The appearance of Urban History as a journal marks a further stage in the progression from Newsletter to Yearbook and now to a semi-annual periodical. The timing is apt since it coincides with the thirtieth anniversary of the first issue of the Urban History Newsletter, and the enthusiasm surrounding the production and publication of Urban History is a continuing sign of the vigour and confidence expressed by H.J. Dyos thirty years ago, and again in 1974, when the Yearbook first appeared. The current academic self-confidence is matched by a commercial one from the new publishers, Cambridge University Press.

The seventeenth-century Worcestershire antiquarian Thomas Habington knew of great agitations around 1400 at Shipston-on-Stour, a manor of Worcester Cathedral Priory. He reported that after an arbitration of 1405–6 ‘the discontented tenants not satisfied broke out against their lord again, but all these being long since buried, shall not be revived by my pen, which shall never prejudice or blot any with infamy’. This article will rescue the rebels from the oblivion to which Habington sought to condemn them. This is not just to correct his bias (as a recusant he sympathized with Benedictine monks; as a member of the gentry he disliked disturbance of the social order), but more to use the Shipston story to investigate general problems of urban conflict in the Middle Ages.

Educational history has been regularly noticed in the Urban History Yearbook in reviews, and in the bibliography under the heading of urban culture, but it has been a minority interest among urban historians and in Britain the treatment of schools and schooling in town histories has tended until recently to be perfunctory or conventional. However, the impact of social and cultural history on both urban and educational history is resulting in more of an overlap of interests. Hence the publication later this year, in the series of themes in International Urban History, of a set of comparative essays on urban educational history: The City and Education in Four Nations. This article anticipates the historiographical reviews, case studies and theoretical discussions of that volume. It attempts to show, from a British perspective, how recent historiographical bends raise questions and issues of interest to urban historians of the modern period.

The growth of interest in urban and housing history during recent decades has produced a large volume of studies that has examined broad societal parameters, or themes, such as housing policies, economics and legislation. Concurrently, a growing volume of historical research about households and families has been published, but few studies examine the lifestyles and values of the residents. In sum, there rarely has been any systematic analysis of how longitudinal developments in domestic life are related to developments in the spatial layout, the meaning and use of shared and private spaces and the daily activities these accommodate. In general, the inter-relations between the architectural, cultural and societal dimensions of housing history have commonly been overlooked. This paper argues why, and then illustrates how, integrative concepts and methods can be applied to diversify and enrich recurrent interpretations by referring to a published study of urban housing and daily life in the French- speaking cantons of Switzerland between 1860 and 1960.1

This paper reflects on aspects of industrial and political history in Birmingham from the 1830s to the 1930s. Its object is to consider the strategies adopted by capital and labour in response to the challenges posed by successive phases of capitalist industrialization, urbanization and bureau-cratization. A convenient way to begin is by responding critically to the approach exemplified by the work of Richard Price and Clive Behagg. Although there are differences of emphasis, Price and Behagg have both explored workshop-based craft traditions, paternalistic labour management strategies and the complex links between them. They pay attention to the broader matrix of forces surrounding industry, including the impact of political movements. However, their main concern is the implementation of specific profit-seeking strategies in the sphere of production and the responses of key social actors, especially artisans and large employers, whose interests are advanced or harmed by these strategies. The master process, implicitly at least, is capitalist industrialization as shaped by the dynamics of domestic and international competition.

Over the past decade a number of scholars have examined the rise of the mass production and distribution of goods, and the concurrent emergence of a nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumer society or ‘culture of consumption’. This body of work has featured the department store prominently in several roles: as a venue for the distribution of consumer goods; as a material fantasyland in which women were encouraged to play out their dreams of conspicuous consumption; and as a place of white-collar employment for working-class clerks. Whatever their focus, these accounts generally view all department stores as homogeneous middle-class institutions, located in a similarly consistent ‘downtown’ in any (and all) large American and European cities. There are serious flaws in such a portrayal. Very real distinctions between department stores in a given city and the social implications of these differences in terms of social status and class are not addressed. Further, the contribution of the built environment and urban topography to the shaping of these status and class distinctions and, ultimately, women's shopping experience, is likewise overlooked. This article examines a set of surveys and marketing reports prepared in 1932 for the Higbee Company of Cleveland, Ohio, in order to situate more precisely one department store within its urban context. These sources document the relationship of the Higbee Company to the city's other department stores and in so doing reveal some of the ways in which stratification between and among classes was interpreted in terms of geographical and social space. Examination of the hierarchy of stores that existed in what was at the time the nation's sixth largest city provides a corrective to the image of the department store as a homogeneous democratic phenomenon, and thus provides an invaluable basis for a reinterpretation of the department store as an urban institution in early twentieth- century America.

City planning has become such an acknowledged function of city government that today we tend to take the city planning commission for granted as a logical part of the city government. Pioneers in the city planning movement in the United States at the turn of the century, however, had yet to decide upon the proper vehicle for carrying out city planning. Although in the early years of the movement a variety of methods were tried, including private planning associations, planning conducted by a committee of city council, and city planning conducted by a single city official, the most common agency of planning to emerge out of this period was the city planning commission.

Calcutta celebrated its tercentenary in 1990. The city rose to the occasion handsomely with floats, exhibitions, seminars, the usual flurry of publications and some soul-searching. So it has been an exciting year for Indian urban historians. A decade has elapsed since Narayani Gupta reviewed the state of current research on urban India, and after a brief examination of writings on colonial cities, attention is devoted here to a more extensive survey of works on Calcutta including those published on the occasion of the tercentenary.