Title: Industrial Revolutionaries

Author: Gavin Weightman

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Price: £20.00

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Industrial Revolution

Category: Industrial Revolution

The so-called "industrial revolution" is most commonly presented as a history of machines or a relentless process of innovation that sprang from a new kind of scientific thought forged in the eighteenth century. But, as it emerges in Gavin Weightman's engrossing social history, machines are mere gadgets unless there are people to make good use of them. "The Industrial Revolutionaries" interweaves accounts of the achievements of giants such as Trevithick, Stevenson, Watt, wedgwood, Daimler, Bessemer and Edison with lesser-known characters who carried industrialism from one nation to another.

Title: Slumming

Author: Seth Koven

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Price: £11.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Poverty

Category: 19th Century History

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. "Slumming" elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted - and continue to confront - in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

Title: The Lunar Men

Author: Jenny Uglow

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Price: £9.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: James Watt

Category: 19th Century History

Led by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin), the Lunar Society of Birmingham were a group of eighteenth-century amateur experimenters who met monthly on the Monday night nearest to the full moon. Echoing to the thud of pistons and the wheeze of snorting engines, Jenny Uglow's vivid and swarming group portrait brings to life the inventors, artisans and tycoons who shaped and fired the modern world. The group included James Watt; Josiah Wedgewood; Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton.

Title: Voices of the People

Author: Robert G. Hall

Publisher: Merlin Press

Price: £15.95

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website:

Category: 19th Century History

An examination of Chartist democracy viewed 'from below' Considers which groups were more and less vocal in the movement, how political identity intertwined with craft, ethnicity, gender and class. Questions myths, memories, and identities and will appeal to students of history, sociology and culture challenges the approach of Gareth Stedman-Jones, Patrick Joyce and James Vernon This study explores the development and decline of Chartism as a coherent political identity between 1830 and 1860 and illustrates the creation of Chartist identity from the perspective of plebeian intellectuals and activists in Ashton-under-Lyne and other militant localities of Greater Manchester and Lancashire.

Educational Websites

Standards Site, BBC History, PBS Online, Open Directory Project, Virtual Library,
Education Forum, History GCSE, Design & Technology, Learn History, Music Teacher Resource,
Freepedia, Teach It, Science Active, Geography IST, Brighton Photographers, Sussex Photo History,
Compton History, Universal Teacher, English Teaching, English Online, History Learning Site,
History on the Net, Black History, Greenfield History, School History, HistoryWorld, I Love History,
E-HELP, Ed Podesta Blog, Macgregorish History, Historiasiglo20, Sintermeerten, ICT4LT

News and Search

Guardian Unlimited, Times Online, Daily Telegraph, The Independent, New York Times,
Washington Post, BBC, CNN, Yahoo News, New Scientist, Google News, Channel 4, ZDNet,
Google, Excite, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, AOL Search, Hotbot, Metacrawler, Netscape, Ask, Search,
Go, Looksmart, Dogpile, Raging Search, All the Web, Kartoo, Search Engine Watch, About