This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between the National Birth Control Association, later the Family Planning Association, and contraceptive science and technology in the pre-Pill era. It explores the Association's role in designing and supporting scientific research, employment of scientists, engagement with manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, and use of its facilities, patients, staff, medical, scientific, and political networks to standardise and guarantee contraceptive technology it prescribed and produced. By taking a micro-history approach to the archives of the Association, this book highlights the importance of this organisation to the history of science, technology, and medicine in twentieth-century Britain. It examines the Association's participation within Western family planning networks, working particularly closely with its American counterparts to develop chemical and biological means of testing contraception for efficacy, quality, and safety.

Systemic and political hostility against the 'left', real and contrived, has been a key, yet under-recognized aspect of the history of the modern world for the past two hundred years. By the 1820s, the new, exploitative and destabilizing character of capitalist industrial production and its accompanying market liberalizations began creating necessities among the working classes and their allies for the new, self-protective politics of 'socialism'. But it is evident that, for the new economic system to sustain itself, such oppositional politics that it necessitated had to be undermined, if not destroyed, by whatever means necessary. Through the imperialism of the later 19th century, and with significant variations, this complex and often highly destructive dialectical syndrome expanded worldwide. Liberals, conservatives, extreme nationalists, fascists, racists, and others have all repeatedly come aggressively and violently into play against 'socialist' oppositions. In this book, Philip Minehan traces the patterns of such hostility and presents numerous crucial examples of it: from Britain, France, Germany and the United States; the British in India; European fascism, the United States and Britain as they operated in China and Indochina; from Kenya, Algeria and Iran; and from Central and South America during the Cold War. In the final chapters, Minehan addresses the post-Cold War, US-led triumphalist wars in the Middle East, the ensuing refugee crises, neo-fascism, and anti-environmentalist politics, to show the ways that the syndrome within which anti-leftist antagonism emerges, in its neoliberal phase since the 1970s, remains as self-destructive and dangerous as ever

This book sheds new light on the central role of the Grimms' all too often neglected Deutsche Sagen (German Legends), published in 1816-1818 as a follow up to their famous collection of fairy tales. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, Deutsche Sagen, with its firmly nationalistic title, set in motion a cultural tsunami of folklore collection throughout Northern Europe from Ireland and Estonia, which focused initially on the collection of folk legends rather than fairy tales. Grimm Ripples focuses on the initial northward wave of collection between 1816 and 1870, and the letters, introductions and reviews associated with these collections which effectively demonstrate how those involved understood what was being collected. This approach offers important new insights into the key role played by Folkloristics in the Romantic Nationalistic movement of the early nineteenth century. Contributors are: Terry Gunnell, Joep Leerssen, Holger Ehrhardt, Timothy R. Tangherlini, Herleik Baklid, Ane Ohrvik, Line Esborg, Fredrik Skott, John Lindow, Eilis Ni Dhiubhne Almqvist, John Shaw, Jonathan Roper, Kim Simonsen, Rosa THorsteinsdottir, Liina Lukas, Pertti Anttonen, Ulrika Wolf-Knuts, and Susanne OEsterlund-Poetzsch.