Through a series of sharply focused studies spanning three centuries, David Rollison explores the rise of capitalist manufacturing in the English countryside and the revolution in consciousness that accompanied it. Combining the empiricism of English historiography with the rationalism of Annales, and drawing on ideas from a wide range of disciplines, he argues that the explosive implications of the rise of rural industry created new social formations and altered the communal, cultural and social contexts of peoples lives. Using localized case studies of families and individuals the book starts with significant detail and moves out to build up a subtle and innovative view of English cultural identities in the early modern period.

In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.

Through a series of sharply focused studies spanning three centuries, David Rollison explores the rise of capitalist manufacturing in the English countryside and the revolution in consciousness that accompanied it. Combining the empiricism of English historiography with the rationalism of Annales, and drawing on ideas from a wide range of disciplines, he argues that the explosive implications of the rise of rural industry created new social formations and altered the communal, cultural and social contexts of peoples lives. Using localized case studies of families and individuals the book starts with significant detail and moves out to build up a subtle and innovative view of English cultural identities in the early modern period.

Makes original contributions to late medieval and early modern historiography, including detailed, contextualized studies of the 'Lancastrian revolution', the Reformation and the English Revolution. Commune, Country and Commonwealth suggests that towns like Cirencester are a missing link connecting local and national history, in the immensely formative centuries from Magna Carta to the English Revolution. Focused on atown that made highly significant interventions in national constitutional development, it describes recurring struggles to achieve communal solidarity and independence in a society continuously and prescriptively divided by grossinequalities of class and status. The result is a social and political history of a great trans-generational epic in which local and national influences constantly interacted. From the generation of Magna Carta to the regicides of Edward II and Richard II, through the vernacular revolution of the 'long fifteenth century' and the chaos of state reformations to the great revival that ended in the constitutional wars of the 1640s, the epic was united by strategic location and by systemic, 'structural' inequalities that were sometimes mitigated but never resolved. Individual and group personalities emerge from every chapter, but the 'personality' that dominates them all, Rollison argues, is a commune with 'a mind of its own', continuously regenerated by enduring, strategic realities. An afterword describes the birth and development of a new, 'rural' myth and identity and suggests some archival pathways for the exploration of a legendary English town in the modern and postmodern, industrial and post-industrial epochs. DAVID ROLLISON is Honorary Research Associate in History, University of Sydney. DAVE ROLLISON isHonorary Research Associate in History, University of Sydney.

In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.

My Grandfather told me this story before he made his final journey. He said the prophet Half Deer was born to a village near the village of his Grandfather's, Grandfather's Grandfather's village. The exact time is hard to determine, but he said he thought the white buffalo would be born between the years 1990 and 2000 and the new leader would follow fifty years later. My Grandchildren will see the completion of the prophecy

A selection of recent poems by San Francisco Bay Area poet David Rollison.

A devastatingly intense thriller written by first time author, David J Rollison, his charmingly deadly hero Mike Kelly Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism operative foils al Qaeda attempts to assassinate the President of the United States and G8 World Leaders. The actions begins with a Saudi assassin in the Bahamas seeking to smuggle deadly Sarin gas to be used at the G8 Summit on St. Simons Island, Georgia. The elite unit of joint counterterrorism operatives of the DHS, FBI and CIA team up to stop the assassin and the al Qaeda mastermind, Sheik Abdullah bin Wadi. After years without a terrorist attack on American soil, the mastermind behind al Qaeda has picked the G8 Summit held on an island off the Georgia coast to pull off he perfect attack. Mike Kelly and his team of warriors find themselves frustrated by the ingenuity of al Qaeda to select another location for the attack, an Atlanta suburban shopping center and a Presidential trip to Turner Field with the G8 World Leaders to watch the Atlanta Braves and The Arizona Diamond Backs in a MLB championship play off game. Meanwhile, the al Qaeda mastermind and his brother terrorist are still at large, and Kelly has been ordered by the president to find and bring them to justice. Following them to the UK, with help from the British MI6 they will do whatever is necessary to arrest or kill them. Mike Kelly continues on in this adrenaline charged thriller to the remote mountains of Waziristan between Pakistan and Afghanistan where Sheik Abdullah holds up in a hideaway fortress. An outraged president wants him to pay for his crimes against America. But the president isn't the only one wanting the Sheik, the Saudi King wants his head on a platter for scheming to kill the Royal Family and making himself the new Caliph of the Muslim world. Mike Kelly will do whatever it takes to bring the last al Qaeda mastermind to justice and to meet in hell with Osama ben Laden