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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.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the
latest in digital technology to make available again books from our
distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These
editions are published unaltered from the original, and are
presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both
historical and cultural value.
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.
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