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Modern Britain with James Vernon

Thu, May 08

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Modern Britain with James Vernon

Join NACBS for a discussion about writing history textbooks featuring a special focus on James Vernon’s revised edition of Modern Britain: 1750 to the Present. Erika Rappaport will join James Vernon to discuss the challenges of crafting broad historical narratives...

Modern Britain with James Vernon
Modern Britain with James Vernon

Time & Location

May 08, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT

Modern Britain with James Vernon

About the event

Join NACBS for a discussion about writing history textbooks featuring a special focus on James Vernon’s revised edition of Modern Britain: 1750 to the Present. Erika Rappaport will join James Vernon to discuss the challenges of crafting broad historical narratives, questions about depth and inclusivity, audience expectations, and pedagogical concerns.  


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"This wide-ranging introduction to the history of modern Britain extends from the eighteenth century to the present day. Vernon structures his compelling narrative around the rise, fall and reinvention of liberal ideas of how markets, governments and empires should work. In this new edition, Vernon expands on four important themes: the history of the environment and climate crisis; global pandemics; the history of minoritised people of colour; and shifting ideas of democracy and sovereignty. This textbook offers a new global history of Britain, demonstrating how the world shaped the course of Britain's modern history. Richly illustrated with figures and maps, the book features textboxes, further reading guides, highlighted key terms and a glossary. A supplementary online package includes a study guide with discussion questions and links to additional primary sources. This textbook is an essential resource for introductory courses on the history of modern Britain."


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James Vernon is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Politics and the People (1993), Hunger. A Modern History (2007), Distant Strangers. How Britain Became Modern (2014), and the last volume of the Cambridge History of Britain, Modern Britain: 1750 to the Present (2017), a revised second edition of which has just been published.  He is editor of Rereading the Constitution (1996) as well as co-editor (with Simon Gunn) of The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain (2011) and (with Colleen Lye and Christopher Newfield) “The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University” in Representations (2011).  He is editor of "The Berkeley Series in British Studies" with University of California Press, and has served on the editorial boards of Social History, Journal of British Studies and Twentieth Century British History.  His work has been supported by the British Academy, the ESRC, the ACLS, the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation.  He is currently writing a book about the reconfigured forms of racial capitalism in Britain after empire told though Heathrow Airport.  


Erika Rappaport is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches courses on Modern British and imperial history, women’s and gender history, and global histories of capitalism and empire.  She received her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University in 1993.  Her most significant publications include Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton 2000) and a Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017), which won the American Historical Association’s 2018 Jerry Bentley Prize for the best book dealing with global or world-scale history. She is also the co-editor of Consuming Behaviours: Identities, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain (Bloomsbury 2015) and editor of A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Revolution and Empire (Bloomsbury 2022) and co-edited a recent special issue of Global Food History entitled, Provisioning Politics and the Making of Imperial Food Industries (2024).  She recently stepped down as president of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies and has served as the Modern Britain Editor of History Compass, and has been on editorial board of several journals including The Journal of British Studies and Gastronomica. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Whitewashing: How Public Relations Sold the End of Empire, which examines how the British public relations industry managed the process, understanding, and memories of decolonization. 






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