One of the most persistent and frustrating problems which the social historian faces is that of gaining access to private lives in the past. This is true for all periods, but it is especially so for the Middle Ages. There are some letters available, but they tend to be scarce and limited in nature. Another type of document which proves a useful means of entry into medieval life is the testament. The information it contains is often of an intensely personal nature and allows the reader to understand the testator's relationships with others.

The wealth of information contained in testaments is only beginning to be fully exploited. In his article “Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Wills as Historical Sources,” Michael L. Zell has demonstrated the breadth of information which these documents contain and points the way to many areas of further investigation. The usefulness of testamentary evidence to trace inheritance patterns and the disposition of property is well established. Eleanor S. Riemer has used testaments from Siena to examine the economic position of women. W. K. Jordan used wills extensively in his three volume study of charity in urban and rural England. More recently, Joel T. Rosenthal employed them to study gift-giving patterns among the English aristocracy. Wills have been used as sources for the study of religious values and popular piety, as a means of investigating the patterns of epidemic disease, and of tracing the spread of literacy. Historians have also begun to use testamentary evidence in the investigation of family life. For the history of the English family, the use of testamentary evidence is just beginning.

The English Civil War and Interregnum produced an astounding number of political tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides that have long fascinated historians and bibliographers. The lack of any effective control over pamphlet content after the elimination of the Court of Star Chamber in the summer of 1641, coupled with the use of printed propaganda by both the king and Parliament, combined to create a body of free-speaking literature that is unmatched in scope and daring. Extensive microfilming and cataloguing projects have made the pamphlets widely accessible to study, but have failed to answer basic questions about the nature of the pamphlets themselves. Fbr example, how soon after an event could a pamphlet be available? How many pamphlets were actually being printed (and when) as opposed to what was being entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company of London? In other words, what could a concerned citizen find for sale at the bookstalls on a given morning?

It is probably impossible to answer these questions for more than a fraction of the pamphlets. Yet, by examining what records do remain, it is possible to gain at least a sense of what the pamphleteers were capable of in serving a public avid for news.

World War One and its aftermath restored the empire to a central place in the considerations of Whitehall. Not only did the war open new vistas for imperial ambitions and drive home the benefits to be drawn from the established dominions, notably in terms of manpower and materiel: it also brought into seats of power the likes of Lords Milner and Curzon, men whose careers had been devoted to the maintenance and expansion of Britain's imperial realm. Though their autocratic style ill-suited democratic politics, it did serve the needs of a modern state at war, where all sectors of society were subordinated to central command. It can be argued that these imperial bureaucrats had a more sophisticated appreciation for the power of the state than their domestic counterparts, who still labored under the lingering constraints of laissez-faire doctrine. They understood from colonial experience the state's potential for engineering social change. And they saw change as vital to Britain's future. Deeply imbued with a social Darwinist world-view, they regarded the war as evidence that national survival would require a more integrated, self-contained, harmonious imperial system, directed with greater deliberation and rigor from above. They were, in effect, social imperialists. Although this doctrine had taken shape in the Edwardian years, it was the war that eroded much of the resistance to its implementation. Yet how far could these gains be extended into the critical post-war period?

As Keith Williams has argued in his valuable dissertation, an important feature of social imperialist doctrine concerned migration: here the bonds between Britain and the empire were those of culture and blood.

The “deluge” of World War I not only produced change within British society, but it intensified governmental and societal interest in the empire. This trend occurred for several reasons. Britain's wartime co-operation with her dominions led many Britons to assume that this new imperial unity could, and should, be cultivated in the post-war period. The imperial pessimism generated in some circles by the tragedy of the Boer War faded from the public's memory. Equally important, however, by 1917 the government was conscious of the serious economic and social problems Britain would confront once victory had been attained. One of several imperial solutions studied extensively during the war was state supported emigration. The government, which since 1914 had played an increasingly prominent role in solving society's problems, believed that emigration would serve a variety of useful purposes. It would alleviate the distress of thousands of British women, it would accelerate the economic and social development of the dominions, and it would strengthen the British Empire, giving it the power and self-assurance necessary to carry out its diplomatic and military roles in the post-war world. During the course of these deliberations during and immediately after World War I, the importance of women to any comprehensive strengthening of the empire was fully accepted by the government for the first time in British history.

The growth of interest in government sponsored imperial migration, including that of women, did not occur, however, in a vacuum. The 1920s and 1930s were, as it is increasingly recognized, “a great age of British Imperialism,” during which the “mass pheonomena of Empire—the Empire Shopping Weeks, the Empire Exhibitions and Empire Day celebrations” became a prominent part of the British social scene.