Founded in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 presidential candidacy, Citizens for Eisenhower took on an ambitious mission to revitalize the Republican party by expanding its activist ranks and by supporting the moderation of its conservative policy agenda. The organization proved unable to sustain the impressive momentum that it achieved during the 1952 campaign, however, instead helping to fuel factional opposition that informed the intraparty upsurge of conservatism during the 1950s and afterwards. The Eisenhower administration's efforts to encourage Citizens activists to join the party were flawed, and existing Republican activists often viewed such newcomers with hostility. More significantly, despite recruitment initiatives, in most cases activism in support of Eisenhower did not translate into enthusiasm for the party cause. The history of Citizens for Eisenhower therefore demonstrates the seriousness of Eisenhower's interests as president in boosting the Republican party's fortunes, but also the shortcomings of ‘amateur’ political activity in support of the party cause. It also sheds light on goals and activities of this era's moderate Republicans, together with their role in fostering the conservative resurgence that characterized the post-Eisenhower Republican party.

Sources and methods in African history: spoken, written, unearthed. Edited by T. Falola and C. Jennings. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Pp. xxi+409. ISBN 1-58046-140-9. £50.00.

Honour in African history. By John Iliffe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv+404. ISBN 0-521-54685-0. £16.99.

Black experience and the empire. Edited by P. Morgan and S. Hawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xv+416. ISBN 0-19-926029-x. £39.00.

Muslim societies in African history. By D. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx+220. ISBN 0-521-533566-x. £10.99.

The study of African culture stands in a uneasy relationship with the study of African history. Historians work by pegging people, places, and events to a place on time's ever-lengthening yardstick. For the historical discipline, time is a structure that stands behind and lends meaning to human events. Culture, by contrast, is often claimed to be timeless, the unique inheritance of a distinct group of people. Culture builders work by short-circuiting chronology. They poach events, names, clothing styles, and other inspirational elements from the past and marshal them as a tradition to be proud of. The study of cultural history enters into a field where the partitions between past and present are being trampled by the traffic of human imagination.

It is generally assumed that the kingless Commonwealth established in 1649 was the unforeseen consequence of the regicide: an expedient taken hesitantly and nothing more than a stop-gap. ‘Republicanism’ was a minority position even among those who remained at Westminster during the dramatic events of 1648–9: the majority remained committed to monarchical forms of government. By reappraising the surviving evidence, this article proposes a radically different account of the genesis of the Commonwealth regime. Not only were preparations already underway in the weeks before Charles I's death that helped to pave the way for government without a king, but also the decision to abolish kingship after the regicide was itself taken relatively quickly, with no discernible signs of hesitation. Even if few who defended or served the Commonwealth were republican, this need not mean that the majority were attached to monarchy. Rather, many of those who supported the regime, drawing upon the experiences and ideas of 1640s parliamentarianism, claimed that the form of government was only ever of secondary importance in comparison to its substance. They did not think kingship was inherently unlawful, but they did not believe it was absolutely necessary either.

Recent work on the Enlightenment continues to bear out the importance of context in shaping both what is written and how it is read. In the case of the French Revolution, largely thanks to the work of Robert Darnton, studies have come to focus on how, if at all, different layers and styles of dissidence helped to bring down the French monarchy. But not all writing has, or need be suspected of, such an obvious or immediate outcome. This period, for instance, sees the birth of ‘philosophical’ history, as John Pocock and others have made us aware. Here again, contexts and individual experience shape what is studied and written, but it is clear that the project common to the best-selling work of, for instance, Gibbon, Hume and Robertson was to explain how civil society emerged and thrived. This inquiry, and what it says about the separate states and common principles of Europe then and now, is unfinished business; so, too, is determining what historical knowing is, and cannot be. What the eighteenth century undeniably saw, even from the slightly educated, was a growing appetite for understanding and for improvement: these have proved necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for modernity.

While recent work has shown that interwar Asian civic associational culture was becoming more plural than previously understood, scholars focus mostly on transnational networks and neglect local associations co-existing in the colonial urban space. We also know little about how internationalist and liberal ideals interacted with notions of racial and national exclusion prevalent in the wider society. To overcome this, this article examines local organizations alongside transnational networks in interwar Hong Kong to understand fully how global trends in the interwar period affected colonial civic culture. Drawing on Freemasonry, Rotary, the League of Fellowship, and the Kowloon Residents’ Association, I discuss the aspirations of multi-racial urbanites in interwar Hong Kong and their limits. I argue that, while internationalism and colonial hierarchies allowed solidarity to be forged amongst multi-racial urbanites and encouraged their civic engagements, racism embedded in the society, rising nationalism, and constitutional constraints put limitations on their aspirations.

Traditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

The recently released Special Operations Executive (SOE) personal file of Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard (HS 9/1200/5) sheds new light on the man who helped fly General Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, leading ultimately to the overthrow of the democratically elected republican government and thirty-six years of brutal dictatorship. Contrary to the previous portrayal of Pollard, a genial, rough-and-ready gung-ho ‘adventurer’ who flew the future Caudillo to Morocco on a whim, the files reveal Pollard to have been an experienced British intelligence officer, talented linguist, and firearms expert with considerable firsthand experience of wars and revolutions in Mexico, Morocco, and Ireland, where he had served as a police adviser in Dublin Castle during the ‘stormy days’ of the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. Pollard, who listed his hobbies in Who's Who as ‘hunting and shooting’, was the sporting editor of Country Life and a member of Lord Leconfield's hunt. He was also a renowned and passionate firearms expert having written numerous books on the subject including the section on ‘small arms’ for the official war office textbook. His friend Douglas Jerrold, who himself later served in British intelligence, recalled that Pollard ‘looked and behaved, like a German Crown Prince and had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office he happened to visit’. Once Jerrold plucked up the courage to ask Pollard if he had ever killed anybody.

This article explores the lengthy and convoluted history of a Jacobean project to set the idle poor to work making ‘new draperies’. Although the projector, Walter Morrell, convinced the Cecils, King James, and the privy council of the social and fiscal benefits of his scheme, he failed to persuade the Hertfordshire gentry. This case study in the formulation of crown economic policy, and in ‘Stuart paternalism’, draws upon Morrell's own detailed, unpublished treatise, as well as conventional political sources, and shows how the combination of ‘commonwealth’ rhetoric and progressive economic thinking could sway crown policy-making. It also demonstrates once again the limits of conciliar authority in early Stuart England. In the face of sustained provincial non-compliance, the privy council had neither the machinery nor the stomach to force the Hertfordshire elite to implement government policy and give meaningful support to a government-backed projector. And despite their inability to deal with growing rural unemployment, the Hertfordshire magistrates were unwilling to experiment with rural industry as a solution.

This article explores how probation officers encouraged magistrates to hand down supervision orders for men charged with importuning via Social Enquiry Reports in the 1960s, a period characterized by a penal-welfare approach to crime and delinquent behaviour. Using nine reports on men charged with importuning, the article will show how ideals of citizenship were crucial to securing supervision. The article will consider to what extent definitions of citizenship varied depending on the offender's social class. In particular, the article will explore how ideals of citizenship were invoked to encourage supervision in circumstances where the offender already had previous convictions for importuning as well as cases where there were none. Finally, the article will consider to what extent the liberalization of the sexual offences laws in 1967 affected the way probation officers defined citizenship for homosexuals and altered the way supervision was encouraged in reports for men charged with importuning. Rounding up the above findings, the conclusion will also look at how successful probation officers were in securing supervision orders by portraying importuners as good citizens and will assess to what extent probation can be conflated with leniency and permissiveness.

Recent writers have pointed out that the 1834 act often made little immediate difference to the practice of local poor-law authorities. The poor-law commissioners lacked the means or the will to enforce their programme. Poor law unions did not replace the township as the effective unit of administration. The same men (albeit with different titles) remained in control. Authorities continued to vary greatly in efficiency and generosity, strong determinants of leniency or harshness being the fortunes of the local economy and the strength of local impulses towards paternalism or frugality. In Nottinghamshire, for example, relief policy became steadily more stringent from the 1820s onwards, largely owing to the work of cost-conscious magistrates; 1834 speeded the current, rather than changed its course. On the other hand, in the Durham unions surveyed by Peter Dunkley, relief was generous throughout the 1830s, but stingy when the local economy was hit by slump after 1840; in the Hungry Forties, the Durham unions were as ruthless as the poor law commission in their attitude towards the poor – and sometimes, indeed, were more so, the commission protesting vainly against the overcrowding of workhouses. Even local authorities' generous phases reflected a shrewd assessment of the ratepayers' best interests: Rhodes Boyson has shown how the north-east Lancashire unions' insistence on continuing outdoor relief was due in part to a realisation that to enforce indoor relief in all cases would be much more costly.

In Bolton's pubs at the end of the 1930s, the research organization Mass Observation pursued answers to big abstract questions about time by studying small concrete actions. Drawing on field notes, draft manuscripts, and published works, this article sets out the different understandings and experiences of time documented by the team of investigators. Outside the ‘time-clock factory-whistle dimension of living’ and inside ‘pub-time’, individuals bought drinks for their companions, drank at the same pace, and engaged with everyone around them on an equal footing. Mass Observation presented such behaviours as proof that the pub fostered a socially harmonious, egalitarian community from a pre-industrial age. However, this article shows that the pub study's archive contains material that goes against the published findings. Observers turned in reports about authoritarian conduct, hierarchical power structures, and the intrusion of contemporary politics. Blurring the research subject and object, it was sometimes the investigators themselves who broke the spell of the pub. These moments of tension, confusion, and contradiction offer insights into the observers’ own perspectives on modern temporalities and subjective experiences of time. All the people in the pubs were caught up in a state of flux.

The causes and consequences of the quarrels between Louis XV and the parlements in the third quarter of the eighteenth century continue to provoke a lively debate amongst historians. In France, the traditional thesis of a reforming monarchy confronted by the selfish obstructionism of the judiciary has many adherents. However, few Anglo-American scholars favour such an interpretation and some have gone as far as to reject the existence of a crisis altogether. Research is also concentrated upon the consequences of these disputes, and their importance to the development not only of parlementaire constitutionalism, but even of a new political culture. In order to contest these conflicting interpretations, this article takes afresh look at the Besançon affair of 1757–1761. In one of the most heated political battles of the reign, thirty judges were exiled from the parlements of Besançon, provoking a lively response from the other parlements, headed by that of Paris. By examining the origins of the dispute in Franche-Comté, and the subsequent reaction of both the government and the Parisian magistrates, this article offers a new picture of the causes of crisis and of how judicial politics actually worked.

This article re-examines a crucial aspect of French history between 1789 and 1793, and one which remains controversial : the attitude of Louis XVI towards the Revolution. It does this by exploiting an important and unpublished source, the letters of the king's secret plenipotentiary to the European powers, the baron de Breteuil, to the foreign monarch most trusted by the French royal family, Gustavus III of Sweden. Since Louis XVI's precarious position in Paris from the October Days until his death prevented him from expressing his true feelings except very rarely, historians since have found it difficult to reach firm conclusions on his political views and motivation during the Revolution, and the result has often been partisan judgements from left and right. The issue has been further clouded by persistent claims for over a century that several of Louis's most important letters of this period are forgeries. While they do not resolve all these problems, the letters of Breteuil to Gustavus III, which are incontestably genuine, reveal Louis XVI's views on critical events between 1791 and 1792 as represented by the politician closest to his real policy, to the fellow-ruler in whom he had the most faith. The most important subjects covered are Breteuil's interpretation of Louis XVI's true attitude to the constitution of September 1791, his distrust of his brothers, the comtes de Provence and d'Artois, and the plan for an armed congress of the European powers to put pressure on revolutionary France. These letters, and Gustavus III's replies to them, are published at the end of the article in an appendix.