Social History
Books to explore
Bricks of Victorian London
Author: Peter Hounsell
Format: Paperback
The companies that made the bricks employed many thousands of men, women and children and their working lives, homes and culture are looked at here, as well as the journey towards better working conditions and wages.
Lady Anne Bacon
Author: Deborah Spring
Format: Paperback
Deborah Spring's deeply researched and compellingly readable book reveals Anne Bacon's extraordinary part in shaping the public story of Tudor history.
Price: £18.99 (free postage)
Coming soon
Moseley 1850–1900
Author: Janet Berry
Format: Paperback
By the first decades of the twentieth century Moseley had become part of the metropolis of Birmingham. This engaging account of the process from village to fully integrated suburb will be of particular interest to urban historians.
Sevenoaks 1790–1914
Author: Iain Taylor , David Killingray
Format: Paperback
This book offers a fresh perspective on British history in the long nineteenth century through the lens of a study of Sevenoaks and the surrounding area of West Kent.
St Albans: A history
Author: Mark Freeman
Format: Paperback
Mark Freeman’s classic history of St Albans, first published in 2008, has been substantially rewritten by the author and brought fully up to date, making it an invaluable guide to more than two thousand years of St Albans’s history.
William Ellis
Author: Malcolm Thick
Format: Paperback
William Ellis, who lived and farmed at Little Gaddesden in Hertfordshire in the first half of the eighteenth century (d. 1759), is an important figure in English agricultural history.
A Caring County?
Editor: Steven King , Gillian Gear
Format: Paperback
This comparative study gathers together new research by local historians into aspects of welfare in Hertfordshire spanning four centuries.
Children of the Labouring Poor
Author: Eileen Wallace
Format: Paperback
This book focuses on the lives of working children in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire employed in agriculture, straw-plaiting, silk-throwing, paper and brickmaking and as chimney sweeps.
Communities in Contrast
Author: Sarah Holland
Format: Paperback
This book investigates what a case study of a northern market town and its rural hinterland can tell us about village differentiation, exploring how and why rural communities developed in what was chiefly an industrial region and, notably, how the relationship between town and country influenced rural communities.
Letchworth Settlement, 1920–2020
Author: Kate Thompson
Format: Paperback
A century of creative learning
New Directions in Local History Since Hoskins
Editor: Christopher Dyer , Andrew Hopper , Evelyn Lord , Nigel Tringham
Format: Ebook
Local history in Britain can trace its origins back to the sixteenth century and before, but it was given inspiration and a new sense of direction in the 1950s and 60s by the work of W.G. Hoskins.
Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547-1600
Author: Marjorie Keniston McIntosh
Format: Paperback
At the cutting edge of 'the new social and demographic history', this book provides a detailed picture of the most comprehensive system of poor relief operated by any Elizabethan town.
Prostitution in Victorian Colchester
Author: Jane Pearson , Maria Rayner
Format: Paperback
Bringing to bear considerations of class and gender, health and welfare, religion and moral reform, this is a wide-ranging and original study. As well as providing a vivid portrait of nineteenth-century Colchester, it will appeal to all those interested in the history of women's work, policing and society more widely.
Saving the People's Forest
Author: Mark Gorman
Format: Paperback
Open spaces, enclosure and popular protest in mid-Victorian London
Shaping the Past
Editor: Evelyn Lord , Nicholas R. Amor
Format: Paperback
The essays in this Festschrift are offered as a token of esteem and affection by colleagues, friends and students of David Dymond. They consist of new research on aspects of local history from the medieval period to the twentieth century, with a particular focus on Eastern England.
St Albans: Life on the Home Front, 1914-1918
Editor: Jonathan Mein , Anne Wares , Sue Mann
Format: Paperback
This study examines the reality of life on the Home Front in St Albans during the First World War.
The Birmingham Parish Workhouse, 1730–1840
Author: Chris Upton
Format: Paperback
This book is the first attempt to write a history of the workhouse and the ancillary welfare provision for Birmingham, frequently referred to as the ‘Old Poor Law’.
The County Community in Seventeenth-century England and Wales
Editor: Jacqueline Eales , Andrew Hopper
Format: Paperback
This volume honours the memory of Professor Alan Everitt who, in a series of publications during the 1960s and 1970s, advanced the fruitful notion of the ‘county community’ during the seventeenth century.
The Industrious Child Worker
Author: Mary Nejedly
Format: Paperback
Child Labour and Childhood in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1750–1900
The Peaceful Path
Author: Stephen V. Ward
Format: Paperback
Stephen Ward reassesses the legacy of Ebenezer Howard.