`The moloch of details'? cycles of criticism and the meaning of history now

In a recent review of Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648– 1815 (2007), Keith Thomas marvelled at the author’s range, given that ‘the volume of specialised writing has grown immeasurably since the 1950s’ and because ‘the subject matter of history has expanded and its younger practitioners are intensely specialised.’1 Such observations are not new. More than a century ago, William Milligan Sloane offered a similar sentiment, but more colourfully, when lamenting that history had been ‘immolated by the Moloch of details’.2 The specialization which Sloane inveighed against increased in the subsequent years, with the expansion of the university-based history and the growing emphasis upon specialist knowledge. At the same time, the discipline fractured into more and more sub-specialisms, thus amplifying the problems which Sloane encountered in the 1890s. As historians strengthened their dogged faith in the power of the sources and in their powers of scientific deduction, many of the works they produced became divorced from a general reading population

Child-stripping in the Victorian City

During the nineteenth century, police, magistrates, reformers and the press noticed a rising tide of juvenile crime. Child-stripping, the crime of stealing young children's clothes by force or deception, was an activity of this type which caused alarm among contemporaries. As the century progressed, improved policing, urbanization and Irish migration, allied to growing social concern, caused more cases of child-stripping to be noticed. Accounts by Dickens, Mayhew and others characterized child-stripping as an activity indulged in by old women who were able to make money by victimizing the weakest strata of society. However, research in the British Library's digitized newspaper collections as well as in parliamentary papers conclusively demonstrates that child-stripping, far from being the domain of Dickensian crones, was actually perpetrated by older children, notably girls, against children even younger than themselves. Despite widespread revulsion, which at times approached a ‘moral panic’ prompted by the nature of the crime, progressive attitudes largely prevailed with most child-stripping children being sent to reformatories or industrial schools in the hope of reforming their behaviour. This article thus conforms with Foucauldian notions of the switch from physical to mental punishments and aligns with the Victorians’ invention of children as a category of humanity that could be saved

Interdependence Day and Magna Charta: James Hamilton's public diplomacy in the Angloworld, 1907-1940s

This article discusses the use of the Magna Charta as a universal symbol of democracy in the Anglo-world in the early twentieth century. It focuses on the role played by one group, the International Magna Charta Day Association (IMCDA), in a global movement to unite and educate the English-speaking peoples through the promotion of the great charter. In searching for a worldwide Anglo-Saxon patriotism, this society promoted strong connections and the laudation of what it called ‘Interdependence Day’. This article concludes that although the IMCDA may have been only one element in the widening and strengthening of Anglo- world connections, it was an important one that has been previously neglected

Book review : Transnational nationalism and collective identity among the American Irish

Book review of: Transnational nationalism and collective identity among the American Irish / by Howard Lune, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2020, 224 pages, ISBN: 978143999181897 (paperback

‘Irish fever’ in Britain during the Great Famine: immigration, disease and the legacy of ‘Black ‘47’

During the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ‘47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focussing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western ports of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain’s Irish population faced in the 1850s

Perspectives on the Great Irish Famine

This overview of the Great Irish Famine is unfolded in terms of the three major phases of British government policy. The understanding of poverty underlying the paper is in terms of diet, not income per capita, housing or literacy, or any of the other more conventional measures in use by historians of the Famine. The claim is that reliance on a diet consisting almost exclusively of the cheapest foodstuff (potatoes) is both the definition of and the principal measure of poverty in pre-Famine Irish society. There is some emphasis on class conflict, both in its overt and its latent forms, as a constraint on the redistribution of income and food in the face of a massive crisis. A.K. Sen’s entitlements thesis on the causes of famine is held to have limited usefulness for the study of the Irish Famine, and there is a renewed emphasis on the absolute shortfall in domestic food production (‘food availability decline’) in the later 1840s. Ever so briefly, attention is drawn to lives saved as well as lives lost