The traditional idea of a landowner is inextricably bound up with concepts of maleness. The most frequently used word for a landowner is simply ‘landlord’, with the corresponding feminine form ‘landlady’ carrying quite different connotations. The law with regard to inheritance and marriage lends weight to this interpretation, since common law, until the mid-nineteenth century, decreed that married women could not own property or make contracts as individuals, in theory leaving only spinsters and widows as potential landowners. Yet scrutiny of manorial, enclosure, tithe and land tax documentation reveals that women commonly held land either as owners or occupiers.

England has one of the longest histories of industrialisation and urbanisation of any West European country. This has inevitably had a formative influence in the structuring of its social science research. For political scientists it has involved an almost overwhelming concern with urban political systems and industrial cleavages. An analysis of class based voting has been a major focal point with its implicit assumption that any other cleavages based, for example, on religious or regional identities are marginal or atavistic. Certainly there has been little acknowledgement of any significant urban–rural divide. In consequence the study of rural politics has been something of an intellectual backwater and there has been no attempt to define or identify rural politics as an object of study. The blinkered vision of political scientists is disappointing. It unduly ignores a number of studies that have engaged with mainstream debates and frequently made worthwhile contributions, most notably, with reference to the case of agriculture, in the understanding of relations between government and industry (Cox et al, 1986; Grant, 1983). There are also signs that some political scientists are beginning to reject models of national (i.e. urban) voting behaviour and political systems in favour of more spatially sensitive work in which greater prominence is given to regional and local differences (Dunleavy, 1990; Johnston, 1985, 1987; Johnston et al, 1988).

There is a common belief that Israeli women have achieved gender equality over and above that attained in America and European countries. Evidence cited to support this is the fact that women routinely serve in the Israeli army and the country elected a woman, Golda Meir, as prime minister. Equality between men and women is claimed to date back to the days at the beginning of the century when both sexes worked shoulder to shoulder in road construction and land reclamation (Bernstein, 1992: 2). The years 1904–14 and 1919–23, known in Zionist history as the Second and Third Aliyah (waves of immigration), were indeed formative times during which the dominant values of the society were shaped and the infrastructure of future organizations was laid (Eisenstadt, 1967; Izraeli, 1981). The immigrants who arrived during this period, known as halutzim (male pioneers) and halutzot (female pioneers) were idealistic nationalists from Eastern Europe. They were young and single, and came with the express purpose of rebuilding Zion and creating a new type of egalitarian and labor-oriented society.

One characteristic of an affluent society is that wealthy individuals often seek a place in the country to spend weekends and summer vacations. In the United States second homes in rural areas first became popular in the Gilded Age when elites in the northeast tried to ape English patterns of leisured country living. Americans, however, had to contend with hot and humid summers. As a result, access to water became a vital ingredient in any choice of a country retreat. An alternative motivation for migration to the countryside in the late nineteenth century came when elites desired to take part in field sports, especially foxhunting. In New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and of course, Virginia, where reasonably mild winters permitted activities to continue with some frequency throughout the winter, foxhunting became part of the yearly ritual of small numbers of urban based elites. Horse ownership went hand in hand with livestock raising. By the twenties cattle breeding had become another hobby pursuit of the gentry in northeastern states; herds of Angus or other breeds grazed in paddocks on either side of a long driveway which led up to a large country home.

In October 1994, the Environment Secretary and Agriculture Minister announced their intention to publish, for the first time, a joint White Paper, setting out Government policy for the economic, social and environmental well-being of the English countryside. It stimulated a further flurry of interest in how such policy agenda are drawn up and implemented. Although ostensibly, ministers sought fresh policies under the banner of sustainable development, some commentators discerned an even greater concern as to the growing sense of deprivation felt by the 12 million voters who lived in the countryside. Although there had been much rural debate and research in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Cloke and Little have contended it laboured under two deficiencies. Not only was there minimal Government interest, but it did little more than highlight the inadequacies of a simple positivist approach. This time round, much greater use might be made of a political-economy perspective, that took fuller cognisance of the connections that prevailed between economic change, restructuring of society, and the role of the state.

The publication of The Art and Mystery of Historical Archaeology, a festschrift in honour of James Deetz, makes a useful starting point for assessing the remarkable development of American historical archaeology over the last four decades. The discipline of ‘historical archaeology’ is the New World equivalent of British post-medieval archaeology. It is the study of the material culture of colonial and industrial America. Unlike its highly marginalised British counterpart, the discipline has seen an enormous growth in America over the last two decades, reflected in the creation of numerous posts both in universities and public-sector archaeology. This article seeks firstly to discuss some of the main contributions to the festchrift and areas of promise for future research. Secondly it will assess the relevance of some recent contributions on the history of consumption to Deetz's concept of the ‘Georgian world view’ and the notion of radical change in eighteenth-century material culture.

A cursory examination of publishers’ catalogues reveals a number of titles like Environmental History, Green History and An Environmental History of Britain which suggest an upsurge of interest in what has come to be called ‘environmental history’. This weight of scholarship suggests that demands for the ‘greening of history’, or for more studies of the impact of human actions on the countryside, which have been made throughout the present decade, have been answered. It is worth noting the shift of title from ‘Green’ to ‘Environmental’. ‘Green’ is increasingly attached to the political movements and social groups concerned with environmental issues and even, in the case of the German Greens, to political parties whose concerns include ecology as only one of a number of interests. ‘Environmental’ has a much broader range, but, as the titles below demonstrate, this is by no means an absolute distinction. Closer consideration of many of these works reveals that although ‘History’ appears in many titles, the books are actually written by archaeologists, by sociologists, by political theorists, by Green activists and, most frequently, by geographers - all with ‘historical’ appended to their discipline. The Social Construction of the Past is a collection of essays from the Second World Archaeological Conference; Environmentalism proves to be ‘the view from Anthropology’ but contains at least one essay which appears to be a model of what environmental history could be. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, rather confusingly, has chapters on historical transformations and a discussion of the ‘history’ in historical ecology. This is perhaps not surprising. History has always prided itself on interdisciplinarity and on its universal appeal. The usual justifications for undergraduate history begin from the premise that a knowledge of one's own history is necessary for any understanding of society, and that history has so many variations that there is bound to be some congenial corner for anyone interested in the past. What is still lacking, however, is British environmental history, written by historians.