Nationalism, Religious Violence, and Hate Speech in Nineteenth-Century Western Europe critically analyses the role played by different memories of past religious violence in public debates in nineteenth-century Europe. Looking back, European societies often did not seek to overcome their differences and create a framework of peaceful coexistence among various religions and denominations, but rather, more frequently, to fuel intra- and inter-religious hatred. Moreover, various violent pasts were mobilised to define what and who was intolerant, in order to mark the "other" as intolerant and therefore incompatible with societal values. To examine conflicting memories of violence and hatred, this book focuses on commemorations, statues, publications, and public polemics surrounding past religious violence. Three elements serve as a framework to explain the conflictive nature of these memories of intolerance: the age of commemorations, the culture wars, and the second confessional age. The authors explore cases in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the Low Countries, covering Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Islam, and Judaism. The book focuses on iconic victims such as Giordano Bruno and Michael Servetus, collective massacres, and discourses surrounding religious hatred in events such as the Crusades. The cases of religious violence remembered in the nineteenth century span the Middle Ages and the intense period of religious violence known as the confessional age. This book will appeal to students and scholars of politics, religious tolerance and freedom, hate speech, nationalism, religious history, and European history.

"Compelling." The Guardian "An insightful and inspiring history." BBC History Magazine "A tantalising revelatory book." The House "Brisk and illuminating." Times Literary Supplement "A damn good read." Morning Star "Wonderful." The Chartist Uncontrollable Women is a history of radical, reformist and revolutionary women between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832. Very few of them are well-known today; some were unknown even in their own day. All of them contributed something to the world we now inhabit. At a time when women were supposed to leave politics to men they spoke, wrote, marched, organised, asked questions, challenged power structures, sometimes went to prison and even died. History has not usually been kind to them, and they have frequently been pushed into asides or footnotes, dismissed as secondary, or spoken over, for, or through by men and sometimes other women. In this book, they take centre stage in both their own stories and those of others, and in doing so bring different voices to the more familiar accounts of the period. These women and many others played a part in developing political ideas and freedoms as we know them today, and some fought battles which still remain to be won or raised questions that are still unresolved. These are their stories.

A Book Sense Fall 2005 History Channel Top Ten Pick Paul Collins combines present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the physical remains of founding father Thomas Paine. Paine's missing body, like a saint's relics, has been scattered in pieces around the world over the last two centuries-a brainstem in New York, a box of bones in London, a lock of hair in Edinburgh, a skull in Sydney. As Paul tracks down these remnants, he revisits the unusual life of Tom Paine-and in his search for Paine's body, Collins uncovers that body's soul.

Originally published in 1999, this book deals with the cultural and legal debates which have counterposed the right to free speech and the need to protect Christian sensibilities in Britain from the time of the French Revolution to the present day. Central to the book is a close study of the content and public reception of the anti-Christian literature of the 19th century associated with the names G.W.Foote and J.W. Gott, the Freethinker and The Truthseeker. David Nash here also examines a variety of critical-theoretical approaches to blasphemy and blasphemous writing, including postmodernism and the work of Foucault and Said. The book concludes with a detailed examination of 20th-century blasphemy cases, up to and including the Gay News case, The Last Temptation of Christ and Visions of Ecstasy.

David Nash's new study focuses on the development of blasphemy in the Christian world. Tracing the subject from the Middle Ages to the present, he outlines the history of blasphemy as a concept, from a species of heresy to modern understandings of it as a crime against the sacred and individual religious identity. Investigating its appearance in speech, literature, popular publishing and the cinema, he disinters the likely motives and agendas of blasphemers themselves, as well as offering a glimpse of blasphemy's victims. In particular, he seeks to understand why this seemingly medieval offence has reappeared to become a distinctly modern presence in the West.

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection examines diverse forms of anti-social behaviour in Victorian and contemporary Britain, providing a unique comparison of the methods which have been employed by governments to control it.