Between the founding of Jamestown in 1606 and the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, images of Indigenous men and women rose and fell on the great seals of the British Atlantic colonies. At the peak of this process, “the Indian” was the most persistent seal icon save for that of the arms and image of the monarch himself. This essay traces the sigillary Indian's illustrious career, as evolving imperial structures and legal debates about the nature of empire positioned and repositioned him (and her) in relation to just claims of authority. Early depictions reflected the settler colony concerns of private charter companies, justifying claims to land, not the rule over people. Royal colonies, by contrast, imagined Indians as a form of vassal, essential aids in the procurement of raw materials from the land. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the image of the Indian had yielded to classical motifs and representations of the land through maps, mirroring the increasing centrality of territoriality to British imperial thought. Taken together, seal images of Indians in the British Atlantic present the rise and fall of a visual paradox: depicting Indigenous people as symbols of authority over white settler colonies.

In July 1979, the Sunday Mirror published an article with the headline: “HOSPITALS AT CRISIS POINT: Jobs and beds to go in cash curbs.” In this article we explore the role of hospital beds in such public discussions of “crisis” within the British National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s, the media and politicians paid increasing attention to bed numbers as an indicator of resource scarcity within the NHS. While this in part reflected a genuine trend, it was also a powerful narrative device. The hospital bed has become a cipher for NHS resourcing and resilience, but throughout the twentieth century, there has been a tension between stories of declining bed numbers as a sign of “crisis,” and declining bed numbers as a marker of more efficient, high-quality healthcare. This article will show that the hospital bed was an extremely important political device because it was imbued with rich social and cultural symbolism, and that stories of declining bed numbers were not as straightforward as they first appear. While discussions in the public sphere tended to focus on bed numbers and waiting times, discussions in the healthcare sector and among policymakers attended to what beds could—and should—do for both patients and staff. Public rhetoric about decline was less about the object itself, and more about the role of the hospital bed as a symbol of care and as a politically pertinent shorthand for the health of the NHS as an institution.

Eric Hobsbawm recently observed that “a good deal of economics has the function not so much of telling government or business what they ought to do, as of telling them what they are doing (or not doing) is right.” Economic history, happily or unhappily, does not suffer from the same weakness. Its problem is rather the reverse: a good deal of economic history has the didactic function of telling us what should have been done, as though that were always possible. So it is with the critics of the Lloyd George coalition's postwar economic policies; they work from a retrospectively-divined ideal back to an explanation for the coalition's melancholic failure to grasp and pursue that ideal. This has made for portrayals of the untried paths as relatively unobstructed, clearly marked and negotiable, while the route actually taken is seen as a gamut, bordered by briars and surfaced with quagmires, through which the nation emerged badly scathed and shaken. To veer off the course of this prickly metaphor, the critics of the coalition's refusal to deflate or its negligence – one might almost say abandon – toward inflation and permissiveness make two types of arguments.

Most conspicuous by their unmitigated scorn are the socialists who see in the wartime state the first buds of what a socialist Britain could flower into.

The apparent lack of representations of the Titanic disaster in Britain between the start of the First World War and the end of the 1950s was due, not to a lack of interest, but to active resistance to such representations. Shipping interests, the press, government, and the public all opposed portrayals of the catastrophe, but their opposition depended much on the medium by which the sinking was to be represented, on the broader international context, and on the nature and status of individual memories of the events of 1912. Questions of fact, fiction, national prestige, and the ethics of representation dominated the first half century of the Titanic's cultural history in the United Kingdom.

Music has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by evaluating different approaches that historians have taken to music, summarizes the important shifts in method that have recently taken place, and advocates for a performance-centered, contextualized framework that is attentive to the distinctive features of music as a medium. The second half examines avenues for future research into the historical connections between music and politics, focusing on four thematic areas—the body, emotions, space, and memory—and closes with some overarching reflections on music's use as a tool of power, as well as a challenge to it. Although for reasons of cohesion, this short article focuses primarily on scholarship on Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its discussion of theory and methods is intended to be applicable to the study of music and political culture across a broad range of periods and geographies.

In recent years, scholars have begun to look afresh at the dynamics of English “imperial” power in the late medieval period, but the extent to which the English dominions were subject to English law and legislation––and the questions of why and how these influences varied between the regions and over an extended period of time––have been considered less systematically and rarely comparatively. With its focus on Wales and Ireland, this article explores the synergies and the strains that shaped attitudes towards the authority of the late medieval English crown and that ultimately determined the extent of England's influence beyond its borders. The article shows that these attitudes were often fundamentally conflicted and contradictory. It highlights the difficulties of the English crown in seeking to balance the elitist agenda of its English subjects, on the one hand, with its desire to bring the Welsh and Irish more squarely within the orbit of the English state system, on the other hand. And it shows how the dominions veered between welcoming and resisting the interference of the English crown. The discussion emphasizes how interaction between the English crown and the people of its dominions was shaped above all by dialogue and negotiation.

In an attempt to understand the public and private roles of medieval women in the English countryside, historians have devoted growing attention to widows as villein tenants and transmitters of land in manorial communities. Villein women are often recorded in manorial sources as co-tenants and recipients of property rights on their husbands' deaths. Although in Common Law the widow's share ranged from one-third to one-half of a free husband's lands, the villein widow often received a right to life usage of the whole of the conjugal estate upon her husband's death as her “free bench.” The extensive property-holding rights of these villein widows have made them rich subjects for study of their legal, social, and economic status and activities.

Case studies based on manorial estates, however, have often focused exclusively on the widow as a transmitter of property and have subordinated the study of widows within a framework governed by considerations of land markets and property transmission. Medieval historiography contrasts with studies of early-modern and modern populations that have put elements such as age at widowhood, number of dependents, social status, personal choice in connection with widow remarriage, and provisions for widows at the forefront of study. By connecting work on widows and the landmarket with these other concerns it is possible to study medieval peasant widows within broader comparative perspective.

During his own lifetime John Bright (1811-1889) assumed an iconic status in the history both of Quakerism and of middle-class radical politics as “the Tribune of the people.” Yet he remains an anomalous figure, difficult to place in the frameworks that presently organize the historiography of modern Quakerism, and of reform politics in the nineteenth century. In large part this reflects a failure among his biographers and social historians of this period to analyze in any depth the relation between his politics and his spiritual life. His religious values have been variously denied or given a nodding acknowledgment as fundamental to his radicalism. And where the religious basis of John Bright’s radicalism is accepted, there are varying and contrasting accounts of that relationship.

In December 1905 R.B. Haldane, later Viscount Haldane of Cloan, became Secretary of State for War. Among his fellow politicians Haldane, at this time, was looked on as an intriguer who combined habitual meddling in high places with a curious and remarkable interest in German philosophy. The Prime Minister of the day, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had good reason to dislike Haldane, nicknamed him “Schopenhauer.” Both men knew that the War Office had ruined the reputations of several of Haldane's predecessors. “We shall now see,” remarked Campbell-Bannerman, in a phrase that later became famous, “how Schopenhauer gets on in the Kailyard.” Despite this unpromising start Haldane's military reforms were so successful that they established his reputation in history as one of the great servants of the state in the pre-1914 era. His work and accomplishments in the field of military aviation, however, have been criticized very severely. In fact, the matter is so complicated that one aviation authority has written of the record in this area that “Haldane's actions behind the scenes may never be known with certainty.”

Even some of his closest subordinates in the field of military aeronautics were very critical of Haldane's attitude and outlook. In February 1911 a major step was taken when, by an Army Order, a unit known as the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers was created. This Battalion was entrusted with the duty of training a “body of expert airmen.” The Battalion's first commander was Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, an officer who knew little about airplanes, but was instead a balloon expert with experience in the South African and Russo-Japanese wars.

Ecclesiastical benefactions by English barons have provided topics for a number of scholars, but the professional civil servants, proto-bureaucrats, who first appeared in the twelfth century, are another group whose gifts to the Church deserve more study. In England, such men appear as early as Henry I's time, but they become more numerous in the reign of his grandson, Henry II. At first, such royal servants were men of all work, doing whatever the king assigned to them at the curia regis, in the counties, and abroad. By the last years of Henry II and in the reigns of his sons, however, some specialization was taking place, and this becomes easier to see in Henry III's early years.

It is next to impossible to probe these royal administrators' minds. They left few letters, no personal recollections, and they earned only a few anecdotes—mainly hostile—in the chronicles. For a number of years, I have been studying a group of fifty-two of these men, whose careers span the last third of the twelfth and the first third of the thirteenth centuries, chosen first chiefly because of their connection with the work of royal justice. They form a representative sample, ranging in rank from the justiciar to knights of the counties, from archbishops to men in minor orders, including roughly equal numbers of clergy and laity. They range from close associates of the king to largely local officials (see Appendix I).

In her biographical note on John Ponet, C. H. Garrett observed that although there was “little good” to be said of him as a man, as a political pamphleteer Ponet had attracted less attention than was his due. Although W. S. Hudson and W. Gordon Zeeveld have remedied this deficiency to a considerable extent, the precise connections between Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power and the contemporary situation in England have not been delineated. Much of the strength of this work lies in the fact that it was written as a direct response to events in England and on the Continent. In particular, Ponet's theories regarding the natural rights of subjects stemmed from efforts by the crown in 1555 to remove the right of ownership of private property from those it regarded as delinquents: the Protestant exiles. Ponet elevated the possession of property by private individuals to the status of a right. He went on to examine the basis of regal power and its practical limits and, in arguing the legitimacy of resistance to an unjust ruler, postulated a commonwealth in which a substantial measure of power rested with “the people”.