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In some ways, The All-Consuming Nation is an autobiography of the baby boom generation since it highlights the consumer culture and rising environmental consciousness that have been central to that generation’s lived experience. This focus should appeal to a wide audience of regular readers. Those who are sensitive to such current issues as wealth inequality, climate change, and the environmental consequences of mass consumerism will also find the book as a way to see how the United States reached its contemporary crisis points, as well as possible ways to curb current excesses. The book alternates chapters on the evolving consumer economy with chapters on environmental critiques of mass consumerism. It considers the technologies that have fueled consumption, strategies such as planned obsolescence that sustain consumption, and the shift in retailing from brick and mortar to online shopping. Environmental critics have viewed every shift in patterns of increasing consumption as ultimately unsustainable. Finally, the book should serve as text for post–World War II surveys in American history, environmental history, as well as business and marketing courses.

Armies and Political Change in Britain, 1660–1750 argues that armies had a profound impact on the major political events of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. Opening with the controversial creation of a permanent army to protect the restored Stuart monarchy in 1660–1, this original and important book examines how armies defended or destroyed regimes during the Exclusion Crisis, Monmouth’s Rebellion, the Revolution of 1688–9, and the Jacobite rebellions and plots of the post-1714 period, including the ’15 and ’45. The book explores the political ideas of ‘common soldiers’ and army officers and analyses their political engagements in a divisive, partisan world. The threat or hope of military intervention into politics preoccupied the era. Would a monarch employ the army to circumvent parliament and annihilate Protestantism? Might the army determine the succession to the throne? Could an ambitious general use armed force to achieve supreme political power? These questions troubled successive generations of men and women as the British army developed into a lasting and costly component of the state and emerged as a highly successful fighting force during the War of the Spanish Succession. Armies and Political Change in Britain, 1660–1750 deploys an innovative periodization to explore significant continuities and developments across the reigns of seven monarchs spanning almost a century. Using a vivid and extensive array of archival, literary, and artistic material, the book presents a striking new perspective on the political and military history of Britain

Choose Your Medicine is the first comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States. It draws on legal history and the history of medicine (as well as political, intellectual, cultural, and social history) to examine the ways that persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American law, regulation, and policy from the country’s origins to the present. It describes social movements and legal efforts dedicated to resisting government measures denying individuals an unfettered choice among therapeutic products and methods. The targets of this activism have included, among others, state medical licensing statutes, FDA restrictions on the distribution of unapproved drugs, state and federal prohibitions against medical marijuana, formulary limitations in government insurance programs, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions on physician-assisted suicide. The narrative’s protagonists range from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. The book considers how all of these examples, taken together, fit within the broader development of the idea of freedom of therapeutic choice in American history and law.

This book examines the function of convents as memorial centres in early medieval Saxony as expressed in the historical texts written for and by these institutions. In the early medieval world, how people remembered the past changed how power was seen in the present. Certain sites, like the prominent convents of Gandersheim and Quedlinburg, were linked to memories of the predecessors of the new dynasty that came to power in tenth century Saxony, the Ottonians. With the accession of the first Ottonian king to the throne in 919, the memorial centres linked to his family shot to the foreground of Saxon politics, with their prominence and prestige seen as exceptional in tenth-century Western Europe. Through closely examining how and why these convents became central sites in the new Ottonian Empire, this book reveals how the women in these communities themselves were skilful political actors. The women of Gandersheim and Quedlinburg were constantly renegotiating their relationships with the Ottonian rulers and their families and were able to produce new visions of the past to achieve their ends. In so doing, a new vision of the history of the Ottonian dynasty and their convents emerges, one of contingency, versatility, and luck.

This monograph provides an in-depth comparison of lay and religious sources produced in Siena (1260-1330) on criminal justice, conflict and violence. Two main trends have been highlighted in the development of criminal justice in late medieval Italy. Firstly, that the practice of revenge was still popular among members of all social classes. Secondly, that crime was increasingly perceived as a public matter that needed to be dealt with by the government, and not by private citizens. These two aspects are partly contradictory, and the extent to which these models reflect the reality of communal justice is still open to debate. The book sheds light on this question through the contribution of religious sources, which scholars have started comparing only very recently to secular ones with regard to these topics. The underlying argument is that religious people were an effective pressure group with regards to criminal justice, thanks both to the literary works they produced and their direct intervention in political affairs, and their contributions have not received the attention they deserve. It is suggested that the dichotomy between theories and practices of ‘private justice’ (e.g. revenge) and of ‘public justice’ (trials) should be substituted by a framework in which three models, or discourses, of criminal justice are recognised as present in late medieval Italian communes: in addition to the trends described above, also a specifically religious approach to criminal justice based on penitential spirituality should be recognised as an influence on the policies of the communes. This case study shows that, although the models were competing, they also influenced each other; and none of them managed, in this period, to eliminate the others, but they coexisted.

Ancien régime France did not have a unified law. Legal relations of the people were governed by a disorganized amalgam of norms, including provincial and local customs (coutumes), elements of Roman law and canon law that together formed jus commune, royal edicts and ordinances, and judicial decisions, all coexisting with little apparent internal coherence. The multiplicity of laws and the fragmentation of jurisdiction were the defining features of the monarchical era. A key subject in European legal history is the metamorphosis of popular customs into customary law, which covered a broad spectrum of what we call today private law. This book sets forth the evolution of law in late medieval and early modern France, from the thirteenth through the end of the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on the royal campaigns to record and reform customs in the sixteenth century. The codification of customs in the name of the king solidified the legislative authority of the crown, the essential element of the absolute monarchy. Achievements of French legal humanism brought French custom and Roman law together to lay the foundation for the French law. The Civil Code of 1804 was the culmination of these centuries of work. Juristic, political, and constitutional approaches to the early modern state allow an understanding of French history in a continuum.

This book details the story of how Germans came to embrace the Third Reich. Germany in early 1933 was a country ravaged by years of economic depression and increasingly polarized between the extremes of left and right. Over the spring of that year, Germany was transformed from a republic, albeit a seriously faltering one, into a one-party dictatorship. The book examines the pivotal moments during this fateful period in which the Nazis apparently won over the majority of Germans to join them in their project to construct the Third Reich. It scrutinizes the events of the period—the elections and mass arrests, the bonfires and gunfire, the patriotic rallies and anti-Jewish boycotts—to demonstrate both the terrifying power that the National Socialists came to exert over ordinary Germans and the powerful appeal of the new era that they promised.

This is an interdisciplinary study of the typographical web that underpinned and enabled skilled print trade networks across the anglophone world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a cultural history, the first study of its kind on international Victorian print networks. Morality, mobility, mobilization, and solidarity were central to how compositors and print trade workers defined themselves during this period. These themes are addressed in case studies on roving printers, striking printers, and creative printers, drawing on a range of unique primary and secondary sources covering Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, the United States, and Wales. The case studies explore the cultural values and trade skills transmitted and embedded by such creative compositors, the global print trade union networks that enabled print workers to travel across continents in search of work and experience, the trade actions reliant on mobilization and information sharing across the printing world, and the Victorian working-class literary culture that compositors and printers shared through such means as memoirs, poetry, prose, and trade news contributions to trade journals and other public outlets.

Muslims have lived in Europe for hundreds of years. Only in 1878, however, did many of them become formal citizens of European states. Muslims and the Making of Europe shows how this massive shift in citizenship rights transformed both Muslims’ daily lives and European laws and societies. Starting with the Treaty of Berlin and ending with the eradication of the Shari’a legal system in communist Yugoslavia, this book centers Muslim voices and perspectives in an analysis of the twists and turns of nineteenth- and twentieth- century European history, from early nation-building projects to the shattering of the European imperial order after World War I, through the interwar political experiments of liberal democracy and authoritarianism, and into the Second World War, when Muslims, like other Europeans, were caught between occupation and civil conflict, and the ideological programs of fascism and communism. Its focus moves from Ottoman Europe in the late nineteenth century to Yugoslavia, a multi-confessional, multi-lingual state founded after World War I. Throughout these decades, Muslims negotiated with state authorities over the boundaries of Islamic law, the nature of religious freedom, and the meaning of minority rights. As they did so, Muslims helped to shape emergent political, social, and legal projects in Europe.

The Other Face of Battle plunges into the jarring and violent experience of America’s “other” wars: the often irregular, unconventional, and intercultural wars that have dominated the American military experience. The national narrative is dominated by the so-called “big wars,” but the other wars are both more common and equally critical to understanding American military history. American wars with enemies from different cultures, fighting with different tactics, have generated shocking battlefield defeats, unanticipated insurgencies, and strategic stalemate. In 1755, George Washington and other Anglo-American soldiers on an expedition to the Ohio Country were catastrophically defeated by French and Indian irregulars at the Monongahela, with resounding consequences for how Americans thought about themselves in combat over the next several generations. In 1898, U.S. troops at the Battle of Manila confronted Filipinos who had just fought and won a revolution against the Spanish—a battle that was but the opening round of a protracted U.S.-Filipino conflict sparked by American occupation and annexation. The unexpected war that followed was both conventional and irregular, an omen for America’s 20th-century wars. In 2010, U.S. soldiers and Afghan allies launched an extraordinarily complex, interservice attack on the village of Makuan in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. The battle symbolized the Americans’ struggle to find and pin down the elusive Taliban enemy, despite careful planning, immense firepower, and nine years of experience fighting an insurgency.

This book describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland’s most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the sixteenth century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion’s most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas. But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. The southern state turned to the Catholic church to shape its social mores, until it emerged from an experience of sudden-onset secularization to become one of the most progressive nations in Europe. The northern state moved more slowly beyond the protestant culture of its principal institutions, but in a similar direction of travel. In 2021, 1,500 years on from the birth of Saint Columba, Christian Ireland appears to be vanishing. But after the failure of several varieties of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance.