Based on the most recent historical research and current debates about Wales and Welshness, this volume offers the most up-to-date, authoritative and accessible account of the period from Neanderthal times to the opening of the Senedd, the new home of the National Assembly for Wales, in 2006. Within a remarkably brief and stimulating compass, Geraint H. Jenkins explores the emergence of Wales as a nation, its changing identities and values, and the transformations its people experienced and survived throughout the centuries. In the face of seemingly overwhelming odds, the Welsh never reconciled themselves to political, social and cultural subordination, and developed ingenious ways of maintaining a distinctive sense of their otherness. The book ends with the coming of political devolution and the emergence of a greater measure of cultural pluralism. Professor Jenkins's lavishly illustrated volume provides enthralling material for scholars, students, general readers, and travellers to Wales.

This highly successful, illustrated Pocket Guide has been revised and expanded. the Celts to the invasion by Romans and Normans, the conquest by Edward I of England, the passage of the Acts of Union, the impact of the Reformation, Puritanism and Methodism, the effects of the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions and the changes in political, social and economic life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. historical sites, a glossary of terms and a list of important dates are included, making this an ideal introductory study for the general reader.

The existence of the Welsh-language can come as a surprise to those who assume that English is the foundation language of Britain. However, J. R. R. Tolkien described Welsh as the 'senior language of the men of Britain'. Visitors from outside Wales may be intrigued by the existence of Welsh and will want to find out how a language which has, for at least fifteen hundred years, been the closest neighbour of English, enjoys such vibrancy, bearing in mind that English has obliterated languages thousands of miles from the coasts of England. This book offers a broad historical survey of Welsh-language culture from sixth-century heroic poetry to television and pop culture in the early twenty-first century. The public status of the language is considered and the role of Welsh is compared with the roles of other of the non-state languages of Europe. This new edition of The Welsh Language offers a full assessment of the implications of the linguistic statistics produced by the 2011 Census. The volume contains maps and plans showing the demographic and geographic spread of Welsh over the ages, charts examining the links between words in Welsh and those in other Indo-European languages, and illustrations of key publications and figures in the history of the language. It concludes with brief guides to the pronunciation, the dialects and the grammar of Welsh.

After outlining conventional accounts of Wales in the High Middle Ages, this book moves to more radical approaches to its subject. Rather than discussing the emergence of the March of Wales from the usual perspective of the ‘intrusive’ marcher lords, for instance, it is considered from a Welsh standpoint explaining the lure of the March to Welsh princes and its contribution to the fall of the native principality of Wales. Analysis of the achievements of the princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries focuses on the paradoxical process by which increasingly sophisticated political structures and a changing political culture supported an autonomous native principality, but also facilitated eventual assimilation of much of Wales into an English ‘empire’. The Edwardian conquest is examined and it is argued that, alongside the resultant hardship and oppression suffered by many, the rising class of Welsh administrators and community leaders who were essential to the governance of Wales enjoyed an age of opportunity. This is a book that introduces the reader to the celebrated and the less well-known men and women who shaped medieval Wales.

Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives a sense of the view seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, they give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, in the Welsh language and in English, that is internationally renowned for its distinction and continuing vibrancy.

This title discusses Welsh miners, American coal, and the construction of ethnic identity. In 1890, more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants resided in the United States. The majority of them were skilled labourers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies.

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.