Browsing by Subject "Great Britain"
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Item An ordinary metropolis: the evolution of criminal justice in London, 1750-1830(Texas Tech University, 1998-12) Balch-Lindsay, Virginia SuzanneThis dissertation examines England's transition from a system of criminal law enforcement that relied on individual initiative to one that relied on state-centered institutions. Between 1750 and 1830, London experienced a confluence of events, and ideas, that promoted new goals forhumanity law enforcement. The prevention of crime, not only its punishment, became an achievable goal. Reform of the criminal was another. Efficiency, effectiveness, and, combined to push England's governors toward a more rational, more enforceable code of law.Item The Baghdad Railway(2013-05) Atwood, Valerie H.; Louis, William Roger, 1936-This paper explores the historical development of the Baghdad Railway in the context of international affairs during the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Viewed from the perspectives of businessmen and diplomats, the Railway was an expensive venture with considerable economic and strategic potential. This report provides an overview of the Railway project amid growing apprehension in Europe and Great Britain about German designs.Item Paying respects: death, commodity culture, and the middle class in victorian london(Texas Tech University, 2005-05) Owens, Tana L.; Wong, Aliza S.; Deslandes, Paul R.; Adams, Gretchen A.This thesis attempts to fulfill the need for a study of the relationship between middle-class consumerism and death culture in nineteenth-century London by analyzing manifestations of middle-class death culture – private cemeteries, mourning, funeral ephemera, and the providers of these. The structure of this thesis provides the reader with a history, as well as a detailed description, of the consumerist aspects of death. The second chapter examines the intellectual roots of the death culture and how new discourses passed through to the denizens of the nineteenth century. The third chapter explores the rising popularity and meanings of the new private cemeteries and the overwhelming sanitary issues of the middle Victorian period. The fourth chapter covers the business of selling death ephemera to the members of the middle class and the people who sold it. The final chapter looks at the decline of Victorian sentimentality and the increasing popularity of “modern” practices. All chapters emphasize the middle-class association and the deeper meanings.Item The Art of Cookery: A Culinary Search for Cultural and National Identity in Great Britain, 1750-1850(2014-04-23) Schmidt, ElizabethThis thesis discusses how published cookbooks reflect the complicated attitudes toward identity in Great Britain between 1750 and 1850. Focusing on cookbooks produced as commercial products, we are able to see how gender, national, and regional identity was expressed through the introductory pages of a cookbook as well as the recipes that were included. The gendered differences in professional training in Britain resulted in two very different categories of published cookbooks. Male-authored books were more appreciative of foreign cuisine, since these authors had technical training in France?s nouvelle cuisine. Since women most often gained their knowledge of cooking through experiences as housewives or housekeepers, the female-authored cookbooks more overtly expressed the development of a British national identity. This contributed to the overall trend of anti-French sentiment into the nineteenth century through cookbook introductions and the exclusion of French recipes, especially as Anglo-French tensions reached high points during this period. A paradox existed as the middling classes expressed loyalty to the nation while also conforming to the current fashion of French cuisine. Within the culinary world authors tried to satisfy the middle class by including French recipes in their cookbooks while also touting their loyalty to Britain and their preference for ?British? cuisine. However, even though nationalistic sentiment increased during periods of intense commercial and political competition with France, regional distinctions never disappeared from the British Isles. This project shows that although a unique ?British? identity was forming during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, British subjects retained regional distinctions such as Scottish, Irish and Welsh. Published cookbooks show both a decrease in French recipes and an increase in regionally distinctive recipes over the course of a century. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, French cuisine had been equated with expense and ostentation, gaining a very negative view in the eyes of cookbook authors. At the same time though, recipes reflected distinct regional influences, illustrating the importance of maintain cultural distinctions. Rather than a homogenization of British culture, or the conflation of ?English? and ?British,? the various cultures within Great Britain maintained their importance in the eyes of the people.Item The British invasion of Egypt and the political press, 1882(Texas Tech University, 1997-08) Buchanan, Donal ScottThe multi causal background of the Egyptian Question of the 1870s and 1880s has frustrated historians for over a century. Despite the creation of a voluminous bibliography on the topic, accounts differ markedly and reflect the confusion that obscured the events surrounding the 1882 British occupation, the climax to the accumulating pressures. Economic demands conditioned political responses. Political considerations impacted military policy. Military policy was dictated in part by diplomatic realities. All were rooted in the background of recent Egyptian history and the increasing involvement of Europe in areas outside its previous spheres of influence. Thus, it is not surprising that the Egyptian Question was often interpreted in various ways by the educated English who lived through this period as well as by the historians of today, who must still rely on many of these earlier insights. The objective of this paper is to return the study of the British invasion of of Egypt in 1882 to an important element of the original source material—the periodic press, which helped to condition the attitudes of the educated British public as well as reflect those attitudes. Specifically, this thesis will focus on such periodical publications as The Contemporary Review, The Fortnightly Review, and The Nineteenth Century and the views of the authors and editors reflected in their pages. Because of the voluminous coverage of this episode, the focus of this thesis must be restricted to certain key events and major issues.Item The Fourth Party and conservative evolution, 1880-1885(Texas Tech University, 2000-08) Owen, Keith RichmonThe Fourth Party developed after the defeat of the British Conservative Party in the General Election of 1880. Four men united to rally the Conservatives in Parliament and to present an active opposition to the Liberals. Soon their attention was turned to their own party and the newly enfranchised voters from the Reform Bill of 1867. This dissertation appears to be the first detailed study of the Fourth Party in almost one hundred years. The Fourth Party is viewed as part of the evolution of the Conservative Party into a modern political movement. The pressures of a more democratic political system forced changes in the type of leadership demanded by the new voters, in how political figures appealed to the electorate, and in how the parties would involve the voters in the electoral process. The Fourth Party initiated new ways to involve the Conservative rank and file in the service of the party and to attract new supporters. The Conservative leadership was forced to review the organization of the party and to find effective ways to deal with the members of the Fourth Party.Item The new politics of the National Health Service(Texas Tech University, 1972-05) Klein, Rudolf,Not Available.Item Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked : newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870(2010-05) Smith, Tamara Leanne; Canning, Charlotte, 1964-; Jones, Joni L.; Wolf, Stacy; Thompson, Shirley E.; Forgie, GeorgeIn the nineteenth century, theatre and newspapers were the dominant expressions of popular culture in the northeastern United States, and together formed a crucial discursive node in the ongoing negotiation of American national identity. Focusing on the five decades between 1820 and 1870, during which touring stars from Great Britain enjoyed their most lucrative years of popularity on United States stages, this dissertation examines three instances in which English performers entered into this nationalizing forum and became flashpoints for journalists seeking to define the nature and bounds of American citizenship and culture. In 1821, Edmund Kean’s refusal to perform in Boston caused a scandal that revealed a widespread fixation among social elites with delineating the ethnic and economic limits of citizenship in a republican nation. In 1849, an ongoing rivalry between the English tragedian William Charles Macready and his American competitor Edwin Forrest culminated in the deadly Astor Place riot. By configuring the actors as champions in a struggle between bourgeois authority and working-class populism, the New York press inserted these local events into international patterns of economic conflict and revolutionary violence. Nearly twenty years later, the arrival of the Lydia Thompson Burlesque Troupe in 1868 drew rhetoric that reflected the popular press’ growing preoccupation with gender, particularly the question of woman suffrage and the preservation of the United States’ international reputation as a powerfully masculine nation in the wake of the Civil War. Three distinct cultural currents pervade each of these case studies: the new nation’s anxieties about its former colonizer’s cultural influence, competing political and cultural ideologies within the United States, and the changing perspectives and agendas of the ascendant popular press. Exploring the points where these forces intersect, this dissertation aims to contribute to an understanding of how popular culture helped shape an emerging sense of American national identity. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that in the mid-nineteenth century northeastern United States, popular theatre, newspapers, and audiences all contributed to a single media formation in which controversial English performers became a rhetorical antipode against which “American” identity could be defined.Item Transnational convergence or national idiosyncrasies of Web-based political communication : a comparative analysis of network structures of political blogspheres in Germany, Great Britain, adn teh United States(2009-12) Hyun, Ki Deuk; Reese, Stephen D.New media technology has brought heated debate about its power to transform existing structures and relations in national and international communications. It is expected to either democratize or reproduce current political communication processes. At the same time, new media technology raises concerns that it may promote a global convergence of communication cultures to the American model. Political blogging, online personal publishing of observations and comments about news and politics with frequent links to other Web sources, provides a useful ground to test these competing theses since political blogging emerged as a citizen-based, alternative media in the U.S. and has subsequently been diffused internationally. This dissertation compares political blogs in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany to investigate how national political systems and communication cultures shape the structures and practices of political blogging across the three countries. Based on the media’s relative power in the public sphere and communication processes, political communication culture is distinguished as a mediatized culture in the U.S., a politicized culture in Germany, and a culture-in-between in the U.K. Different systems and cultures are predicted not only to foster political blogging to varying degrees but also to shape different fabrics of relations among political bloggers and other participants in political communication in each country. Using the rankings of political blogs in the three countries, the 106 top political blogospheres and linking patterns of individual political blogs to various websites in the countries. Findings from this dissertation reveal both cross-national commonalities rooted in general human tendencies and national particularities emerging from different structural factors internal to the three countries. Across the three countries, bloggers make more communicative ties to politically like-minded blogs and websites than to those with opposing perspectives. Blogging networks of the three countries represent very unequal spaces, with a few blogs having a disproportional number of incoming links. Also, blogs are highly insulated geographically with bloggers making links mostly to other bloggers and sites within their own countries. There are also notable cross-national differences in network structures and linking patterns. The U.S. blogging network has more dense interconnections among its members compared with British and German networks. Also, America’s mediatized culture increases the probability that political blogs choose to link more to news media sites compared to British and German bloggers. On the other hand, British and German blogs in politicized cultures make links to government websites more frequently than do American blogs. Additionally, the U.S. political blogosphere shows greater segregation between blogs of competing political perspectives, compared with U.K. and German blogospheres. Findings are discussed in light of two key questions about the nature of political blogging (1) as a new technology-enabled medium facilitating cross-national convergence in communication practice, and (2) as a revolutionary venue revitalizing the public sphere and democracy.