Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 Memory, Materiality and the Landscape

This book offers the first systematic study of the multiple and contested ways in which protest is remembered. Drawing on work in social and cultural history, cultural and historical geography, psychology, anthropology, critical heritage studies, and memory studies, Remembering Protest focuses on the dynamic and lived nature of past protests, asking how conflicted communities and individuals made sense of and mobilized protest past in forging the future. Written by several of the leading historians and historical geographers of protest in early modern and modern Britain, the chapters span the period from 1500 to c.1850 while also speaking to the politics of past protests in the present. In so doing, it also offers the first showcase of the variety of approaches that comprises the vibrant and intellectually fecund ‘new protest history’. Empirically rich but conceptually sophisticated, this book will appeal to those with an interest in protest history, and early modern and modern British history, and historical geography more generally. 

Remembering protest; Carl J. Griffin and Briony McDonagh.- Remembering Mousehold Heath; Nicola Whyte.- Landscape, memory and protest in the Midlands Rising of 1607; Briony McDonagh and Joshua Rodda.- Relating early modern depositions; Heather Falvey.- Remembering protest in the Forest of Dean c. 1612-1834; Simon Sandall.- Remembering protest in the late-Georgian plebeian home; Ruth Mather.- Prosecution, precedence and official memory: judicial responses and perceptions of Swing in Norfolk; Rose Wallis.- The politics of ‘protest heritage’; Steve Poole.- Memory and the work of forgetting: telling protest in the English countryside; Carl J. Griffin.-  Afterword; Andy Wood.

Carl J. Griffin is Reader in Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. His publications include The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (2012) and Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700-1850 (2014). He is editor of Southern History and is co-editor of Rural History.

Briony McDonagh is Lecturer in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Hull, UK. Her publications include Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700 - 1830 (2017) and Hull: Culture, History, Place (2017). She chairs the Historical Geography Research Group (RGS-IBG) and co-edits Historical Geography.