For the first issue of the renamed journal, Modern British History co-editor Erik Linstrum convened a group of scholars to reflect on the past, present, and possible futures of the field. The resulting contributions make no claim to provide a comprehensive or representative survey. Rather, they offer a variety of perspectives on where modern British history has been and where it might be going. Several contributions, written by former editors of Twentieth Century British History, drawn on the history of the journal as a way of thinking about the direction of the field and its subfields. Others consider the place of modern Britain in the wider discipline of history, grappling with questions of temporality and embodiment; the institutional and material contexts of scholarship; the role of national histories in a transnational world; and the response of historical writing to epidemiological, humanitarian, and ecological crisis. The sequence of contributions mirrors the evolution of the journal since its founding in 1990, beginning with political history and gradually encompassing a much broader range of subjects and methodologies as well as an expanded geographical ambit. Here are archive stories, pleas for new subjects, roadmaps for new approaches to old subjects, and attempts to identify master narratives. Taken together, these contributions demonstrate that modern British history has many houses—which is both a sign of intellectual vitality and a challenge for anyone wishing to generalize about the ‘state of the field’. If British modernity remains an abundant resource for ‘thinking with’, its contours and frontiers are tantalizingly up for grabs.

Journal Article Peter Sloman. Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain. Get access Peter Sloman. Transfer State: The Idea of a ­Guaranteed Income and the Politics of ­Redistribution in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 320. Cloth $88.00. Guy Ortolano Guy Ortolano New York University Email: ortolano@nyu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, March 2022, Pages 542–543, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac112 Published: 26 April 2022

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During the quarter of a century after the Second World War, the United Kingdom designated thirty-two new towns across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Why, even before selling council houses or denationalising public industries, did Margaret Thatcher's government begin to privatise these new towns? By examining the most ambitious of these projects, Milton Keynes, Guy Ortolano recasts our understanding of British social democracy, arguing that the new towns comprised the spatial dimension of the welfare state. Following the Prime Minister's progress on a tour through Milton Keynes on 25 September 1979, Ortolano alights at successive stops to examine the broader histories of urban planning, modernist architecture, community development, international consulting, and municipal housing. Thatcher's journey reveals a dynamic social democracy during its decade of crisis, while also showing how public sector actors begrudgingly accommodated the alternative priorities of market liberalism.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsRedbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities. By William Whyte.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+390. $110.00.Guy OrtolanoGuy OrtolanoNew York University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs salaries lag and workloads mount, academics feel increasingly squeezed. On one side they confront officious administrators, preoccupied with fund-raising and pushing absurd rebranding exercises; on the other side they face distressingly homogenous student bodies, who approach their educations as consumers buying credentials rather than scholars seeking knowledge. Morale cannot be helped by the fact that more than 40 percent of the professoriate recently dropped dead—such is the state of affairs in the paleoliberal university, King’s College London of the 1830s.Commentators on today’s universities often seem more familiar with these gripes than their lineage, and it is precisely that combination of contemporary relevance and historical perspective that recommends William Whyte’s revelatory Redbrick. The “first history of the civic universities for sixty years” (9), Redbrick explains how the civic universities came to comprise Britain’s national university system. Leeds and Leicester, not Oxford and Cambridge, are—in the words of the historian D. W. Brogan, writing in 1951—the “normal universities of the modern world” (218), and Whyte explores how their ethos emerged, developed, and eventually triumphed. Redbrick, in this sense, refers not strictly to those sturdy Victorian institutions in industrial cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, but to the whole network of modern universities that can trace their origins back to University College London and King’s College London, and whose numbers swelled so dramatically through successive waves of expansion during the twentieth century. Exeter and Leicester, Keele and Sussex, Loughborough and Salford, De Montfort and Oxford Brookes, and even the Open University all figure here as iterations of a Redbrick idea that is (relatively) democratic, pragmatic, and innovative—if also, too often, overextended, underfunded, and mired in a recurrent sense of crisis. Collectively, Whyte argues, the development of the civic universities over the previous two centuries represents “an almost forgotten revolution, a Renaissance that nobody now notices” (8)—an oversight that this beautifully produced book remedies triumphantly.After a prologue examining the origins of King’s College Windsor in loyalist New York, in order to illustrate the variety of precedents and ambitions that subsequent establishments inherited, Redbrick begins not in the provinces but the capital. Part I tells the intertwined story of the foundings of University College London and King’s College London, which opened their doors in 1828 and 1831, respectively. These precarious foundations were beset by crises from the outset, which were partially resolved through the shared federation of the University of London. That foundation marked a key point of departure for the civic universities to follow, since it established an accredited structure through which localities beyond London could establish colleges of their own. Part II then examines the mid-Victorian university, from 1843 to 1880, showing that these establishments were driven by rivalries partly denominational but increasingly civic. These institutions served whole new swaths of society: provincial, non-Anglican, middle and working class, and most importantly women. Parts III and IV push forward through the Second World War, by which time Redbrick had transcended civic horizons to emerge as a truly national system. And Parts V and VI take the story up to the present, showing how successive waves of university expansion—before, during, and since the Robbins Report of 1963—have all remained indebted to the model of Redbrick.The book is comprehensive, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present; it perceptively attends to false starts and fictional accounts, alongside more familiar and lasting successes; and it is deeply researched, generously illustrated, and beautifully written throughout. Announcing itself as “a social and architectural history,” each section devotes equal attention to student cultures and building forms, but the most commanding discussions reflect Whyte’s sure-footed skill as an architectural historian. The readings of buildings advance his most pointed arguments, especially regarding the relationship between Redbrick and Oxbridge. Whyte challenges those historians who read civic university buildings as derivative or traditional, identifying “an archetypally Redbrick architecture” (157) instead, one that offers “a new architecture for a new sort of institution” (158); this “vibrant series of architectural experiments” (160), he continues, actually “owed little to Oxbridge” (161). Far from second-rate Oxbridge knock-offs, the buildings of Redbrick—like the Redbrick idea itself—were utterly their own: innovative, modern, and diverse, they ultimately emerged as the physical signature of Britain’s university system.Whyte advances these arguments so energetically that readers might wonder whether something significant is missing. Here, after all, is an account of more than two centuries of British universities that minimizes the significance of Oxford and Cambridge—despite the fact that, surely, many of the ideas and personnel shaping Redbrick were themselves made in Oxbridge. But that is precisely the perspective—“disastrous,” in Whyte’s view (8)—that has long distorted understandings of Britain’s civic universities, preventing their recognition as achievements in their own right, and Whyte’s bracing refusal to grant it any quarter emerges as one of the defining contributions of this powerfully argued and persuasive book. Redbrick belongs on the shelf of every historian of architecture, universities, and indeed modern Britain, and it should also inform wider discussions about the university in Britain past, present, and future. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 89, Number 1March 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690158 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Journal Article Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World, by Daniel Horowitz Get access Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World, by Daniel Horowitz (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 2012; pp. 491. £23). Guy Ortolano Guy Ortolano New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 536, February 2014, Pages 253–255, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cet343 Published: 13 January 2014

Journal Article English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement, by Christopher Hilliard Get access English as a Vocation: The Scrutiny Movement, by Christopher Hilliard (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2012; pp. 298. £57). Guy Ortolano Guy Ortolano New York University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 538, June 2014, Pages 767–769, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceu128 Published: 28 June 2014

Introduction 1. C. P. Snow and the technocratic liberalism 2. F. R. Leavis and the radical liberalism 3. A tale of two colleges 4. The making of English social history 5. The rise of national 'decline' 6. Post-colonial developments 7. The eclipse of the meritocratic moment Conclusion.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsJerome Kagan. The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and the Humanities in the Twenty‐first Century. xii + 311 pp., tables, index. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. $21.99 (paper).Guy OrtolanoGuy Ortolano Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 101, Number 3September 2010 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/657223 Views: 60Total views on this site © 2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

E. H. H. Green and D. M. Tanner, eds. The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values, and the Reception of Economic Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii+313. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 48 Issue 3