Search results for ""Author Paul Salveson""

A landmark new history of the great English county of Lancashire, exploring its people’s impact on Britain and beyond. This popular history explores the cultural heritage and identity of Lancashire, stretching from the Mersey to the Lake District. Paul Salveson charts the county’s transformation from a largely agricultural region noted for its religious learning into the Industrial Revolution’s powerhouse, as an emerging self-confident bourgeoisie drove economic growth. This capital boom came with a cultural blossoming, creating today’s Lancashire. Industrialists strongly committed to the arts endowed galleries and museums, producing a diverse world of science, technology, music and literature. Lancashire developed a distinct business culture, but this was also the birthplace of the world co-operative movement, and the heart of democracy campaigns including Chartism and women’s suffrage. Lancashire has generally welcomed incomers, who have long helped to inform its distinctive identity: fourteenth-century Flemish weavers; nineteenth-century Irish immigrants and Jewish refugees; and, more recently, ‘New Lancastrians’ from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. This long-overdue book explores contemporary Lancastrian culture, following modern upheavals and Lancashire’s fragmentation compared with its old rival Yorkshire. What future awaits the 6 million people of this rich historic region?

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The line from Settle to Carlisle is one of the world's great rail journeys. It carves its way through the magnificent landscape of the Yorkshire Dales - where it becomes the highest main line in England - descending to Cumbria's lush green Eden Valley with its view of the Pennines and Lakeland fells. But the story of the line is even more enthralling. From its earliest history the line fostered controversy: it probably should never have been built, arising from a political dispute between two of the largest and most powerful railway companies in the 1860s. Its construction, through some of the most wild and inhospitable terrain in England, was a Herculean task. Tragic accidents affected those who built, worked and travelled the line. After surviving the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, the line faced almost certain closure in the 1980s, only to be saved by an unexpected last-minute reprieve. This book describes the history behind the inception and creation of the line; the challenges of constructing the 72-mile railway and its seventeen viaducts and fourteen tunnels; threat of closure in the mid-1980s and the campaign to save it, and finally, the line today and its future.

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