Conspiracy on Cato Street

A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency

London

British and Irish history

About

Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, and a Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine Book of the Year. On the night of 23 February 1820, twenty-five impoverished craftsmen assembled in an obscure stable in Cato Street, London, with a plan to massacre the whole British cabinet at its monthly dinner. The Cato Street Conspiracy was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the British state since Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It ended in betrayal, arrest, and trial, and with five conspirators publicly hanged and decapitated for treason. Vic Gatrell explores this dramatic yet neglected event in unprecedented detail through spy reports, trial interrogations, letters, speeches, songs, maps, and images. Attending to the ‘real lives’ and habitats of the men, women, and children involved, he throws fresh light on the troubled and tragic world of Regency Britain, and on one of the most compelling and poignant episodes in British history.

Key Features

• Debunks our fantasies about Regency England and presents a compelling, gritty alternative

• Uses exceptionally rich source material to present sympathetic portraits of the would-be terrorists

• Gives a voice to the impoverished, disenfranchised, and cruelly exploited London underclass

About the Author

Reviews

‘Gatrell’s intense study of the men’s lives - and what brought them to believe that violently overthrowing the government could solve their problems - is forensic and vivid in its detail.’

Stephen Bates, BBC History Magazine

‘a panoramic and thrilling study of an overlooked part of British history.’

Catherine Ostler, Daily Telegraph

‘This is micro-history at its richest and its most penetrating. More than giving us a social history in a few lives, Gatrell has told us a human story with the depth of a novel.’

D. H. Robinson, The Critic

Vic Gatrell’s previous books include The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People (1997) which was awarded the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society; City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2009) which was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize; and The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London’s Golden Age (2013) which was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

9781108799904

Paperback

AUD $53.99 / NZD $57.99

Available August 2023

Naoko Wake, Michigan State University

Key Features

• The first book-length study of U.S. casualties of the 1945 atomic bombings

• Draws on fascinating oral histories of Japanese and Korean American survivors of the atomic bombings to tell a story that is peoplecentered rather than nationcentered

• Provides a gendered analysis to the history of nuclear weaponry

About

American Survivors is a fresh and moving historical account of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, breaking new ground not only in the study of World War II but also in the public understanding of nuclear weaponry. A truly trans-Pacific history, American Survivors challenges the dualistic distinction between Americans-as-victors and Japanese-as-victims often assumed by scholars of the nuclear war. Using more than 130 oral histories of Japanese American and Korean American survivors, their family members, community activists, and physicians - most of which appear here for the first time - Naoko Wake reveals a cross-national history of war, illness, immigration, gender, family, and community from intimately personal perspectives. American Survivors brings to light the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that connects, as much as separates, people across time and national boundaries.

Advance praise

American history About the Author

‘Naoko Wake’s American Survivors is a beautifully written portrayal of the traumas suffered by atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She offers lyrical depictions of the visceral experience and the profound significance of silence. The work also foregrounds the cross-national and gendered experience of being hibakusha and the ways in which they and their allies engaged in transnational forms of activism.’

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Professor of Asian American Studies, and Director of the Humanities Center, University of California, Irvine

‘This deeply researched, sensitively analyzed, and beautifully written book rests on a source base of 132 interviews with American atomic-bomb survivors. Wake respectfully shows the range of ways that these individuals navigated their complicated lives and made sense of the enormous tragedy at their center.’

Laura Hein, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor

of History

Naoko Wake is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. A historian of gender, sexuality, and illness in the Pacific region, she has authored Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism and co-authored with Shinpei Takeda Hiroshima/Nagasaki Beyond the Ocean. She was born and raised in Japan.

9781009226417

Hardback

AUD $47.95 / NZD $51.95

Available November 2023

Raymond Hickey, University of Limerick