Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Broadening the conversation begun in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (2009), this book examines how the spatial dynamics of public making changed the shape of early modern society. The publics visited in this volume are voluntary groupings of diverse individuals that could coalesce through the performative uptake of shared cultural forms and practices. The contributors argue that such forms of association were social productions of space as well as collective identities. Chapters explore a range of cultural activities such as theatre performances; travel and migration; practices of persuasion; the embodied experiences of lived space; and the central importance of media and material things in the creation of publics and the production of spaces. They assess a multiplicity of publics that produced and occupied a multiplicity of social spaces where collective identity and voice could be created, discovered, asserted, and exercised. Cultural producers and consumers thus challenged dominant ideas about just who could enter the public arena, greatly expanding both the real and imaginary spaces of public life to include hitherto excluded groups of private people. The consequences of this historical reconfiguration of public space remain relevant, especially for contemporary efforts to meaningfully include the views of ordinary people in public life.

Many long-held assumptions of historians and literary critics are sharply challenged in this interpretation of the cultural consequences of social, economic, and political change in early modern London. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, greater London's population nearly quintupled, surpassing 500,000 before 1700, making it Europe's largest metropolis. Contemporaries often complained that the many problems accompanying this urban development were the result of immigrants flocking to the rapidly expanding suburbs around the City of London. Such complaints assumed that immigrants chose to live outside the City in order to avoid the economic oversight of its trade guilds.
Sharing such assumptions, many scholars have found an inherent conflict between residents of the traditional, orderly City and those of the relatively licentious suburbs. According to their view, this conflict encouraged both the decline of the guilds and the appearance of new forms of representation in Renaissance literature, notably in the plays staged in suburban theatres. The author offers an alternative to this view of London's expansion.
His argument begins with an analysis of sermons, tracts, and poems suggesting that some Londoners of the time considered the suburbs subject to the same kinds of authority as the City, which consequently made them integral parts of the metropolis. The author then draws on the records of more than twenty guilds to demonstrate that many members lived and worked in the suburbs and were as capable of flaunting City traditions and authority as immigrants; trade guilds, therefore, were metropolitan by nature.
However, the extent to which guilds continued to offer a sense of community--of meaningful association--to their members depended in turn on the desire of individual members to identify themselves with their guild's goals and values. The author argues that guilds, as principal sites for the collision of tradition and innovation, generally took a flexible approach to change rather than simply trying to prevent it.

This book explores the complex ways in which England's gradual transformation from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation presented men and women with new ways in which to fashion their own identities and to define their relationships with society.
The past generation's research into the religious history of early modern England has heightened our appreciation for the persistence of traditional beliefs in the face of concerted attacks by followers of Henry VIII and his successor Edward VI. The book argues that the present challenge for historians is to move beyond this revisionist characterization of the English Reformation as a largely unpopular and unsuccessful exercise of state power to assess its legacy of increasing religious diversification. The contributors cast a post-revisionist light on religious change by showing how the Henrician break with Rome and the Edwardian implementation of a Protestant agenda had a lasting influence on the laity's beliefs and practices, forging a legacy that Mary I's efforts to restore Catholicism could not overturn.
If, as revisionist research has stressed, late medieval Christianity provided the laity with a wide array of means with which to internalize and individualize their religious experiences, then surely the events of the reigns of Henry and Edward vastly expanded the field over which the religiosity of English men and women could range. This book addresses the unfolding consequences of this theological variegation to assess how individual spiritual beliefs, aspirations, and practices helped shape social and political action on a family, local, and national level.

In "Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll," historians analyze central aspects of the cultural exchanges between Britain and the American South.

Along with the Spanish and the French, the British were among the first Europeans to have contact with the native peoples in what would come to be known as the American South. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British were intensively engaged in colonizing much of the region and developing its economy. The American Revolution severed the governmental links between Britain and its Southern colonies, but economic, social, religious, and cultural ties persevered during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

"Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll" illuminates Britain's evolving relationship with the South over a period of four centuries, an era that witnessed Britain's rise to imperial dominance and then the gradual erosion of its influence on the wider world. It considers the British influence upon-and often critical responses to-Southern institutions and cultural formations such as religion, gentility, slavery, and music.

Two chapters focus on Britain's response to the Confederacy, while other essays look even further into the past, concentrating on the English legacy in colonial times, its influence on Southern religion, and Britain's relationship with the Creek Indians. Moving into the twentieth century, the book features analysis of the South's relationship to the British Left from 1930 to 1960, and an investigation of the South's role in 1950s British popular music.

With an engaging afterword that explores the difficulties in comprehending both Britain and the American South in the present day as well as in the past, this book shows that the relationship between the two has always been-and continues to be-complex, subtle, and meaningful.

Joseph P. Ward, an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, is the author of "Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London" and the co-editor of "Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England" and "The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850."

Contributions by Allison Margaret Bigelow, Denise I. Bossy, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Alexandre Dube, Kathleen DuVal, Jonathan Eacott, Travis Glasson, Christopher Morris, Robert Olwell, Joshua Piker, and Joseph P. Ward European Empires in the American South examines the process of European expansion into a region that has come to be known as the American South. After Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted for three hundred years with one another, with the native people of the region, and with enslaved Africans in ways that made the South a significant arena of imperial ambition. As such, it was one of several similarly contested regions around the Atlantic basin. Without claiming that the South was unique during the colonial era, these essays make clear the region's integral importance for anyone seeking to shed new light on the long-term process of global social, cultural, and economic integration. This volume includes essays on all three imperial powers, Spain, Britain, and France, and their imperial projects in the American South. While the consequences of Indian encounters with European invaders have long remained a principal feature of historical research, this volume advances and expands knowledge of Native Americans in the South amid the Atlantic World.

European Empires in the American South examines the process of European expansion into a region that has come to be known as the American South. After Europeans began to cross the Atlantic with confidence, they interacted for three hundred years with one another, with the native people of the region, and with enslaved Africans in ways that made the South a significant arena of imperial ambition. As such, it was one of several similarly contested regions around the Atlantic basin. Without claiming that the South was unique during the colonial era, these essays make clear the region's integral importance for anyone seeking to shed new light on the long-termprocess of global social, cultural, and economic integration. For those who are curious about how the broad processes of historical change influenced particular people and places, the contributors offer key examples of colonial encounter. This volume includes essays on all three imperial powers, Spain, Britain, and France, and their imperial projects in the American South. Engaging profitably - from the European perspective at least - with Native Americans proved key to these colonial schemes. While the consequences of Indian encounters with European invaders have long remained a principal feature of historical research, this volume advances and expands knowledge of Native Americans in the South amid the Atlantic World.

Between 1550 and 1850, the great age of mercantilism, the English people remade themselves from a disparate group of individuals and localities divided by feudal loyalties, dialects and even languages, into an imperial power. Examining literature, art and social life, and returning to ground first explored by Raymond Williams in his seminal work, The Country and the City Revisited traces this transformation. It shows that what Williams figured as an urban-rural dichotomy can now be more satisfactorily grasped as a permeable boundary. While the movement of sugar, tobacco and tea became ever more deeply interfused with the movement of people, through migration and the slave trade, these commodities initiated new conceptions of space, time and identity. Spanning the traditional periods of the Renaissance and Romanticism, this collection of essays offers exciting interdisciplinary perspectives on central issues of early modern English history.

Between 1550 and 1850, how were the English people able to transform themselves from a disparate group of individuals and localities into an imperial power? This book supplements Raymond Williams' seminal work on the country and the city by applying exciting new interdisciplinary perspectives on the question. During the great age of mercantilism, new conceptions of space, time, and social identity began to emerge that are still with us today. This collection of essays by major scholars looks afresh at central issues of early modern English history.