Paul Readman

The relationship between landscape and identity is explored to reveal how Englishness encompasses the urban and rural, and the north and south.

Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity

Storied Ground

Chad Bryant

Arthur Burns

Few historians have written about walking, despite its obvious centrality to the human condition. Focusing on the period 1800-1914, this book examines the practices and meanings of walking in the context of transformative modernity. It boldly suggests that once historians place walking at the heart of their analyses, exciting new perspectives on themes central to the ‘long nineteenth century’ emerge. Walking Histories, 1800-1914 adopts a global perspective, including contributions from specialists in the history and culture of Great Britain, North America, Australia, Russia, East-Central Europe, and South Asia. Critically engaging with recent research, the contributions within offer fresh insights for academic experts, while remaining accessible to student readers. This book will be essential reading for those interested in movement, travel, leisure, urban history, and environmental history.

Walking Histories, 1800-1914

Mark Freeman

Angela Bartie

Linda Fleming

Alexander Hutton

Restaging the Past is the first edited collection devoted to the study of historical pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. Across Britain in the twentieth century, people succumbed to ‘pageant fever’. Thousands dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from the history of the places where they lived, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between the 1900s and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organised groups, including Women’s Institutes, political parties, schools, churches and youth organisations. Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of ‘pageant fever’ remain in evidence today.

Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain

Restaging the Past

Paul Readman

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