Roy Palmer has brought together songs and ballads from the period 1750 to 1900, and interspersed them with the writings (from letters, memoirs etc) of many soldiers, as well as contemporary prints and photographs, to give a vivid account of life in the lower ranks at this time.

This wide-ranging survey, part-anthology, part-social history provides a unique study of popular song.

Tender or harsh, fleeting or long-remembered, song has always been a vehicle for the expression of popular feeling, often as the voice of the oppressed or of those in opposition to the power fo the State.

It has won high praise:

'Magical . . . These popular songs tell us of life's pleasures and pains from the cradle to the grave, of work and play, sport and sex, loving and leaving, the town and the country . . . A book both heart-rending and heart-warming. It is Palmer's achievement to attune our ears to the sounds of the past.' Roy Porter in the "Sunday Times "

When first published in 1979 no less an authority than Bob Copper described this collection as 'without doubt . . . the finest book of English traditional songs that has come my way in a very long time'.

Just under one hundred and fifty songs are collected and arranged in seven different categories:

'Fellows that Follow the Plough Work', 'A Health to the Master: Deference and Protest', 'The High Gallows Tree: Crime', 'Once I loved a Lass: Courtship', 'The Charmig Bride: Marriage', 'Up To The Rigs: Sport and Diversion' and 'The Life of a Man: Seasons and Ceremonies'.

As Roy Palmer concludes in his own introduction, 'Yet in the final analysis, it could be argued that the songs' final justification is aesthetic. They have a sheer beauty of language which both refleced and helped to shape the utterance of generations of Englishmen, men like Shakespeare, Crabbe, John Clare, Wordsworth, Hardy, John Arden, as well as the countless thousands of ploughmen, shepherds, blacksmiths, milkmaids and servant girls who were the backbone of the nation. Their full power emerges, however, not on the page but on the lips. I hope they will be savoured, but above all sung'.

Roy Domenico describes and evaluates the controversial efforts in Italy to punish Fascists after the overthrow of Mussolini in 1943 and the more violent efforts to do so after the liberation of German-occupied northern Italy in 1945. He focuses on the trials and bureaucratic purges of Fascists and illuminates the political struggles between those who favored the sanctions and those who opposed them.
According to Domenico, sanctions against Fascists were complicated by a widespread inability to define and place blame. Those most likely to be tried, he argues, were symbolic or strategic figures who were prominent in the dictatorship or were otherwise closely identified in the public's mind with the regime and whose prosecution would make a dramatic impression. The scope of sanctions was restricted further by focusing on those who served Mussolini's collaborationist Salo regime and away from the Fascists of the 1922-43 dictatorship.
The British and Americans were ambivalent about prosecuting the Fascists in part, says Domenico, because they did not look upon Italian fascism as nearly as objectionable as German nazism. In theory, they wanted the most notorious Fascists to be investigated and punished, but in practice, they did not want to create bureaucratic chaos in what was left of the weak Italian state or to strengthen the far Left. Further, the outbreak of the civil war in liberated Greece in the winter of 1944-45 alarmed many, who feared that civil war might erupt in northern Italy as well.
Domenico concludes that although Italy dismantled a dictatorship and became a democratic republic in the space of three years, the Italian experience nevertheless illustrates the resilience of the old order and its tenacity in maintaining influence.
Originally published in 1991.
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Presents a survey, drawing on a wide range of printed, manuscript and oral material. This title covers topics such as local legend and lore, ghosts and witchcraft, folk medicine, work and play, sport and fairs, crime and punishment, music, drama and calender customs.

Few people realise that the splendid mills seen in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset and Devon are the legacy of the cloth industry, for which this area was well known from the Middle Ages onwards.Woollen cloth, silk, linen, lace, rope and sailcloth were made in south-west England and an introductory chapter looks at how these fabrics were produced to meet changing markets. Most of the book is devoted to the buildings themselves, ranging from the splendid Tuckers Hall in Exeter through clothiers' houses and rural fulling and spinning mills to the homes of the workforce, many of which were also workplaces for handloom weavers well into the nineteenth century.