The period from c.718 to c.1000 oversaw the reconquest of a significant part of the Iberian Peninsula by the Kingdom of Asturias (718–910) and its successor in León (910–1037); the study of this process of Reconquista has in recent years focused on two broader social changes: the increasing exploitation of the peasantry, and the eclipse of public power. In the Introduction, I argue that it is necessary to integrate the study of peasant societies with analyses of royal and aristocratic power; reframing the subject in this way, we are able to appreciate the diversity of social experience which characterized both peasant and aristocratic life across the two case studies here examined, Southern Galicia, and the Liébana. I argue that the tenth century must be seen on its own terms, and without the benefit of hindsight, if we are to characterize it fairly. Chapter Two discusses the source material I have used in the elaboration of this thesis, highlighting its uses and problems from a critical perspective. In Chapter Three I show that fluid social structures allowed a family to rise to power from amongst the village inhabitants of the Liébana. Public officials such as counts were not able to impose themselves frequently upon this society. In Chapter Four, I show how a rich and aristocratic family of lay magnates, based in southern Galicia, were major political operators from the ninth century, but only came to exercise significant social influence amongst local society after the construction of the monastery of Celanova in 936. My Conclusion contextualizes these changes; it also argues that more nuanced and less schematic approaches to social relations demonstrate that peasants retained considerable autonomy in this period, and that factional politics influenced the stability of kingship far more than the supposed eclipse of public power.

'Marry - Stitch - Die - or Do Worse' ran a Times newspaper leader in 1857. Yet a significant proportion of the adult female population at this time were surviving without a husband, particularly in London. This thesis focuses on the activities of such women who never married, were deserted or became widowed. Sometimes labelled 'redundant', 'distressed' or 'failed' by their contemporaries, they were frequently unsupported. In the face of substantial barriers to paid employment, this thesis argues that self-employment and small business proprietorship was often a viable option. The evidence presented suggests a somewhat different picture to that often generalised for all middle and upper class women in the nineteenth century - that of retreat into the private sphere of home to become the ‘angel in the house’. A wide variety of sources have been drawn upon to examine women's use of small business proprietorship as a strategy in nineteenth century London, including published diaries, trade cards, opinion pieces, trade directories and insurance records. In addition, it is argued that it is only by following the female proprietor home that we can begin to understand the role of proprietorship in women's work-life strategies. Record linkage has been used to obtain more detailed and consistent information on the families and household's of female proprietors than that available from trade directories or newspaper advertisements. Common stereotypes of women in business in this period relating to age, marital status and so on have been assessed in the light of this evidence. This research has revealed that these stereotypes have some truth in their application to women engaged in the production and typically 'male' trades but that such trades represent only a small fraction of the experience and activities of female proprietors.

Choosing to Run: A History of Athletics and Gender in Kenya, c. 1940s – 1980s explores the history of gender and athletics in Kenya, with focus on the Rift Valley Province, from the onset of late colonial rule in the 1940s through the professionalisation of the sport during the last decades of the twentieth century. The first two empirical chapters provide a history of athletics during the colonial period. The first highlights the continuity of ideas about sport and masculinity that were developed in nineteenth century Britain and were subsequently perpetuated by the men in charge of colonial sport in Kenya. The next chapter considers how pre-colonial divisions of labour and power within Rift Valley communities informed local peoples' cultures of running. The absence of women’s running was not only the result of sexism translated from the British metropole to its Kenyan colony but also of pre-existing divisions of responsibilities of indigenous Kenyan men and women into separate, gendered domains. The second half of the thesis considers the impact of social change within women’s athletics internationally and of marriage, childbirth and education locally on female runners in the Rift Valley during the post-colonial period. Most women abandoned athletics once they reached maturity. Those who sought to do otherwise, as the final chapter argues, found that they could only do so by replicating the prototype of masculine runners that had already been established. Later, after the professionalisation of running allowed women to become wealthy, female patrons took this a step further by providing resources to those in their community in need, setting themselves up as 'Big (Wo)men'. This thesis uses athletics to reveal how gender relations and gender norms have evolved and the benefits and challenges that the sport has brought both to individual Kenyan women and their communities.

This thesis examines attitudes toward infertility in early modern England and colonial New England from c.1620 to 1720 through infertility’s representation in contemporary medical, religious, and literary sources. This study uses an expanded definition of infertility, namely a 'spectrum of infertility', to capture the tensions that arose during periods of infertility and experiences of reproductive failure such as miscarriages, stillbirths, monstrous births, and false conceptions. A spectrum, more than a modern definition, more accurately represents the range of bodily conditions experienced by early modern women and men that indicated reproductive disorder in the body; by extension, the language of infertility expressed fears about disorder in times of social, religious, and political crisis in early modern society. The two societies' relationship was often described through reproductive language and the language of infertility appears in both societies when order - within the body, within marriages, or within and between communities - was threatened. This thesis contributes to a growing body of scholarship on infertility in early modern society by analysing its presence in communications within and between early modern England and colonial New England. It argues that understanding the English origins of the colonists' attitudes toward infertility is fundamental both to understanding the close connection between the two societies and to providing context for the colonists' perceptions about their encounters with new lands, bodies, environments, and reasons for emigration. As a result, this thesis seeks to break new ground in providing an overview of social, medical, and cultural reactions in both England and New England, demonstrating that similar language and tropes were used in both regions to communicate concerns about infertility. Exploring the interplay between the many sources addressing this health issue more accurately represents the complexity of early modern attitudes toward infertility, and the intimacy of the relationship between the fledgling New England colonies and their metaphorical Mother England.

Este trabalho compara a atuação e a vida pública de dois intelectuais que tiveram um papel de destaque em meio às discussões que trataram da modernização do Brasil, bem como compara os projetos de país com os quais se envolveram durante as décadas de 20 e 30. A partir da análise das atividades do Departamento de Cultura da prefeitura paulistana entre 1934 e 38 chefiada pelo modernista Mário de Andrade e da vida e obra do escritor e editor Monteiro Lobato, pretende-se avaliar a postura que assumiram diante da modernização inexorável de uma sociedade agrária e exportadora como a brasileira, de reação e defensiva por arte do primeiro, e de adesão ativa ao modelo norte-americano de sociedade afluente a de mercado interno pelo segundo. Defende também que a coerência interna do modelo proposto por Lobato frutificou tanto na esfera pública, tendo o Estado assumido várias de suas bandeiras como a causa da siderurgia e do petróleo, quanto entre os indivíduos, na medida em que a \"pedagogia desenvolvimentista\" que elaborou, se não chegou a resultados materiais expressivos, a formação embutida nela engendrou a geração de militantes políticos das mais audaciosos que já houve no país, encorajando-os indiretamente à ação armada. / This thesis compares the action and public life os two intellectuals that played a significative roll among discussions about modernization of Brazil and projects for the country that involved them during 20\'s and 30\'s years. From the analysis of the activities of Departamento de Cultura of São Paulo city\'s prefecture between 1934 and 1938 headed by modernist author Mário de Andrade, and of life and works of writer and publisher Monteiro Lobato, is attempted to value their attitudes facing the inexorable modernization of an agrarian and exporter society like the brazilian one, reactive and defensive by the first of them, and of active adhesion to north-american affluent society model and to inner market by the other. It defends also that inner coherence of Lobato\'s proposed model fructified in public sphare, having State of Vargas assumed several of his causes like steel industry and oil, and among individuals, in so far as the \"developmentist pedagogy\" that elaborated, if it did\'n reach expressive material results, political education inlaid in it engendered a generation of the boldest and most combative militants in history of the country, by it indirectly encouraged to armed fight.

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop the theoretical concept of social movement momentum by examining the origins, framing strategies, and organizational dynamics of the East Timor transnational social movement. To accomplish this, in-depth interviews of twenty activists and intellectuals involved in the East Timor movement from 1975-1999 were conducted and examined using qualitative data analysis methods. Specifically, comparative historical methods utilizing grounded theory and the phenomenological approach were employed. This study fills a gap in the social movement literature by engaging and expanding the main theoretical debates in sociology over movement mobilization, political outcomes, movement emotions, solidarity, and movement framing. These debates, along with the theoretical concept of social movement momentum as developed in this dissertation, are used to explain and analyze interviewees' first-hand accounts of the East Timor campaigns. . This resulted in a series of successes that represent the peak of the momentum in the East Timor movement. In sum, this study aids researchers in understanding how the successes and failures of social movement activity can be better explained using the theoretical concept of social movement momentum. By analyzing the significance of momentum in a movement post hoc, this study contributes a more nuanced understanding of how social movements create social change. / by Shane Gunderson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

This thesis is the first oral history study of English rugby union. Through personally conducted interviews, it focuses on the experiences of men who played rugby union for England in the post-war, amateur era, and considers what they can tell us about both the sport and the society of which it was a part. The period it covers begins with the end of the Second World War, in 1945, and ends when rugby union ceased to be an amateur sport, in 1995. These fifty years were a time of both change and continuity, and it is a primary concern of this thesis to consider the extent of each in both rugby union and in wider society. Through looking at, in particular, English rugby union’s links with education, its relationship with work in a period in which its players were amateur, and its place on the spectrum of class, this study demonstrates, above all, the durability of rugby union’s social core, even in the midst of outward change to the sport. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to the historiography of both British sport and post-war Britain more generally, arguing for consideration of social continuity among a field largely dominated by notions of change. It also constitutes a unique study of a particular group of middle-class men, and demonstrates that sport – and oral history – can add much to our understanding of post-war social history.

Limited legal reforms took place in England and Wales in 1967 that partially decriminalised private, adult, consensual homosexual acts. These reforms were not implemented in Scotland until 1980. This thesis documents the reasons why Scotland had to wait until 1980 to achieve legal equity with England and Wales and suggests that the combination of cultural and institutional silences regarding legal reform and an immediate valorization of the independent Scots Law system in the post-Wolfenden era hindered any moves for the 1967 legislation to be applied to Scotland. This thesis then examines the life experiences of 24 gay and bisexual males who had experience of living in Scotland during the period when all homosexual acts were outlawed. This thesis offers an examination of how continued criminalisation coupled with the influence of negative and stigmatising discourses influenced self-perception and identity formation amongst gay and bisexual men. The thesis finds that the operation and dominance of negative discourses regarding homosexuality, coupled with the limited public demand for legal reform had significant implications for the identity formation and attitudes among the gay and bisexual men who participated in this research.

This study draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with seventeen partnered mothers in Newcastle upon Tyne. All the study households contained a full time wage earner and had an income between 60 and 85% of the national median household income. The aims of the study were: 1) to establish how interviewees managed life on a limited income, both financially and emotionally 2) to investigate how this was connected to sources of household income, negotiations with their partner, and personal beliefs about money and gender 3) to discover how these women experienced and understood their own material deprivation and their role as household financial managers. Previous studies of intra-household income have looked at the whole population or those on benefit, but mothers in this income bracket had never been studied before. Moreover, after a decade of tax credit reform and women-into-work policies significant changes in the financial circumstances of this group of households seemed likely. An approach which placed the lived experience of the interviewees at the centre of the study was taken, rooted in the feminist qualitative tradition. A new method for revealing the material deprivation of individual household members was also pioneered. The key finding is that women in this income group were likely to be materially poor, although living in households officially defined as ‘not poor’, and the way they related to their money is similar to poor women in previous studies. This resulted both from the general inadequacy of household incomes and from the way resources were distributed within the household, with women often at the bottom of the spending hierarchy. Contrary to the findings of most previous studies, women did not ‘tag’ certain streams of household income, such as reserving Child Benefit for children; instead they ensured children were protected from material deprivation by their own sacrifices, sacrifices not always shared with their male partner. The lower the household income, the more likely this was to happen. Other findings include widespread desire to undertake paid work if it fitted around caring responsibilities, a marked decline in the proportion of household income from male earnings, a strong tendency for the mother to be the sole manager of household finances and therefore the carrier of resulting stress, and a powerful discourse that men could not be trusted with money which further increased women’s burden of worry. The women interviewed had a high level of financial skill, demonstrating many strategies to make money stretch further, but usually resources were simply inadequate to meet all household needs. Policy recommendations recognise the vital importance of tax credits and argue for increasing household incomes through supporting good quality paid work that fits with caring responsibilities. It is argued that better measurement of intra-household income distribution is also needed. The cultural issues underpinning the unequal burden of self-sacrifice within families are harder to tackle, but some suggestions are made.

The noncognitive features of pupils’ experience of school are important: they can affect academic attainment; they have an independent influence on outcomes in later life; and to the extent that they are related to pupils’ wellbeing they have intrinsic importance. I present four empirical papers on the emotional health, friendships, and behaviour of pupils in English secondary schools. The first two empirical papers present the results of a large pragmatic controlled trial of an intervention intended to promote pupils’ resilience and mental health. I estimate the intervention impact on symptoms of poor mental health, behaviour, absence from school, academic attainment, and popularity. I find small and short-lived impacts on depressive symptoms, absence, and popularity, and a small but more lasting impact on academic attainment. I find no impact on anxiety scores or behaviour. The third paper examines behaviour incidents at school. Poor behaviour is a major challenge to the effectiveness of schooling, and the data I have represents a substantial improvement over previous attempts to measure pupil behaviour. I find that demographic characteristics are strong predictors of the number of incidents per pupil, but they do not explain much of the overall variance in incidents. Incident rates per lesson vary strongly by context within the school, suggesting that schools could influence behaviour by modifying the environment. However, a pupil’s rank in terms of behaviour is remarkably persistent over different contexts and through time, suggesting that the tendency to misbehave is a stable noncognitive trait. The fourth paper looks in detail at the impact of time of day and day of the week on behaviour. I find that the strong and persistent day-of-the-week and time-of-day patterns I observe are not due to selective reporting or misreporting, and are not due to endogenous timetabling. Since schedule adjustment could be almost costless, it could be highly cost effective even if the impact on behaviour were much smaller than estimated in my observational data.