Brian Lewis – författare

In 2021, McGill University celebrated its bicentennial anniversary, reflecting on contributions to research, education, and other successes. The university’s founding within the context of nineteenth-century Atlantic capitalism requires that a deeper account engage with the more complex and difficult elements of its history.McGill in History brings together diverse historiographies and perspectives to critically examine how McGill has been implicated in power structures and is the product of conflicting ideologies. James McGill, the university’s namesake, owned and profited from the sale of enslaved Black and Indigenous people, a legacy highlighted by the removal of his statue and ongoing debates over the racially charged Redman name used by the men’s sports teams. Imperialism, settler colonialism, slavery, sexism, and homophobia are elements of McGill’s story that must be fully integrated into a broader understanding of the university’s institutional history. Challenging siloed narratives with new research, the contributors to this volume emphasize the important task of scholars to scrutinize and confront history that is unflattering and to rethink their institution’s own story – a reckoning happening across many institutions of higher education around the world.McGill in History broadens the historical frame of critical university studies, showing how the university can serve as a model for understanding power in modern society.

This collection of essays takes stock of the ‘new British queer history’. It is intended both for scholars and students of British social and cultural history and of the history of sexuality, and for a broader readership interested in queer issues. In offering a snapshot of the field, this volume demonstrates the richness and promise of one of the most vibrant areas of modern British history and the complexity and breadth of discussion, debate and approach. It showcases challenging think-pieces from leading luminaries alongside some of the most original and exciting research by established and emerging young scholars. The book provides a plethora of fresh perspectives and a wealth of new information, suggests enticing avenues for research and – in bringing the whole question of sexual identity to the forefront of debate – challenges us to rethink queer history’s parameters.

This collection of essays takes stock of the ‘new British queer history’. It is intended both for scholars and students of British social and cultural history and of the history of sexuality, and for a broader readership interested in queer issues. In offering a snapshot of the field, this volume demonstrates the richness and promise of one of the most vibrant areas of modern British history and the complexity and breadth of discussion, debate and approach. It showcases challenging think-pieces from leading luminaries alongside some of the most original and exciting research by established and emerging young scholars. The book provides a plethora of fresh perspectives and a wealth of new information, suggests enticing avenues for research and – in bringing the whole question of sexual identity to the forefront of debate – challenges us to rethink queer history’s parameters.This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender equality.

This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851–1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap empire. So clean places Lever squarely in his social and cultural context and is fully informed by recent historical scholarship, using him as an entry-point for contextualized and comparative essays on the history of advertising; on factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century; and on colonialism and forced labour in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. It concludes with a discussion of his extraordinary attempt, in his final years, to transform crofting and fishing in the Outer Hebrides. Written in an engaging and accessible style, So clean will appeal to academics and students working in business, social, cultural and imperial history.

This book seeks to enrich our understanding of middle-class life in England during the Industrial Revolution. For many years, questions about how the middle classes earned (and failed to earn) money, conducted their public and private lives, carried out what they took to be their civic and religious duties, and viewed themselves in relation to the rest of society have been largely neglected questions. These topics have been marginalized by the rise of social history, with its predominant focus on the political formation of the working classes, and by continuing interest in government and high politics, with its focus on the upper classes and landed aristocracy.This book forms part of the recent attempt, influenced by contemporary ideas of political culture, to reassess the role, composition, and outlook of the middle classes. It compares and contrasts three Lancashire milltowns and surrounding parishes in the early phase of textile industrialization—when the urbanizing process was at its most rapid and dysfunctional, and class relations were most fraught. The book's range extends from the French Revolution to 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, which symbolized mid-century stability and prosperity.The author argues that members of the middle class were pivotal in the creation of this stability. He shows them creating themselves as a class while being created as a class, putting themselves in order while being ordered from above. The book shifts attention from the search for a single elusive "class consciousness" to demonstrate instead how the ideological leaders of the three milltowns negotiated their power within the powerful forces of capitalism and state-building. It argues that, at a time of intense labor-capital conflict, it was precisely because of their diversity, and their efforts to build bridges to the lower orders and upper class, that the stability of the liberal-capitalist system was maintained.

Those giving evidence, individually or through their professional associations, included a broad cross-section of official, professional and bureaucratic Britain: police chiefs, policemen, magistrates, judges, lawyers and Home Office civil servants; prison governors, medical officers and probation officers;

The Wolfenden Report of 1957 has long been recognized as a landmark in moves towards gay law reform. What is less well known is that the testimonials and written statements of the witnesses before the Wolfenden Committee provide by far the most complete and extensive array of perspectives we have on how homosexuality was understood in mid-twentieth century Britain. Those giving evidence, individually or through their professional associations, included a broad cross-section of official, professional and bureaucratic Britain: police chiefs, policemen, magistrates, judges, lawyers and Home Office civil servants; doctors, biologists (including Alfred Kinsey), psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; prison governors, medical officers and probation officers; representatives of the churches, morality councils and progressive and ethical societies; approved school headteachers and youth organization leaders; representatives of the army, navy and air force; and a small handful of self-described but largely anonymous homosexuals. This volume presents an annotated selection of their voices.