This thesis explores the nature of the second folk revival in the North East of England. While there have been several major studies of the various national folk revivals during the 1950s, '60s and '70s, there is a paucity of scholarly accounts viewed through a regional lens. This study therefore builds on a common perception of North Eastern regional particularity to establish the ways in which the folk revival as experienced by its members within the region was distinct from that detailed in the literature on the wider (inter-)national folk scene. Using comparative examples drawn from the regional and international folk movements, the thesis contextualizes and differentiates the general trends within the second revival as a whole and its North Eastern manifestation. There are some evident discrepancies relating, for example, to levels of political involvement in the respective folk scenes but also broad similarities in chronological developments. These trends are explored through a number of themes, beginning with the weaving of a constructed regional folk-cultural identity out of a diversity of ethnic, local and occupational strands. Secondly, the common assumption that the North East is a region with a rare continuity of traditions is interrogated, alongside an acknowledgement that this was a time of rapid social change, mobility and dislocation from older cultural practices. The basic dichotomy of 'mediator' and `mediated' is questioned and found wanting, particularly in a region where young revivalists were rarely far — temporally, geographically or socially - from the source of their tradition. The ways in which the media represented and altered folk traditions, and how these representations were used to build regional consciousness is considered, as are the 1960s developments in heritage and tourism which saw vernacular culture taking on a much greater significance in the region's economy. Further, celebratory imagery is shown to have a long history in musical representations of the region, but with a contemporary focus on stoicism in the face of decline. Finally, the reasons behind the folklorists' imperative to locate the `authentic' are sought in relative degrees of alienation from contemporary society, resulting in a dissolution of the barriers between 'genuine' and 'invented' tradition.

This study explores the themes of continuity and change in twentieth-century British cultural history, particularities of place and regional identity in the North of England, and the cultural transfer of North American popular music in Britain between 1956 and 1965. By means of a comparative historical investigation of youth culture and popular music in Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne, the work engages with existing debate among historians surrounding the nature and extent of cultural change for the period usually referred to as 'The Sixties', and whether or not it is possible to speak of a 'Cultural Revolution'. Spanning the years between the initial impact of rock 'n' roll and the immediate aftermath of the Beat Boom of 1963-64, a phenomenon described by one commentator as representing 'perhaps the North's greatest single cultural 'putsch?', the thesis examines the role of urban and regional identity in the process of cultural production, reproduction, and consumption. Theoretical insights derived from the associated disciplines of sociology and cultural studies are employed which offer an opportunity for a novel and dynamic analysis and interpretation of the empirical historical evidence. This research is especially pertinent at a time when historians are increasingly looking to the regional and inter-regional, as opposed to the national and international, for explanations of continuity and change. There is a burgeoning interest in the history of popular culture inspired by the transition of post-modern society from one of production to consumption. Cultural and economic theorists have called for more historical investigation to inform current debates regarding the post-modern city's ability to attract a 'creative class' as a means towards urban regeneration. This study informs these debates by bringing the above themes together in a unique historical analysis of cultural continuity and change, Northern identity, and popular music.

This thesis explores the ways in which seventeenth-century nonconformist writers used the Puritan model of spiritual autobiography to record their individual forms of dissent. Spiritual autobiography is read against the political and religious turmoil that existed in England in the aftermath of the Civil Wars and during the subsequent Restoration. Through a study of four dissenting writers I show how a genre seen usually as a record of spiritual crisis and ultimate reconciliation, was also used as a way of communicating gendered, psychological, domestic, and religious dissent by writers from the extreme margins of society. The argument differs from other studies of spiritual autobiography in that I situate the genre beyond the strict confines of soteriology and adopt an interdisciplinary approach that deploys literary, historical, and theoretical readings. I draw upon the theories of Jean-François Lyotard in order to illustrate a mood analogous to postmodernism apparent in the nonconformist psyche as well as to contextualise the wider dissent shown to exist in the seventeenth century. By applying Lyotard’s concepts of Svelteness, competing Phrase Regimens, and the Differend to spiritual autobiographies by John Bunyan, Agnes Beaumont, Laurence Clarkson, and Richard Norwood this study raises questions with regard to assumptions associated with the genre, the context in which they were written, and so presents new readings of often marginal texts.

This thesis investigates the life and work of six eighteenth-century writers, two male and four female. It explores their experience of depression through their letters and other autobiographical material, and examines the ways in which they represent melancholy in their poetry and prose. The subject of Chapter Two is Thomas Gray, whose real life persona as the lonely intellectual is also identifiable in his poetry. The Scottish poet Robert Fergusson is studied in Chapter Three. Fergusson’s lively and vigorous mind was shattered in the months leading up to his death, during which time some of his writing became darkly nihilistic. Chapter Four looks at Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, a lifelong depressive who often wrote about her feelings of despair in her poetry. Chapter Five explores Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was a courageous and controversial figure, but despite her resilience, on occasion in her letters she reveals her vulnerability and susceptibility to low spirits, a mood which is sometimes expressed in her creative writing. Sarah Scott, whose life and work have not yet been considered in relation to the subject of melancholy, is examined in Chapter Six. Her novel includes several low-spirited and depressed female characters who are continually seeking asylum from a hostile world. Chapter Seven analyses Charlotte Smith, a mother of twelve children whose unhappy marriage ended in separation. Smith wrote extensively about her depression in her letters, prefaces, poetry and novels. This study shows that the women in particular use their writing on melancholy and depression to express their discontent with the confined way in which they are often expected to live out their lives.

This thesis discusses the development of design history in Britain from the 1970s to 2012, arguing that it is a clear example of a network of relationships, intersections of ideas, approaches and intellectual influences that are representative of the complexity of current academic practice. This study engages with discourses and debates concerning attempts to define academic recognition in a subject area that resists drawing boundaries and is by its very nature multidisciplinary. The period with which this study is concerned is characterised by considerable change in society, the approach to education and academic endeavour, and the consumption of histories. All of these changes have significance for the formation and development of design history, in addition to its contribution to academic practice and its impact beyond narrow scholarly circles. This thesis acknowledges that the overlapping and interweaving of threads of knowledge, methodology, approaches and paradigms is a feature of contemporary academic practice, and applies the concept of communities of practice to discussion of the multiple types of scholarship that have constituted design history. In doing this no claim is made for design history as a distinct academic discipline but rather it is discussed as a much broader academic network. Additionally, the thesis offers an evaluation of the role of this network, including the Design History Society as a distinct community of practice, in the context of developments in education, academic changes, museums and publishing. This leads to a consideration of the various arenas in which the products of design history are consumed thus demonstrating the importance and impact of the network outside academia.

This thesis looks at design practice as a method of investigating the relationship between design and identity in interwar Britain; in particular it considers design from the perspective of practice, not solely as the final object or the story of the maker. For it is in the process of making that the varied aspects of design as it is practiced are configured to create the greatest impact on everyday life. This research proposes that the quest to construct one’s identity, in particular a feminine identity, can be demonstrated by the making of goods and objects through the traditionally feminine practice of sewing and needlework, specifically those made at home. It argues that home sewing, as an understudied everyday practice, was intrinsically bound up with ideas of who women were, how they imagined themselves, and how their feminine identities were represented. Between the wars, home-sewing was an integral daily practice for middle-class women that left indelible memories of not only the items made, but of specific types of sewing and design practice, who it was made for and how it was used. It also explores these specific practices during a period of enormous change- culturally, technologically and politically – and particularly important for this study are the themes of femininity and domesticity, as well as the boundaries of private and public life in relation to modernity. Methodologically it focuses on sewing practices by utilizing mass media, specific objects and oral histories to elucidate this. This thesis considers the breadth and extent of home sewing as an everyday practice aligning individual narratives, original source material and theoretical analysis.

Working within the field of nineteenth century transatlantic history this thesis takes as its starting point British attempts to engage with the American Civil War. It emphasizes the historiographical oversights within the current scholarship on this topic which have tended to downplay the significance of antebellum British commentators in constructing an image of the United States for their readers which was highly regionalized, and which have failed to recognize the antebellum heritage of the tropes deployed during the Civil War to describe the Union and Confederacy. Drawing on the accounts of over fifty British pre-war commentators and supplemented by the political press, monthly magazines and personal correspondence, in addition to significant amounts of Civil War propaganda this thesis contends that the understanding of the British literate classes of the conflict was part of a continuum. It equally emphasizes that by measuring the reception of texts among the literate public it is possible to ascertain the levels of British understanding of different aspects of the American nation and its sections in this period. It aims to demonstrate that any attempt to understand the conflict in a British context must adequately reflect the long-standing image of the United States as being characterized by discrete regions with particular social, cultural, economic and political identities. At the same time, it makes clear that pre-war discussions of the United States as a nation did not preclude the use of sectional identities; in fact the tropes of the pre-war United States themselves came to be highly sectionalized during the conflict. This thesis, therefore, places the American Civil War in both a transatlantic framework and emphasizes the extensive chronological span of British engagements with American sectionalism in order to explain the occasionally counter-intuitive and often confusing attitude of the British towards the conflict.

This work investigates the development of an environmental consciousness and environmental activism in Britain, 1945-1975. The 1970s have been described as ‘the decade of the environment’ and was the period when the modern environmental movement emerged. In this thesis, the environmental movement is considered to be a broad network of individuals and pressure groups engaging in collective action with shared environmental beliefs. Much of the work on the movement has ignored or played down the importance of the post-war period on its development. This project challenges that, dealing less with the movement itself and more with the developments which led to its emergence: through analysing events like the great London smog of 1952 and the Torrey Canyon oil spill of 1967, as well as through television programmes, this thesis traces the post-war influences of the movement and the growth of environmental awareness. Environmental pressure groups form part of the movement and a number of them are studied here, such as the Newcastle-based group Save Our City from Environmental Mess and the London-based group Commitment, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the National Smoke Abatement Society. From analysing the resources of these groups and the political processes within which they appear (resource mobilisation theory and political process theory) a better understanding is made about their successes, failures and how they fed into a growing environmental awareness. Television programmes from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – notably natural history programmes such as Look, Zoo Quest, Doctor Who and Doomwatch – also helped an environmental consciousness develop. In marrying together these different issues, this work provides an original contribution to knowledge, and assesses some of the influences which led to the environmental movement emerging in 1970s Britain.

This is a study of the mercantile organisation of the British fur trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The thesis seeks to answer two over-arching questions. Firstly, why did the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) maintain its Charter and acquire a monopoly of the British fur trade during a period of significant trade liberalisation in British overseas commerce? Secondly, why did London remain the European emporium of the North-Atlantic fur trade despite the rise of the provincial outports in other branches of Britain’s colonial and foreign trades? In seeking to answer these questions, the thesis explores each stage of the British fur trade in order to establish the factors that prolonged the continuation of the London mercantilist system in the trade. Underpinning these explorations is a detailed study of the trade statistics contained within the British customs’ records, as well as, from sale, purchase, and employee ledgers, and correspondence contained within the HBC Archives. The thesis presents the argument that developments occurring on both sides of the North-Atlantic World supported the continuation of the mercantilist system in the fur trade, and that the trade was actually a more robust model of that system in 1821 than it had been in 1783. The factors that led the British government to grant the HBC a de facto monopoly of the British fur trade in 1821 were multifaceted and it was not, as much of the existing literature suggests, a simple business merger. Ecological constraints in North America limited the potential for growth in the trade and made the enterprise ever more specialised, which served to discourage new entrants and to increase pressure on existing participants. Limited prospects for expansion and the presence of the rival North West Company (NWC) restrained the critiques of British manufacturers towards the HBC. From 1815, violent confrontations between the HBC and NWC on the frozen frontiers of the British North American Empire increased political scrutiny of the fur trade and led metropolitan interests to conclude that a single company with a monopoly of the fur trade was preferable to the injurious effects of unrestrained free market competition. The continued importance of the re-export trade and the buying preferences of the consumers who purchased the trade’s high-value products kept the trade centred on the metropolitan economy and restricted its proliferation to other British ports. Finally, the role of Cain and Hopkins’ ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ proved crucial, as the total absence of provincial opposition allowed the future of the fur trade to be solely shaped by the hands of London’s commercial elite.

This thesis is the first major study of organised Irish nationalism in the North East of England, set against the wider context of events in Britain and Ireland, from the division that followed Parnell’s fall in 1890 until shortly after the foundation of the Irish Free State and the Irish Civil War. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the largest ethnic group in Britain before the Second World War – the Irish. It is also an important regional study, revealing the vitality and diversity of the North East’s expression of Irish nationalism that was probably not equalled anywhere else in England and Wales, other than in London. That vitality was manifested in the raising of the Tyneside Irish Brigade for the British Army in 1914. The Tyneside Irish was the crowning achievement of the pre-1918 Irish nationalist organisations in the North East, and arguably in Britain, demonstrating the organisations’ commitment both to John Redmond and to the region, where so many Irish migrants had settled. Irish nationalism’s diversity in the North East was embodied in the Irish Labour Party, which, alone in England, took root on Tyneside, and sought to blend class and ethnic issues at a time of national crisis in Ireland. This organisation casts light on the complex issue of the transference of working-class Irish Catholic allegiance from nationalism to the labour movement in Britain, and, therefore, in the assimilation of that community into the wider British community. Though none of these nationalist organisations has left any extensive archive, this thesis utilises Irish and English manuscript sources, and a wide array of Catholic, labour, and regional newspapers, to demonstrate that these organisations were not only an important part of the history of the Irish in the North East, but also of the North East itself.