The historiography on civil–military relations in the early years of the Weimar Republic has concentrated on issues such as the soldiers' councils, the threat of a radical left-wing uprising and the difficulties of demobilization. This article broadens the perspective on co-operation between the officer corps and the government, arguing that the collapse of the Kaiserreich provided an opportunity to remake the state. For very different reasons, liberal and socialist politicians and officers shared a community of interests in centralizing the Reich. Officers believed that a more centralized state was more effective in military and foreign policy terms. Whereas other incidents of co-operation were due to urgent necessity, the establishment of the Reichswehr Ministry showed that the new state could potentially serve the longer term agenda of the officer corps. However the plans for a centralized Reichswehr Ministry were opposed by those who held power in the federal states, particularly in southern Germany. With support from the National Assembly and the cabinet, opposition from the states was overcome. This episode in Weimar history shows that the view of antagonistic civil–military relations must be modified to take account of the ways in which the officer corps sought to exploit the possibilities opened up by the German revolution of 1918.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, local government was intrinsic to the nature of liberalism in theory and practice, beyond the specific national contexts of England or Germany. At an ideological and practical level, local government was integral to the liberals' concern for efficient and representative government. As long as liberals were unwilling to contemplate more redistributive state measures, local government became their central arena for social policy. Local involvement in primary education provided them with the ability to enable individual progress and self-fulfilment, while control of local income and taxation provided a further tangible yardstick against which liberal politics could be measured. The liberals' popularity in the urban sphere was enhanced through a distinctive rhetoric of civic pride. However, the appeal to community and belonging which this entailed remained illusory as long as liberals remained wedded to granting special political rights to property. Ultimately, the liberals' success and innovativeness in local government led to a ‘nationalization’ of their policies and concerns. In this way, local government contributed to the liberals' popularity from the 1870s, and underlined their ultimate failure.

This review traces historians' use of the concept of popular culture, since its entry into the discipline in the 1970s. ‘Popular culture’ was initially loosely understood as the values, pleasures, and pastimes of the poor, and research in the field was heavily influenced by both Marxism and cultural anthropology. By the 1990s, earlier conceptions of popular culture appeared crudely reductionist, and heterogeneity, diversity, and ‘appropriation’ were firmly established as key terms and concerns for the historian of popular culture. But in the search for social and cultural complexity, the role of politics and the simple force of power and social inequality have been neglected. I argue here that wealth and power have long been key determinants shaping the character of popular cultural practice, and that their operation needs to be incorporated into our analyses. In this way, the study of popular culture offers the promise of research that is both of intrinsic interest and of broader historical significance.

This article examines policy towards juvenile delinquency in colonial Kenya in the interwar period, arguing that juvenile offenders were the subject of scant official interest until the 1930s, when a series of official reports was commissioned and legislation enacted which attempted to modernize the management of juvenile offenders in keeping with current metropolitan policy. This impulse for reform is placed in the context of colonial discourses on eugenics and the effects of urbanization and detribalization on young Africans, arguing that while key metropolitan principles about delinquency retained their influence on transferral to the colony, they were blended with a distinctive colonial rhetoric about African psychology and capacity for development.

This review will survey some of the most important historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British masculinity which have appeared in the last decade. It endorses John Tosh's insistence that it is necessary to move beyond the homosocial environments and explicit ideologies of ‘manliness’ studied by those historians who, in the 1980s, first sought a gendered history of men in modern Britain. However, it also warns that a commendable desire to ensure that men's identities are located in relationship to women, children, and the home must be accompanied by a degree of scepticism towards unproblematic narratives of male domestication. Men constantly travelled back and forth across the frontier of domesticity, if only in the realm of imagination, attracted by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, but also enchanted by various escapist fantasies (especially the adventure story or war film) which celebrated militaristic hypermasculinity and male bonding. This commentary also insists that, in order to enrich our understanding of male domesticity, existing studies of middle-class men will have to be supplemented by further research on aristocratic and working-class masculinities, and that national, ethnic, and racial differences also need to be more fully registered.

The failure of the socialization of heavy industry in West Germany following the Second World War has often been ascribed to American reluctance to allow meaningful social reform in the face of an intensifying Cold War. But a closer look at the socialization issue during the latter half of the 1940s demonstrates the enormous complexity of transforming Germany's heavy industry. First, the British, who originally advocated socialization, i.e. the public ownership of heavy industry, had done so on security grounds. But when trying to reach out to ‘democratic’ Germans, such as social democrats and left wing members of the Christian democratic union, the British realized the difficulty of cultivating a meaningful consensus within western Germany concerning the fate of heavy industry. In the end, they therefore acceded to American arguments that socialization of such important industries should wait until the creation of a central German government. But once a central German government existed from 1949, socialization did not take place. The chief reason for this was that West German social democrats had already concluded in 1947 that American ‘domination’ of western Germany meant the stifling of social reform. They therefore ceded leadership over German affairs to a Christian democratic union decidedly more favourable to free enterprise. Instead, the social democrats and their trade union allies concentrated their efforts at social reform in the introduction and institutionalization of management–labour co-determination.

In 1957, against a background of political turmoil and international tension the Conservative government passed the Rent Act, a highly contentious piece of legislation designed to resolve the problem of housing shortages by removing the statutory restrictions on the rents of privately let accommodation which had been operative since the Great War. The government argued that by abolishing rent controls landlords would be encouraged to maintain, improve, and invest in private rented property and thereby increase its availability. The failure to achieve these objectives prompts an assessment of the Rent Act through an analysis of its origins. It is suggested that, although the government's rents policy was framed within a broad economic imperative, between 1955 and 1957 it became refracted through a number of political, administrative, and social constraints, ensuring that its central aim of creating a free market in rents could never be achieved. As such the Rent Act reaffirmed the strength of consensus politics as a major influence on the Conservative party's housing strategy.

This is the first account of the prison in the Weimar Republic (1918–33), set in the context of the evolution of German social policy. In the early years, the Weimar prison was characterized by hunger, overcrowding, and conflict. At this time, leading officials agreed on a new approach to imprisonment, influenced by the demand for the ‘incapacitation of incorrigibles, reformation of reformables’. This principle was championed by the modern school of criminal law, designed to replace traditional policy based on deterrence and uniform retribution. The policy of reform and repression shaped the Weimar prison. Most prison officials supported the indefinite confinement of ‘incorrigibles’. While this did not become law, many prisoners classified as ‘incorrigible’ (increasingly after ‘objective’ examinations) received worse treatment than others, both in prison and after their release. Regarding the ‘reformables’, some institutions introduced measures aimed at prisoner rehabilitation. But such policies were not fully implemented in other prisons, not least because of resistance by local prison officials. During the collapse of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, measures aimed at rehabilitation, only just introduced, were cut back again. By contrast, the repression of ‘incorrigibles’ was pursued with even more vigour than before, an important legacy for Nazi penal policy.

Politeness has assumed an important place in recent interpretations of eighteenth-century Britain by historians and historically minded scholars in other fields. The use of politeness as an analytic category has relied on varying assessments of the eighteenth-century semantic associations of the term, which included attentiveness to form, sociability, improvement, worldliness, and gentility. Scholars have used politeness in one or more of these senses to characterize distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century British culture: the comportment of the body in isolation and in social interaction; the material equipment of everyday life; the changing configurations and uses of domestic and public spaces; skills and aptitudes that both constituted personal accomplishment and shaped larger cultural enterprises such as religion, learning, the arts, and science; and important aspects of associational and institutional life. Thus, eighteenth-century Britain was polite in that a wide range of quite different activities have been identified as bearing the stamp of the eighteenth-century meanings of ‘politeness’. Furthermore, what made eighteenth-century Britain a polite society was not its horizontal division between polite and non-polite persons but rather the wide access of a range of persons to activities and competencies that contemporaries considered ‘polite’.

Recent scholarship on the Restoration period in Italy (1815–60) has put the accent on regional diversity and on particular developments within the different pre-unification states. In particular, recent studies on the Kingdom of Sardinia have added much to our view of the Piedmontese nobility's peculiar character and ability to maintain its identity through time. Equally, detailed studies of the economy of nineteenth-century Tuscany have emphasized the importance of banking and silk manufacturing, whilst studies of governmental policies in the Papal State have shed new light over a particular administrative monarchy's attempt at pursuing a policy of reconciliation between modernization and conservatism. Whilst these studies have shown the significance of regional developments during the Restoration, other studies have argued that the process of ‘inventing’ the Italian nation-state has led to a conscious obliteration of regional administrative and juridical traditions and have shown the way to the construction of an up-to-date regional synthesis of a historical period which is much more than a simple prelude to the unification of the country.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) became the focus of a recurrent and sometimes heated debate within the British Labour party before 1973. The official stance of the party followed an all-party consensus within parliament about the non-recognition of the second German state. Yet many on the left wing of the Labour party came, for various reasons, to perceive such an inflexible stance as governed not by reason but dictated by the West German government. Such ambivalence towards West Germany and the Adenauer government in particular led to ambiguities within the party's policy as a considerable minority, including some key figures within the party, offered alternative strategies for maintaining or improving relations with the GDR. The most radical alternative, official recognition of the GDR as a legal, political entity, was only propounded by a core of hard left campaigners both within and outside the party. This article examines why sections of the Labour left came to sympathize with the GDR and how successful it was in influencing official party policy during the whole period of non-recognition of the GDR between 1949 and 1973.

The idea that the autocracy might have successfully modernized itself has, in recent years, spread widely beyond academic circles. However, a look at traditional and recent historiography shows that very few historians support this line. Even those who argue that Russia itself was developing rapidly have seen little prospect of the autocracy surviving the process. Equally, those who argue that radical socialist revolution might have been avoided tend to suggest, often by implication rather than in an explicit fashion, that a democratic, capitalist, bourgeois, and constitutional revolution was the alternative path. Thus it was not so much a question of tsarism or revolution but rather what kind of revolution was Russia facing?

Based on sources from the East German regime's internal archives, this article examines how the exodus of over 3 million people from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before the construction of the Berlin Wall undermined the communist regime's ability to exert its authority over internal affairs. Instead of focusing on the relatively well-known economic and diplomatic costs of the mass exodus, it considers rather the grass-roots political ramifications of this unique phenomenon among the Soviet satellite states. The article focuses on three interrelated issues: first, the government's little-known efforts to curb and control emigration before the Wall; second, the myriad causes of the mass emigration and how these were perceived by the party/state apparatus; and third, the variety of strategies through which ordinary East Germans who stayed in the GDR attempted to use the possibility of flight to the West to enhance their bargaining position with state authorities. It argues that the refugees to the West were not the only East Germans to capitalize on the permeable border around West Berlin. The possibility of emigrating westwards also gave those who stayed a degree of power vis-à-vis the regime that they otherwise would not have had.

The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of the history of the body and sexuality. Seeking to historicize sex differences, historians have widely incorporated the study of the body and sexuality into the history of women and gender. This review considers the place of the body and sexuality in women's and gender history. Recent work posits the long eighteenth century as the century of change in the ways in which bodies were understood, sexuality constructed, and sexual activity carried out. Yet in turn, the incorporation of such new topics also reinvigorates older narratives of economic and political transformation. This historiographical review assesses this recent work, arguing that key facets of the historiography need to be reconsidered. Explanatory models of historical change need to incorporate issues such as life-cycle changes and historical persistence. Approaches to cultural exchange have to develop which can accommodate cultural diversity, and the complexities of cultural transmission. Finally, analyses of the material contexts of the body and sexuality – both corporeal and textual – need to be undertaken.

This review examines some of the recent British, American, and Russian scholarship on a series of important international transitions that occurred in the years around 1945. One is the shift of global leadership from Great Britain to the United States, in which, it is argued, the decisive moment was the fall of France in 1940. Another transition is the emergence of a wartime alliance between Britain and America, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, followed by its disintegration into the Cold War. Here the opening of Soviet sources during the 1990s has provided new evidence, though not clear answers. To understand both of these transitions, however, it is necessary to move beyond diplomacy and strategy to look at the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the Second World War. In particular, recent studies of American and Soviet soldiers during and after the conflict re-open the debate about Cold War ideology from the bottom up.

This review looks at English- and French-language books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French colonial history published since 1995. It considers issues of ideology, imperial governance, the mise en valeur (development and ‘improvement’) of colonies (for instance, in health and education policy), the representation of empire in art and architecture, and decolonization. Special attention is paid to Indochina. Recent works have stressed the evolving nature of colonial policy and its adaptability to local circumstances. The review notes a certain divide between works emphasizing the discursive aspect of empire, and more ‘materialist’ treatments, but remarks on a general renewal of interest in colonial history. Contemporary scholars have also given colonial history a more prominent position in French national history than it previously held.

The loyal opposition: Tudor traditionalist polemics, 1535–1558. By Ellen A. Macek. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Pp. xvi+299. ISBN 0-8204-3059-5. £36.00.

Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. By Lucy E. M. Wooding. Oxford: University Press, 2000. Pp. x+305. ISBN 0-19-820865-0. £40.00.

Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610. By Michael L. Carrafiello. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Pp. 186. ISBN 1-57591-012-8. £27.00.

The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541–1588: ‘our way of proceeding’. By Thomas M. McCoog SJ. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. Pp. xxii+316. ISBN 90-04-10482-8. £67.90.

Newsletters from the archpresbyterate of George Birkhead. Edited by Michael C. Questier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for the Royal Historical Society, Camden 5th ser., 12, 1998. Pp. xiv+307. ISBN 0-521-65260-X. £40.00.

Conversion, politics and religion in England, 1580–1625. By Michael C. Questier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+240. ISBN 0-521-44214-1. £35.00.

Catholicism, controversy and the English literary imagination, 1558–1660. By Alison Shell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xii+309. ISBN 0-521-58090-0. £37.50.

Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, gender and seventeenth-century print culture. By Frances E. Dolan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+231. ISBN 0-8014-3629-X. £26.95.

Catholicism in the English Protestant imagination: nationalism, religion, and literature, 1660–1745. By Raymond D. Tumbleson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. x+254. ISBN 0-521-62265-4. £35.00.