Writing Welsh History

Writing Welsh History PDF Author: Huw Pryce
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 507

Book Description
Writing Welsh History is the first book to explore how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been written over the past fifteen hundred years. By analysing and contextualizing a wide range of historical writing, from Gildas in the sixth century to recent global approaches, it opens new perspectives both on the history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh - and thus on the use of the past to articulate national and other identities. The study's broad chronological scope serves to highlight important continuities in interpretations of Welsh history. One enduring preoccupation is Wales's place in Britain. Down to the twentieth century it was widely held that the Welsh were an ancient people descended from the original inhabitants of Britain whose history in its fullest sense ended with Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1282-4, their history thereafter being regarded as an attenuated appendix. However, Huw Pryce shows that such master narratives, based on medieval sources and focused primarily on the period down to 1282, were part of a much larger and more varied historiographical landscape. Over the past century the thematic and chronological range of Welsh history writing has expanded significantly, notably in the unprecedented attention given to the modern period, reflecting broader trends in an increasingly internationalized historical profession as well as the influence of social, economic, and political developments in Wales and elsewhere.

A History of Welsh Music

A History of Welsh Music PDF Author: Trevor Herbert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009041673
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 786

Book Description
From early medieval bards to the bands of the 'Cool Cymru' era, this book looks at Welsh musical practices and traditions, the forces that have influenced and directed them, and the ways in which the idea of Wales as a 'musical nation' has been formed and embedded in popular consciousness in Wales and beyond. Beginning with early medieval descriptions of musical life in Wales, the book provides both an overarching study of Welsh music history and detailed consideration of the ideas, beliefs, practices and institutions that shaped it. Topics include the eisteddfod, the church and the chapel, the influence of the Welsh language and Welsh cultural traditions, the scholarship of the Celtic Revival and the folk song movement, the impacts of industrialization and digitization, and exposure to broader trends in popular culture, including commercial popular music and sport.

Wales since 1939

Wales since 1939 PDF Author: Martin Johnes
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847795064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 459

Book Description
The period since 1939 saw more rapid and significant change than any other time in Welsh history. Wales developed a more assertive identity of its own and some of the apparatus of a nation state. Yet its economy floundered between boom and bust, its traditional communities were transformed and the Welsh language and other aspects of its distinctiveness were undermined by a globalizing world. Wales was also deeply divided by class, language, ethnicity, gender, religion and region. Its people grew wealthier, healthier and more educated but they were not always happier. This ground-breaking book examines the story of Wales since 1939, giving voice to ordinary people and the variety of experiences within the nation. This is a history of not just a nation, but of its residents’ hopes and fears, their struggles and pleasures and their views of where they lived and the wider world.

Welsh Responses to the French Revolution

Welsh Responses to the French Revolution PDF Author: Marion Löffler
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 0708324908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
The serial literature current in Wales between 1789 and 1802 is the most important public repository of radical, loyalist and patriotic Welsh responses to the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars. This anthology presents a selection of poetry and prose published in the annual Welsh almanacs, the English provincial newspapers published close to Wales’s border and the three radical Welsh periodicals of the mid-1790s, together with translations of the Welsh texts. An extended introduction sketches out the printing culture of Wales, analyses its public discourse and interprets the Welsh voices in their British political context.

English in Wales

English in Wales PDF Author: Nikolas Coupland
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 9781853590313
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
This sociolinguistic perspective on Wales takes account of both principal languages, in contemporary life and in history. It traces the conflicts and mutual influences of the two languages in shaping the sociolinguistic character of Wales and traces the way in which it has simultaneously come to function, for many Welsh people, as a vehicle for cultural continuity, the means to an Anglo-Welsh identity.

Sex, Sects and Society

Sex, Sects and Society PDF Author: Russell Davies
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786832151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Book Description
This book will provide an educational and entertaining read. It will explain the contradictions and complexities of the Welsh national identity. This book will reveal the hardships and horrors of some people's lives. It will reveal how religion and superstition ebbed and flowed together.

Exodus from Cardiganshire

Exodus from Cardiganshire PDF Author: Kathryn J Cooper
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 070832410X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Was migration from Victorian Cardiganshire simply a flight from rural poverty? This book relates the rate and timing of the outward movements from the county to the prevailing social and economic conditions.

Periodizing Secularization

Periodizing Secularization PDF Author: Clive D. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192588575
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.

Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020

Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020 PDF Author: Clive D. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192849328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

Book Description
Counting Religion in Britain, 1970-2020, the fourth volume in the author's chronological history of British secularization, sheds significant new light on the nature, scale, and timing of religious change in Britain during the past half-century, with particular reference to quantitative sources. Adopting a key performance indicators approach, twenty-one facets of personal religious belonging, behaving, and believing are examined, offering a much wider range of lenses through which the health of religion can be viewed and appraised than most contemporary scholarship. Summative analysis of these indicators, by means of a secularization dashboard, leads to a reaffirmation of the validity of secularization (in its descriptive sense) as the dominant narrative and direction of travel since 1970, while acknowledging that it is an incomplete process and without endorsing all aspects of the paradigmatic expression of secularization as a by-product of modernization.

New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History

New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History PDF Author: Louise Miskell
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
This volume tells a story of Welsh industrial history different from the one traditionally dominated by the coal and iron communities of Victorian and Edwardian Wales. Extending the chronological scope from the early eighteenth- to the late twentieth-century, and encompassing a wider range of industries, the contributors combine studies of the internal organisation of workplace and production with outward-facing perspectives of Welsh industry in the context of the global economy. The volume offers important new insights into the companies, the employers, the markets and the money behind some of the key sectors of the Welsh economy – from coal to copper, and from steel to manufacturing – and challenges us to reconsider what we think of as constituting ‘industry’ in Wales.