First published in 1979, The Second Coming is an experiment in the writing of popular history – a contribution to the history of the people who have no history and an exploration of some of the ideas, beliefs and ways of thinking of ordinary men and women in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Millenarianism is a conceptual tool with which to explore some aspects of popular thought and culture. It is also seen as an ideology of social change and as a continuing tradition, traced from the end of the seventeenth century to the 1790s, and is shown to be embedded in folk culture. Abundant in rich and lively descriptions of such colourful characters as Richard Brothers, Joanna Southcott, John Wroe, Zion Ward and Sir William Courtenay, as well as studies of the Shakers, early Mormons and Millerites, the result is a window into the world of ordinary people in the Age of Romanticism.

The age of revolution, in which kings were dethroned, radical ideals of human equality embraced, and new constitutions written, was also the age of prophecy. Neither an archaic remnant nor a novel practice, prophecy in the eighteenth century was rooted both in the primitive worldview of the Old Testament and in the vibrant intellectual environment of the philosophers and their political allies, the republicans. In Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution, Susan Juster examines the culture of prophecy in Great Britain and the United States from 1765 to 1815 side by side with the intellectual and political transformations that gave the period its historical distinction as the era of enlightened rationalism and democratic revolution. Although sometimes viewed as madmen or fools, prophets of the 1790s and early 1800s were very much products of a liberal commercial society, even while they registered their disapproval of the values and practices of that society and fought a determined campaign to return Protestant Anglo-America to its biblical moorings. They enjoyed greater visibility than their counterparts of earlier eras, thanks to the creation of a vigorous new public sphere of coffeehouses, newspapers, corresponding societies, voluntary associations, and penny pamphlets. Prophecy was no longer just the art of applying biblical passages to contemporary events; it was now the business of selling both terror and reassurance to eager buyers. Tracking the careers of several hundred men and women in Britain and North America, most of ordinary background, who preached a message of primitive justice that jarred against the cosmopolitan sensibilities of their audiences, Doomsayers explores how prophetic claims were formulated, challenged, tested, advanced, and abandoned. The stories of these doomsayers, whose colorful careers entertained and annoyed readers across the political spectrum, challenge the notion that religious faith and the Enlightenment represented fundamentally alien ways of living in and with the world. From the debates over religious enthusiasm staged by churchmen and the literati to the earnest offerings of ordinary men and women to speak to and for God, Doomsayers shows that the contest between prophets and their critics for the allegiance of the Anglo-American reading public was part of a broader recalibration of the norms and values of civic discourse in the age of revolution.

This book looks at aspects of Glasgow history which have hitherto been ignored or overlooked by most historians - the history of women in the city. Existing histories are the histories of the men who made Glasgow great: the inventors, industrialists, shipbuilders, philosophers and men of medicine. Although every schoolchild knows the legends of St Mungo, no one knows the legend of his mother St Thenew. The strong machismo culture of the west of Scotland has all but obliterated the contribution of women. St Thenew is actually Scotland's first recorded rape victim, battered woman and unmarried mother. From the time of her death in the seventh century until the present day, there is a discernable trail of oppression and violence against women. At the same time there is a history of strong and sustained resistance to persecution, achievement in the face of adversity and moral triumph in the teeth of injustice. This work deals with women, religon and the Reformation, social and political status, the fight for equal rights and the history of the Suffragettes. Because of the nature of the sources, more space is given to women who stood up and stood out - the 16th century "orray woemen" whom the town council could not control, the revolutionary Owenites and those brave women who threw bombs, burned down big houses, and went on hunger strike.