Readers: Books and Biography

This chapter investigates how book historians have used autobiographical records and documents – diaries, notebooks and commonplace books, and marginalia – to uncover the place of books and reading in everyday life from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century. It aims to provide a survey of the field while also drawing on individual case studies of particular readers. It demonstrates how readers used their books and shows how the individual act of reading was embedded within a larger web of social, economic, and educational contexts. Attending to autobiographical documents can provide information about how reading practices were shaped and influenced by the book trade, social and correspondence networks, and institutions of reading such as subscription libraries. The material forms of autobiography, meanwhile, show how reading in the past has been shaped by social practices, such as commonplacing, letter writing, and marginal annotation

Beyond the chains that bind: the political crisis of unions in Western Europe

The dynamics of neo-liberal restructuring have generated serious tensions in the institutional alignments between social democratic political parties and labor unions in Western Europe. This article explores the origins, development and consequences of the resulting political crisis through a detailed analysis of the institutional alignment of parties and unions in Sweden, Germany, UK and France. The authors reject the argument that the changing contours of the party-union nexus can be understood solely on the basis of a rational choice analysis of labor movement actors in favor of an account that also highlights the importance of historical path dependency and ideological orientation. The resulting complexity of union responses to the crisis of the party-union nexus is explored through the construction of a typology that charts union reorientation along the dimensions of accommodation with, or resistance against, neo-liberalism and within and beyond the national political context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]