In January 1956, the home of Martin Luther King, the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, was bombed; by December, the black citizens’ campaign had ended segregation on the city’s buses. In this survey of 1956, Simon Hall describes how frustration with the post-war order caused ordinary people across the world – in places as far-flung as Algeria, Eastern Europe, South Africa, Cyprus and Cuba – to speak out, take to the streets and sometimes die in the bid for greater freedoms.

Covering the centuries between Magna Carta and the English Revolution, and connecting local and national history, Rollison's social and political study focuses on Cirencester, a town that made significant interventions in national constitutional development.

Until 1958 the daughters of Britain's aristocracy would curtsey to the Queen, a rite of passage that formed the highlight of a season of society parties in an elaborate, strictly controlled mating game. Part memoir, part social history, this book interviews the surviving debutantes to show how this arcane, archaic ritual was finally swept away, opening up their lives in new and unexpected directions.

On 4 August 1914 Ludlow's mayor stood on the Town Hall balcony and read the declaration of war to an expectant crowd. Illustrated with historic photographs, this book charts the war's impact on Shropshire towns and villages such as Bridgnorth, Clun and Much Wenlock: the men who fought; the women who replaced them on the farms; the training camps and convalescent homes; and civilian morale.

Examining ‘unofficial justice as visited upon malefactors by the collective actions of private citizens’, Stephen Banks gives a scholarly account of public shaming rituals, or ‘rough music’, and the punishments imposed for crimes such as wife-beating or informing.