This innovative collection offers a reappraisal of gender as a category of analysis in modern Welsh history. Beginning with sex work in the eighteenth century and concluding with women’s late twentieth-century anti-nuclear activism, the contributors show how gender has been constructed, represented, performed and experienced by men and women at different times and places throughout Wales’s modern past. Using a variety of approaches, the collection interrogates gender as a concept that encompasses both femininity and masculinity, provides fresh perspectives on familiar themes, and demonstrates the value of gender analysis for our understanding of the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Wales. Chapters by leading historians and early career academics each set an agenda for exploring the intersection of gender with nationality, race, class, age and sexuality.  

The book focuses on the Jewish communities in Cardiff, Swansea and the South Wales valleys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking at their everyday lives and also more dramatic and sensational events such as the Tredegar Riots in 1911 and the "Jewess Abduction Case" of 1867-8. A new introduction by Paul O'Leary considers scholarship on the subject which has been published since the book was first published and also discusses the polarised views about the Tredegar Riots of 1911: were the riots the result of ant-semitism, or was South Wales a philosemitic place, where the Welsh and Jewish communities had much in common?

This eloquent memoir provides an unrivalled insight into the life of a child reared in a working-class Irish Catholic community in late nineteenth-century Britain. No other author succeeds in depicting so vividly the texture of a life delimited by manual work, home and community ties as experienced by Irish migrants of the period. At the same time, it charts the tortuous route by which a young man struggled to free himself from a life of manual labour by using his literary talents to become a journalist and a popular novelist. Published in 1916, it reflects the world and assumptions of an emigre community between the failure of the Fenian movement and the Easter Rising, and it includes a telling vignette of the aged Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. An insightful picture of the world of those Home Rule supporters who lived outside Ireland emerges from this book.

The majority of historians have viewed Lloyd George's early career to 1896 as superficial and merely the precursor to his successes at Westminster. Emyr Price provides an altogether different view. Based on original research he asserts that Lloyd George had a very strong commitment to Home Rule (and was the first modern Welsh nationalist), official status for the Welsh language and strong labour legislation and that he campaigned fearlessly against the tide (especially within his own party) to being these measures about. His decision to become a careerist politician after 1896 was the only way he could further the cause of Welsh 'national movement'. Price also investigates Lloyd George's 'Welsh' perception of the major issues that dominated his period of power at Westminster (1908-1922) including Ireland and how these Welsh and Celtic values determined his actions.

This book is the first full-length biography of Huw T. Edwards (1929-70), a key figure in the Welsh labor movement who was known in the 1950s as the "unofficial Prime Minister of Wales." Paul Ward explores Edwards's working-class origins, his growing involvement with trade unions and other political activities, and his eventual place in the high reaches of the Welsh establishment, which included a role as Welsh representative to the BBC, a seat on the Welsh Tourist Board, and the presidency of the Welsh Language Society.