Browsing by Subject "British History"
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Item Clashing Legacies: Narratives of Continuity and Rupture in Restoration Britain's Ideological Constructions of the Past(2014-11) Paltzer, DanielThis dissertation analyzes the textual and argumentative strategies used to debate the meaning of the past in an attempt to influence the present and future in seventeenth-century British polemic. I focus on two pamphlet wars occurring between 1678 and 1685. The first concerned whether bishops had the right to participate in the trial of one of Charles II's most important ministers. The second arose between a Scottish lawyer and two English clerics when one of the Englishmen tried to debunk the traditional Scottish narrative that their kingdom and royal dynasty had been founded in 330 B.C. I draw upon the well-developed scholarly literature on political and religious ideology for this time period to help explain the conceptual vocabulary used in the arguments and the political theory underlying those ideas. I expand the analysis through a more explicit attention to how writers used histories of certain important institutions to define ideological positions. The role of historical narratives about institutions is an important element of ideological argument, which allows me to develop insights about the role of the past in how a society defined itself and tried to solve its problems. Specific examples were in how discourses appealed to national myths, defended entrenched institutional interests in a tightly woven social fabric, or defined the interaction between religion and politics.Item The perfect food and the filth disease: milk, typhoid fever, and the science of state medicine in Victorian Britain, 1850-1900(2011-06) Steere-Williams, JacobThis dissertation examines the complex ways that public health practices developed in Victorian Britain, particularly how standards of scientific knowledge interacted with social and cultural ideas. My central argument is that cultural conceptions of milk as a wholesome, healthful food were intimately tied to and in some ways challenged by the rapidly developing sciences of epidemiology and analytical chemistry, creating a framework for public health policies. This was most apparent at the central level through the work of the Medical Department of the Local Government Board and the Government Chemical Laboratory of the Excise Department, and locally throughout Britain through the work of local Medical Officers of Health and Analytical Chemists. I demonstrate that epidemiologists, chemists, and veterinarians, were the scientific translators of deeply embedded social concerns about purity and progress. These disciplines were largely framed by interactions with different facets of the public; scientific knowledge about milk and disease was reified by milk producers and milk consumers who stressed the importance of purity as representative of cultural progress and British superiority. Milk was not a static cultural or material product, and its cultural meaning and material use changed dramatically throughout the period I investigate. Such analysis sheds historical light on contemporary problems about food safety and reminds us that consumption practices are always embedded within cultural assumptions about nation, personhood, science, and progress.