In the Great War, home front schemes in support of wartime causes included the making and transportation of what were called smellies: homemade tokens and commercial gifts that invoked supposedly traditional British scents. For volunteers, this entailed the collection and distribution of homemade lavender and verbena bags as an allegedly effective—and practical—means of aiding those injured at the front. For others, like commercial perfumers, this meant the production of scented commodities like lavender water and eau de Cologne for transport to troops overseas. In both cases, supporters mobilized the symbolic power of perfumed items to promote a fictitious version of rural, white, English life that could allegedly be resumed after the conflict. These campaigns obscured the social, racial, gendered, and material realities of war. What resulted was a profoundly limited definition of British smells and, by extension, their idealized British recipients: white, English-born servicemen from across classes. While perfumed gifts were designed to comfort these select recipients and bring a sense of order to the front, accounts of gifts’ production and reception ultimately reveal fractures—and failures—in the deployment of national smells to order the disordered smellscapes of war.

Before the mid-seventeenth century when a developing understanding of probability transformed gambling, English gaming took place in the community rather than in dedicated institutions like casinos and so represented and interacted with more general social behavior. Different communities gambled differently; they had different status under the law. This article considers gentlemen's gambling, arguing that in the absence of other constraints, notions of honor had a key role in shaping that activity. Contemporary accounts such as Sir John Harington's “Treatise on Playe” suggest that high-stakes wagering fell into the anthropological category of deep play, whereby gamesters staked excessive sums to win renown for their daring; secondly, it appears that such behavior was seen as a young man's activity, with older men condemning immoderate wagering as their ideas about what was honorable shifted as they matured and became integrated into the community. In addition to age-related changes of attitude to gambling, a tension existed between Elizabethan ideals of gentlemen's gambling behaviors and individual gamesters’ real circumstances. Some had limited money for wagering, others little time; youths from gentle families were sometimes indentured as apprentices or otherwise in situations that altered their relationships to time, money, and regulation. Consequently, even within this single sector of Elizabethan society, attitudes to gambling acquired a high level of complexity.

This article analyzes the print culture of the Black and multiethnic community known as L8 in the northern British city of Liverpool. Through a critique of printed materials, including newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets all written, produced and read within the locale, the author assesses the construction of a community that was at once imagined and lived. This print infrastructure facilitated a collective sense of L8 as a marker of identity and belonging in a city and a nation that otherwise often harbored racialized hostility to the residents’ economic and political interests. Such a commitment to the locale, the author asserts, became a key factor in organizing the collective action taken by the residents in the 1981 Toxteth protests. Before and after that event, the neighborhood's print culture served to justify to residents the reasons for taking violent action against the state. Equally, this source material highlights the fissures and divergences between neighbors in their deliberations over the definitions—and limitations—of such a community and its relation to the nation. The author thus offers new ways to think about Black British protest in close relation to the specific political and social dynamics of neighborhoods across Britain.

The idea that Protestantism in post-Reformation England was inherently hostile to the visual arts has a long history and has become embedded across an interdisciplinary scholarship and within popular consciousness. While more recent historiography addresses numerous exceptions to this prevailing trend, this article provides a new assessment of how English Protestantism in a more positive mood not only came to terms with the image but actively embraced it. In identifying patterns of thinking within a wide body of contemporary comment, we offer a chart in the mode of early modern figurative diagrams to emphasize the diverse criteria that Protestants weighed when considering whether an image was suitable for its intended purpose, from the circumstances of its making and using through audience response to location, medium, subject matter, and patron. In doing so, we stress the importance of historicizing the sense of the terms civil and religious use, which do not map neatly onto a modern reading of secular and sacred spaces. We further illustrate how the criteria of the model operated in practice, through detailed analysis of two extant artworks commissioned by committed Protestants, highlighting keen engagement with pictorial art in theory and in practice. The shift in emphasis from rejection to reconciliation captures the spirit of English Protestantism's negotiation and rapprochement with the image over the period ca. 1560–ca. 1640.

In the November 1922 general election in the two-member seat of Dundee, Winston Churchill, Liberal member of Parliament for the city since 1908, lost his seat to Edwin Scrymgeour (Prohibitionist) and E. D. Morel (Labour). Before 1914, Morel, like Churchill, had been a member of the Liberal Party, and this article compares the political trajectory of Churchill and Morel across the war period in order to understand how their positions had diverged. While still a Liberal in party affiliation in 1922, Churchill was en route back to the Conservative Party, while Morel had become a prominent figure in the Labour Party. In examining this divergence, the aim is to shed light on one of the key issues of British politics in early twentieth-century Britain: the divisions in the Liberal party that undermined its place as one of the two leading political parties. The purpose is not to displace arguments about long-run socioeconomic change undermining the Liberals, nor of the severe impact of total war on Liberal thinking about the scope of state action; rather, it is to use this example to also stress the significance for the party of sharp divergences over war and peace, and more broadly, the conduct of foreign policy.

This article surveys plans that envisioned new leisure uses for derelict landscapes in Britain from about 1966 to 1979. These plans were an attempt to transform areas of Britain in ways that cut across issues ranging from deindustrialization to planning, landscape, environmentalism, industrial heritage, and leisure. The author argues for the importance of the profession of landscape architects in setting the agenda for tackling industrial dereliction. It then shows these issues playing out in three locations: in the Lea Valley, in Stoke-on-Trent, and in Telford New Town. Derelict landscapes were a visual manifestation of the various crises that continue to structure historians’ accounts of the 1970s, but the author shows how the response to the issue was characterized by an almost utopian optimism that these problems could be resolved in a way that would stimulate new forms of living.

Founded in 1760, the Cambridge Botanic Garden was designed to serve the theological interests of the university by developing a collection of living plants from across the globe. Exploring the construction and layout of the garden, its global network, methods of managing information, and the accessibility of the collection during the professorship of Thomas Martyn between 1762 and 1825, this article casts new light on the motivations for founding and managing a botanic garden in Cambridge. It shows how communication structures adapted as the British Empire contracted in the Americas and expanded into Asia and the Pacific, classifying species in the physical garden later inventoried in a series of published catalogues. It suggests that growing interests in natural theology intertwined the university with the expanding British Empire, developing a collection designed to educate students in the influence of divine providence on the vegetable kingdom.