Sasha Handley - Böcker

A riveting look at how the early modern world revolutionized sleep and its relation to body, mind, soul, and societyDrawing on diverse archival sources and material artifacts, Handley reveals that the way we sleep is as dependent on culture as it is on biological and environmental factors. After 1660 the accepted notion that sleepers lay at the mercy of natural forces and supernatural agents was challenged by new medical thinking about sleep’s relationship to the nervous system. This breakthrough coincided with radical changes shaping everything from sleeping hours to bedchambers. Handley’s illuminating work documents a major evolution in our conscious understanding of the unconscious.

A study of the production, circulation and consumption of English ghost stories during the Age of Reason. This work examines a variety of mediums: ballads and chapbooks, newspapers, sermons, medical treatises and scientific journals, novels and plays. It relates the telling of ghost stories to changes associated with the Enlightenment.

This book studies the historiography of smoking in modern Britain, with a focus on the social, cultural, and emotional aspects of the practice.Centring on four specific moments in modern British history; the turn of the 20th century, the Second World War, the 1980s, and the mid-2000s, An Atmospheric History of Smoking not only traces the history of tobacco use, but explores the cultural significance of - and attitudes toward – smoking. Markovic combines oral histories with archival research and artefact analysis, in order to evoke the unique social atmospheres surrounding smoking at each of these key periods within British history.By analysing factors such as the encouragement of the practice as part of Home Front ‘mood management’ during the Second World War, or the impact of smoking on 1980s workplace relations, this book highlights how the role of smoking in public spheres has undergone significant change throughout the 20th century. Constructing the 2007 UK ban on smoking in public places as a turning point for the practice in the British cultural imagination, Markovic examines how smoking has both been deemed ‘out of place’, and yet still persists today.

Despite extensive scholarship on the social and cultural history of industrial England there is little work that explores how new forms of capitalist production were understood and normalised. Capital and Labour in Victorian England explores how accounts of industrial society evolved in the 19th century and how they inspired reform movements designed to accommodate the conflicts and contradictions that were a feature of industrial capitalism. It traces the rise of capitalist utopianism in the mid-century, and how such visions fell apart in the face of industrial unrest, organised labour, and more aggressive forms of capitalism. By the end of the century capital and labour were seen as inevitably separate, distinct and opposed - a development that sharpened class politics and shaped the way the first accounts of industrialisation were written.

What does it mean to be a social and cultural historian today? In the wake of the ‘cultural turn’, and in an age of digital and public history, what challenges and opportunities await historians in the early 21st century? In this exciting new text, leading historians reflect on key developments in their fields and argue for a range of ‘new directions’ in social and cultural history. Focusing on emerging areas of historical research such as the history of the emotions and environmental history, New Directions in Social and Cultural History is an invaluable guide to the current and future state of the field.The book is divided into three clear sections, each with an editorial introduction, and covering key thematic areas: histories of the human, the material world, and challenges and provocations. Each chapter in the collection provides an introduction to the key and recent developments in its specialist field, with their authors then moving on to argue for what they see as particularly important shifts and interventions in the theory and methodology and suggest future developments. New Directions in Social and Cultural History provides a comprehensive and insightful overview of this burgeoning field which will be important reading for all students and scholars of social and cultural history and historiography.

What does it mean to be a social and cultural historian today? In the wake of the ‘cultural turn’, and in an age of digital and public history, what challenges and opportunities await historians in the early 21st century? In this exciting new text, leading historians reflect on key developments in their fields and argue for a range of ‘new directions’ in social and cultural history. Focusing on emerging areas of historical research such as the history of the emotions and environmental history, New Directions in Social and Cultural History is an invaluable guide to the current and future state of the field.The book is divided into three clear sections, each with an editorial introduction, and covering key thematic areas: histories of the human, the material world, and challenges and provocations. Each chapter in the collection provides an introduction to the key and recent developments in its specialist field, with their authors then moving on to argue for what they see as particularly important shifts and interventions in the theory and methodology and suggest future developments. New Directions in Social and Cultural History provides a comprehensive and insightful overview of this burgeoning field which will be important reading for all students and scholars of social and cultural history and historiography.