foxe's printing of them has been traditionally regarded as an idiosyncratic, but ultimately insignificant, aberration in his historical writing. After examining the sources for two of these stories of providential punishment, this article will argue that some of the anecdotes of divine retribution printed in Acts and monuments were sent to Foxe in pursuit of local feuds and private grievances, arising from personal hatreds and prospects of material gain as well as religious conflict. After examining the changes made to these stories in the different editions of Acts and monuments, this article will maintain that such providential stories were central, rather than marginal, features of Foxe's work and thought. It is hoped that this article will offer a fresh perspective on Foxe's editorial practices, on the accuracy of Acts and monuments and also on the conflicting objectives of Foxe and his informants.

This piece reinterprets the career of the Leveller, John Lilburne, during the English Civil War, by re-examining the official sources pertaining to him, and the multitude of pamphlets written by himself and his enemies. The article recovers the chronology of Lilburne's story, by stripping away the layers of propaganda with which he later surrounded himself. It shows that he had powerful friends at Westminster, and that his tribulations were caused by political rivalries within Westminster rather than his development of a radical political theory. He is shown to have formed part of the ‘Independent alliance’ during the mid-1640s, although his protected position was eventually imperilled by the fracturing of this group after the end of the first Civil War. The aim is to improve not just our understanding of Lilburne, but the complexity of parliamentarian politics during the 1640s.

In recent years it has become widely accepted that John Locke was involved, perhaps deeply involved, in the Rye House plot of 1682–3. This article takes another look at the evidence for this, and in particular at Richard Ashcraft's claims that he was closely involved with many of the plotters, that he attended some of their meetings, that his letters contain coded references to their activities, and that he hastily left London immediately they realized they had been betrayed. These claims are found wanting. Locke was probably aware that Shaftesbury and others were planning (or at least talking about) an insurrection, but there is little to indicate that he was directly involved. An analysis of his movements during the autumn of 1682 suggests if anything that he was deliberately keeping out of the way. There is even less reason for thinking that he was involved in plans to assassinate Charles II.

Political historians have recognized that politics and high society interacted in eighteenth-century England; and most would also recognize the presence of elite women in the social world of politicians. These assumptions have not, however, been subjected to much scrutiny. This article takes the social aspects of politics seriously and aims to provide an introduction to social politics – the management of people and social situations for political ends – and, specifically, to the involvement of women therein. Politics in eighteenth-century England was not just about parliament and politicians; it also had a social dimension. By expanding our understanding of politics to include social politics, we not only reintegrate women into the political world but we also reveal them to have been legitimate political actors, albeit on a non-parliamentary stage, where they played a vital part in creating and sustaining both a uniquely politicized society and the political elite itself. While specific historical circumstances combined in the eighteenth century to facilitate women's socio-political involvement, social politics is limited neither to women nor to the eighteenth century. It has wider implications for historians of all periods and calls into question the way that we conceptualize politics itself. The relationship between the obstinately nebulous arena of social politics and the traditional arena of high politics is ever-changing, but by trivializing the former we limit our ability to understand the latter.

This article questions the dominant historiographical approaches to understanding the career of Benjamin Disraeli, which view him either as more opportunistic than most of his political contemporaries or as more ‘continental’ in his outlook. It emphasizes his determination to understand English history and values, and argues that a desire to defend and realize his conception of England gave his career coherence. He saw himself as a foe of dangerous cosmopolitan ideas that were damaging the national character and creating social disharmony. This allowed him to cast all his major political initiatives in a heroic, elitist yet restorative light. He conceived those initiatives as a response to the damage inflicted by the domestic and international crises of the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed it is arguable that as a result Disraeli's political strategy in later life was in some ways both quixotic and outdated.

This article examines the activities of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in Dublin during the 1880s. It explores the organization's weakness and the attempts of elements within the IRB to rejuvenate the tradition through the nurturing of a Fenian-inspired cultural nationalism. Much of the focus falls upon the Young Ireland Society (YIS), which came under IRB control in 1883, prior to the Fenian takeover of the Gaelic Athletic Association. With the growing prominence of the YIS, the home rule establishment attempted to bring the organization within its sphere of influence. For Parnellite MPs, especially those with latent Fenian sympathies, such as William O'Brien, the public meetings of the YIS provided a substantial Dublin forum. After 1885 the YIS increasingly came under the control of the Fenians and fellow-travellers led by John O'Leary who favoured coexistence with the constitutionalists. This split the society between those loyal to the traditional precepts of an oath-bound revolutionary organization and those who recognized that Fenian ideals, reconceived, retained much potency.

The folk music movement was among the most important influences on English cultural life in the years immediately before 1914. Its major figure, both in terms of volume of material collected and published, and in terms of organization and publicity, was Cecil Sharp. Historical understanding of the movement and modern appreciation of the material have been hampered by a Marxist orthodoxy which sees folk music as the cultural property of the working class and which attempts to discredit the folk music collectors, particularly Sharp. This article summarizes the trends in scholarship and employs the first biographical survey of a large group of folk singers to challenge the Marxist interpretation.

The opening of archives in recent years makes it possible to reassess the membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) before 1945. The revised aggregate figures, while not startling, suggest that revisions to established views of the effects of the General Strike, the shift to the ‘new line’ and the popular front, are in order. The party's membership was very predominantly male, tended to be young, often included a high proportion of unemployed people, and was heavily working class, with miners especially significant. Geographically, its membership was dominated for most of the period by London, Scotland, Lancashire, and South Wales. There was also a very high turnover of membership for much of the period. The reasons for this turnover, and explanations for the circumstances in which the party was best able to recruit, are discussed. Over time the party's membership did become less unrepresentative of Britain as a whole, enabling it to become an organic, if minor, part of British political life. CPGB membership patterns have similarities with those of other Western Communist parties and its predecessor organizations in Britain, showing how the CPGB reflected features of both international Communism and the British left.

The origins of the process that transmuted Prussia–Germany's most hallowed social institution and professional group, the officer corps, into a functional elite of ‘National Socialist Führer-personalities’ remain obscure. Recent studies have argued that the ‘structural pressures of modern war’ – the immense losses of summer 1942 – compelled the abolition of time-honoured educational and social qualifications for officer candidacy and the basing of promotions almost solely on battlefield prowess, and that ‘National Socialist elite manipulation’ was at best a secondary factor. Yet archival evidence makes clear that the pressures of war took second place in the army's official mind to the need to preserve order and tradition, and that it was above all Adolf Hitler who dictated the timing, shape, and extent of changes that the bureaucrats were largely incapable of imagining. ‘Führer-selection through battle’ was simultaneously the most far-reaching and lasting element in the social revolution that Hitler sought, and a decisive step in steeling the German armed forces for their fight to the bitter end. In this as in other areas, it was National Socialism's very modernity that endowed it with demonic force.

Analysis of policy after 1945 has been profoundly shaped by the idea of a post-war settlement, which is increasingly viewed as inherently inflationary. For much of the period 1951–64, British economic policy was centrally focused on reducing inflation. The extension of sterling's convertibility in the mid-1950s forced British policy-makers to be sensitive to overseas perceptions of British policy and performance. At the beginning of the Conservative government's period in office, monetary policy was believed to be the most effective instrument to control inflation, but its limitations slowly became apparent and created enormous tension between the Treasury and Bank of England. In the literature stimulated by the Phillips curve, the formation of price expectations is the central element in inflationary dynamics, and it is argued that after 1955 Conservative policy was driven by the need to find alternatives to monetary policy to prevent and then limit inflationary expectations. A number of these initiatives – a steep rise in unemployment and confrontation in pay bargaining – sit uncomfortably with the idea of the post-war settlement and an alternative perspective on the Conservative years, emphasizing the Radcliffe committee and the investigations into incomes policy, is proposed.

The relationship between intellectual secularization and the writing of academic history has long been one of the major neglected themes in British historiography, and its unexamined presuppositions are explored here in relation to the religious history of the eighteenth century. A great deal of the history of eighteenth-century religion has been written from a confessional standpoint, and this has served further to marginalize discussion of the subject in a period of history concerning which secular interpretations continue to prevail. A reunion of the religious and the secular is a major desideratum in the writing of eighteenth-century history, and this applies not only to historians of religion but also, a fortiori, to political, social, and cultural historians. The perspectives offered by such historians are critically examined, and the need for them to take seriously the integral part of religious history in the broader history of the period is emphasized accordingly.

Ten years after German unification, this historiographical review discusses how the cascade of published material reflects on two questions vital for contemporary history on this subject: first, why and how did unification happen, and second, what kind of sources and evidence are used by authors to justify their particular interpretation of events? In answering these questions, this review will not only give an overview of published accounts – official, scholarly, and autobiographical – but go beyond the immediate confines of the 1990s to shed light on the question of why Chancellor Helmut Kohl was able to win a prize that had eluded all of his predecessors since Konrad Adenauer.

The arming of Europe and the making of the First World War. By David G. Herrmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+307. ISBN 0-691-03374-9. £29.50.

Armaments and the coming of war: Europe 1904–1914. By David Stevenson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xi+463. ISBN 0-19-820208-3. £48.00.

Authority, identity and the social history of the Great War. Edited by Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Pp. xxii+362. ISBN 1-57181-017-X. £40.

Dismembering the male: men's bodies, Britain and the Great War. By Joanna Bourke. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-948462825. £19.95.

Passchendaele: the untold story. By Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+237. ISBN 0-300-066292-9. £19.95.

Battle tactics of the western front: the British army's art of attack, 1916–1918. By Paddy Griffith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996 (paperback edition). Pp. xvi+286. ISBN 0-300-06663-5. No price given.

Government and the armed forces in Britain, 1856–1990. Edited by Paul Smith. London, Hambledon Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+324. ISBN 1-85285-144-9. £35.

Whether or not arms races cause wars was a historiographical preoccupation of the Cold War era. The issue was then of more than academic concern. Those opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons saw previous arms races as having destabilized the international system at best and as having led ineluctably to war at worst. Their critics countered that arms races possessed the capacity to increase terror and so promote more effective deterrence.