History, religion, and identity in modern Britain

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Pamela J. Walker

Those people in uniforms who ring bells and raise money for the poor during the holiday season belong to a religious movement that in 1865 combined early feminism, street preaching, holiness theology, and intentionally outrageous singing into what soon became the Salvation Army. In Pulling the devil's kingdom down, Pamela Walker emphasizes how thoroughly the Army entered into nineteenth-century urban life. She follows the movement from its Methodist roots and East London origins through its struggles with the established denominations of England, problems with the law and the media, and public manifestations that included street brawls with working-class toughs. The Salvation Army was a neighborhood religion, with a "battle plan" especially suited to urban working-class geography and cultural life. The ability to use popular leisure activities as inspiration was a major factor in the Army's success, since pubs, music halls, sports, and betting were regarded as its principal rivals. Salvationist women claimed the "right to preach" and enjoyed spiritual authority and public visibility more extensively than in virtually any other religious or secular organization. Opposition to the new movement was equally energetic and took many forms, but even as contemporary music hall performers ridiculed the "Hallelujah Lasses," the Salvation Army was spreading across Great Britain and the Continent, and on to North America. The Army offered a distinctive response to the dilemmas facing Victorian Christians, in particular the relationship between what Salvationists believed and the work they did. Walker fills in the social, cultural, and religious contexts that make that relationship come to life.

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John Ferling

Traces the political disputes that surrounded America's 1776 Declaration of Independence, offering insight into the views of Parliament sympathizers and colonists who stayed loyal to Britain.

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Richard Reeves

In the first definitive biography of Britain's greatest public intellectual, Richard Reeves reveals John Stuart Mill as a passionate man of action: a philosopher, radical MP and reformer who profoundly shaped Victorian society and continues to illuminate our own. A young activist and highly-educated Cambridge Union debater, Mill would become in time the highest-ranked English thinker of the nineteenth-century, the author of the landmark essay On Liberty and one of the most passionate reformers and advocates of his revolutionary, opinionated age. As a journalist he fired off a weekly article on Irish land reform as the people of that nation starved, as an MP he introduced the first vote on women's suffrage, fought to preserve free speech and opposed slavery, and, in his private life, pursued for two decades a love affair with another man's wife. Mill also fearlessly tackled issues such as the regulation of gambling, prostitution and alcohol, as well as parliamentary reform and domestic violence. John Stuart Mill was the 'Saint of Rationalism' according to William Gladstone. But in this biography, Richard Reeves reveals Mill as a passionate man of action, a philosopher, radical MP and reformer who profoundly shaped Victorian society and continues to illuminate our own.

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Mary Wollstonecraft

From Goodreads: Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - Walpole called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.