This volume contains 22 chapters dealing with the status of the Welsh language in a wide range of social domains, including agriculture and industry, education, religion, politics, law and culture.

Through a consideration of settlement patterns, economic activity, language use, and cultural and religious institutions, The Welsh in Metro America: Respectability and Assimilation in San Francisco, Seattle, Columbus, and Milwaukee, 1870–1930 provides a micro study of four Welsh immigrant communities in urban America. This book endeavors to understand the strength and long-term viability of these communities and the ways in which they changed by analyzing the forces that enabled Welsh immigrants and their children to so rapidly become Welsh Americans and, ultimately, to almost seamlessly enter the mainstream world of white, English-speaking, Protestant America.

Written as an act of protest in a Welsh-speaking community in north-west Wales, Why Wales Never Was combines a devastating analysis of the historical failure of Welsh nationalism with an apocalyptic vision of a non-Welsh future. It is the ‘progressive’ nature of Welsh politics and the ‘empire of the civic’, which rejects both language and culture, that prevents the colonised from rising up against his colonial master. Wales will always be a subjugated nation until modes of thought, dominant since the nineteenth century, are overturned. Originally a comment on Welsh acquiescence to Britishness at the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the book’s emphasis on the importance of European culture is a parable for Brexit times. Both deeply rooted in Welsh culture and European in scope, Why Wales Never Was brings together history, philosophy and politics in a way never tried before in Wales. First published in Welsh in 2015, Why Wales Never Was affirms the author’s reputation as one of the most radical writers in Wales today.

The British state between the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century was essentially a Christian state. Christianity permeated society, defining the rites of passage - baptism, first communion, marriage and burial - that shaped individual lives, providing a sense of continuity between past, present and future generations, and informing social institutions and voluntary associations. Yet this religious conception of state and society was also the source of conflict. The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought limited toleration for Protestant Dissenters, who felt unable to worship in the established Church, and there were challenges to faith raised by biblical and historical scholarship, science, moral questioning and social dislocations and unrest. This book brings together a distinguished team of authors who explore the interactions of religion, politics and culture that shaped and defined modern Britain. They consider expressions of civic consciousness in the expanding towns and cities, the growth of Welsh national identity, movements for popular education and temperance reform, and the influence of organised sport, popular journalism, and historical writing in defining national life. Most importantly, the contributors highlight the vital role of religious faith and religious institutions in the understanding of the modern British state.

A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain presents 33 essaysby expert scholars on all the major aspects of the political,social, economic and cultural history of Britain during the lateGeorgian and Victorian eras. Truly British, rather than English, in scope. Pays attention to the experiences of women as well as ofmen. Illustrated with maps and charts. Includes guides to further reading.

Culture, Politics and National Identity in Wales 1832-86 offers the first comprehensive account of politics in the principality between the first and third reform acts. Based on a wealth of previously unused sources in both English and Welsh, and grounded firmly in recent scholarship on electioneering elsewhere in Britain, Cragoe challenges the existing narrative of political history in the principality. There was more to politics in Victorian Wales, he suggests, than the current focus on nonconformity and radical liberalism after 1860 allows. The book's focus on elections and election culture creates a natural context within which a wider spectrum of political opinion can be sampled. Cragoe examines the differing ideologies of the major political parties - Tory, Liberal and Radical - and then explores how these ideas were carried into the electoral arena through party organisation, campaigning, and propaganda. Later chapters examine some of the ways in which individuals were prevented from recording their true political opinions and the relationship between the unenfranchised and the political process. Throughout, politics is presented as a highly participatory process, one in which ideals and principles played a key role for both candidates and voters alike. It was into this world that the typically 'Welsh' style of radical politics, imbued with the values of militant dissent and armed with new conception of national identity, was born in the 1860s. Weaving that singular political phenomenon back into its contemporary setting and recognising the extent to which its ideas have monopolised modern accounts of Welsh political history, is the purpose of this stimulating and, at times, controversial book.

Collecting sixteen thought-provoking new essays by leading medievalists, this volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies. Reflecting Davies' interest in identities, political culture and the workings of power in medieval Britain, the essays range across ten centuries, looking at a variety of key topics. Issues explored range from the historical representations of peoples and the changing patterns of power and authority, to the notions of 'core' and 'periphery' and the relationship between local conditions and international movements. The political impact of words and ideas, and the parallels between developments in Wales and those elsewhere in Britain, Ireland and Europe are also discussed. Appreciations of Rees Davies, a bibliography of his works, and Davies' own farewell speech to the History Faculty at the University of Oxford complete this outstanding tribute to a much-missed scholar.