Bill Luckin
Biographic Data
| ID | 1091432 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bill Luckin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bill |
| FAMILY NAME | Luckin |
| SIGNATURE | LUCKIN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Greater Manchester |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Age of Noise in Britain
Reviewed by: The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity by James G. Mansell Bill Luckin (bio) The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity. By James G. Mansell. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 246. Paperback $30. In this intriguing study, James Mansell engages with interactions between noise, modernity, and the construction of the self in interwar Britain. His book is divided into four parts, including a weighty introduct…
Resources of the City
Peter Reed. Acid Rain and the Rise of the Environmental Chemist in Nineteenth-Century Britain
A Scot turned Englishman, Robert Angus Smith, Britain’s first Alkali (and river pollution) inspector was one of the most important proto-environmental experts in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain. Smith has only recently been recognized as an important figure in the scientific field, joining the ranks of a handful of giants whose work and writings made so massive a contribution to theoretical and empirical styles of thought and communal qua…
Paul Laxton and Richard Rodger, Insanitary City
In late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, every urban centre followed a path of its own. Successive governing elites in Stirling tried to find a cheap and reliable way of disposing of household waste. Contractors were employed, sacked, reemployed and sacked again: none was cheap enough. In the late 1850s Glasgow began to pipe water down from Loch Katrine. But the construction of a viable sewage disposal system hung fire for decades. Fo…
Barron H. Lerner, One for the Road
Remarkably little has been written about the history of traffic accidents—a strange omission since, as numerous commentators have pointed out, many more people died in the twentieth century as a result of road crashes than combined fatalities, military and civilian, during two world wars. Even less has been written about the origins and impact—positive, negative, neutral—of differing national attempts to reduce the incidence of drink driving. Thi…
On Roads
A Never-Ending Passing of the Buck? The Failure of Drink-Driving Reform in Interwar Britain
Little has been written about the history of drink driving. This paper interrogates the issue in interwar Britain. It focuses on the problems facing reformers determined to rouse the public to the dangers posed by drink-associated impairment, as distinct from gross drunkenness. The contribution begins with an outline of earlier twentieth century anti-drink-driving law. This is complemented by an account of the activities of an informal and distin…
A Kind of Consensus on the Roads? Drink Driving Policy in Britain 1945-1970
The history of drink driving and legislative responses to it remain virtual terra incognita. This contribution traces developments in Britain between 1945 and the aftermath of the Road Safety Act in 1967. The first section focuses on the formation of an extra-parliamentary pressure group in the 1950s. This is complemented by an interpretation of the impact of the government-backed Drew Report (1959), and the ways in which Drew's research was rhet…
Accident Prone
Reviewed by: Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age Bill Luckin (bio) Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age. By John C. Burnham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. viii+328. $40. This is an exemplary study of an unusual topic which has close links with the emergence of the later-twentieth-century risk society and a bewilderingly rapidly expandi…
Defining Early Modern Automobility
Automobility lies at the heart of contemporary analysis of the social relations of mobility. Thus far, however, it lacks a history. This article seeks to rectify that omission by interrogating the road traffic accident crisis which afflicted Manchester in the early years of the Second World War. The article proposes a provisional chronology for automobility in twentieth-century Britain: a lengthy phase between 1920 and 1970, dominated by the inte…
The Horse in the City
Health and Wealth
Reviewed by Bill Luckin University of Manchester Simon Szreter. Health and Wealth: Studies in History and Policy. Rochester Studies in Medical History. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2005. xiv + 506 pp. $90.00, £65.00 (1-58046-198-0). This collection of previously published articles by one of the most talented writers in the fields of social, demographic, and medical-epidemiological history is divided into three parts. An opening…
Death Rode the Rails
Reviewed by: Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965 Bill Luckin (bio) Death Rode the Rails: American Railroad Accidents and Safety, 1828–1965. By Mark Aldrich . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi+446. $59.95. In newspapers, magazines, penny-dreadfuls, early newsreels, and silent movies, the train accident looms larger than any other image of dangers associated with the machine and the new ind…
London's Thames
Reviewed by Bill Luckin London's Thames: The River that Shaped a City and Its History. By Gavin Weightman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004. Pp. x+150. $23.95. In recent years, the environmental, social, and economic history of the Thames has begun to attract sustained scholarly attention. Dale Porter, who goes unmentioned in Gavin Weightman's brief and unhelpful bibliography, has narrated the astonishingly complex and contested story of the co…
Revisiting the idea of degeneration in urban Britain, 1830–1900
This article traces the evolution of the idea of degeneration in urban Britain between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rejecting approaches that reduce this richly eclectic, though savagely negative, world-view to a random bundle of prejudices underpinning the emergence of the ‘science’ of eugenics, the article focuses on distinctive environmental, medical and anti-urban determinants. Strong emphasis is also placed on shifting…
Nuclear Meltdown and the Culture of Risk
Nuclear Meltdown and the Culture of Risk Bill Luckin (bio) During the last twenty-five years the hydra-headed idea of risk—nuclear, industrial, health-, allergy-, and terrorist-related—has exerted a profound influence over the shape and direction of social scientific research. Informing academic debate and policy formation, it has modified collective perceptions of everyday life. Construction workers no longer expect to be allowed on site without…
Constructing a Pipe-Bound City
Constructing a Pipe-Bound City: A History of Water Supply, Sewerage, and Excreta Removal in Norrköping and Linköping, Sweden, 1860-1910. By Jonas Hallström. Linköping, Sweden: Department of Water and Environmental Studies, Linköping University, 2002. Pp. 362
Surgery, Science and Industry
This clearly written book describes the development of a remarkable and somewhat mysterious organization. Anyone who has crashed to the ground while running for a bus, or found himself trapped at the bottom of a rugby scrum, will know something about "osteosynthesis": the process whereby a surgeon opens up a fractured limb and, using metal implants and plates, performs an operation that allows freedom of movement to the injured area during the he…
Inviting Disaster
Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology. By James R. Chiles. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Pp. xxx+338. $28/$15.95
The heart and home of horror
This article centres on the unprecedentedly severe fog crisis which afflicted London between the 1870s and the mid-1890s. An overview of meteorological developments prefaces an interrogation of the mid-Victorian origins of environmental cost-benefit analysis and the only slowly dawning awareness that adverse weather conditions might make a significant contribution to mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease. At the same time, exceptionall…
Effluent America
Together with Joel Tarr and William Cronon, Martin Melosi is among the most innovative urban-environmental historians of his generation. Exceptionally productive, he has written eight books, including the recent and highly praised Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000). Melosi has also authored countless articles, thirty of which are cited in the notes to the genial autobiographical note that pref…
Patient Pathways
This paper confronts a major problem in relation to the metropolitan and urban mortality declines in Britain during the later nineteenth century: the extent to which cause-specific death rates at district level were distorted by an official failure to redistribute deaths occurring in institutions back to "normal" place of residence. Describing and analysing the manner in which hospital and infirmary provision in the capital during this period det…
Versions of the Environmental
Accidents in History
There is now an extensive literature on the social and environmental consequences of living in the risk society. Studies of trauma are also increasingly prominent. But scant attention has been paid to perceptions of risk and danger in the past — in particular, to the history of accidents and the meanings of the accidental. This collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses this lacuna providing a theoretically informed historical sociology of …
Urban history and historical epidemiology
Advocating a closer relationship between urban and epidemiological history, the paper concentrates, firstly, on a critical overview of the McKeown thesis. It next identifies components from the work of John Landers as a means of constructing a structural model of mortality experienced during the period under review. The paper goes on to examine the manner in which this model might be applied to London during an era in which the classic killing in…
Revisiting the idea of degeneration in urban Britain, 1830–1900
This article traces the evolution of the idea of degeneration in urban Britain between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rejecting approaches that reduce this richly eclectic, though savagely negative, world-view to a random bundle of prejudices underpinning the emergence of the ‘science’ of eugenics, the article focuses on distinctive environmental, medical and anti-urban determinants. Strong emphasis is also placed on shifting…
Patient Pathways
This paper confronts a major problem in relation to the metropolitan and urban mortality declines in Britain during the later nineteenth century: the extent to which cause-specific death rates at district level were distorted by an official failure to redistribute deaths occurring in institutions back to "normal" place of residence. Describing and analysing the manner in which hospital and infirmary provision in the capital during this period det…
Urban history and historical epidemiology
Advocating a closer relationship between urban and epidemiological history, the paper concentrates, firstly, on a critical overview of the McKeown thesis. It next identifies components from the work of John Landers as a means of constructing a structural model of mortality experienced during the period under review. The paper goes on to examine the manner in which this model might be applied to London during an era in which the classic killing in…
Towards a social history of institutionalization∗
The heart and home of horror
This article centres on the unprecedentedly severe fog crisis which afflicted London between the 1870s and the mid-1890s. An overview of meteorological developments prefaces an interrogation of the mid-Victorian origins of environmental cost-benefit analysis and the only slowly dawning awareness that adverse weather conditions might make a significant contribution to mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease. At the same time, exceptionall…
Accidents, disasters and cities
Despite a massive proliferation in the literature on ‘risk’ and ‘disaster management’ in the contemporary world, historians have been slow to clarify their thoughts on these issues. The paper seeks to remedy this state of affairs. For the purposes of exegesis, it separates disasters, mishaps and accidents into ‘natural’, ‘social’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘individual’ categories, before summarizing and interrogating the influential theoretical work of Karl…
Death and survival in the city
Now that the debate about the standard of living during the first half of the nineteenth century appears to have entered a relatively quiescent phase, historians have begun to turn their attention towards the more elusive concept of the quality of life. The incidence of fatal and non-fatal disease is clearly central to research of this type and so, too, is a delineation of the physical context in which infections have flourished and in which thos…
A Kind of Consensus on the Roads? Drink Driving Policy in Britain 1945-1970
The history of drink driving and legislative responses to it remain virtual terra incognita. This contribution traces developments in Britain between 1945 and the aftermath of the Road Safety Act in 1967. The first section focuses on the formation of an extra-parliamentary pressure group in the 1950s. This is complemented by an interpretation of the impact of the government-backed Drew Report (1959), and the ways in which Drew's research was rhet…
The Horse in the City
Sites, Cities, and Technologies
The decline of smallpox and the demographic revolution of the eighteenth century
It is now a quarter of a century since K. H. Connell, writing on the state of research into the growth of population in Britain during the eighteenth century, commented that 'a weightier contribution is called for from the medical historians than any they seem to have made '.1 By the midi95os the challenge had been taken up by Thomas McKeown and his co-workers at Birmingham in the first of a series of influential articles which seemed to overturn…
The decline of smallpox and the demographic revolution of the eighteenth century
It is now a quarter of a century since K. H. Connell, writing on the state of research into the growth of population in Britain during the eighteenth century, commented that 'a weightier contribution is called for from the medical historians than any they seem to have made '.1 By the midi95os the challenge had been taken up by Thomas McKeown and his co-workers at Birmingham in the first of a series of influential articles which seemed to overturn…
Short Notices
Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, vol. I (From the Reformation to the French Revolution) (1978), xvii+543 (Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, £15.00). Jean Séguy, Les Assemblées Anabaptistes‐Meanonltes de France (Ecole des Hautes‐Etudes en sciences sociales [Société, Mouvements sociaux, et idéologies, le sine, Etudes XVII]) (Paris, 1977), 904 (Mouton, n.p.). (The Anabaptist‐Mennonite Communities in France.) Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic T…
Death and survival in the city
Now that the debate about the standard of living during the first half of the nineteenth century appears to have entered a relatively quiescent phase, historians have begun to turn their attention towards the more elusive concept of the quality of life. The incidence of fatal and non-fatal disease is clearly central to research of this type and so, too, is a delineation of the physical context in which infections have flourished and in which thos…
Towards a social history of institutionalization∗
Time, Place and Competence
This is an article by an historian about the work of an American anthropologist and social scientist who has for many years observed, recorded and participated in the lives of the mentally handicapped. It had its origins in a dissatisfaction with existing histories of retardation and a desire to seek out twentieth century sociological perspectives with relevance to and resonances for earlier periods. The paper falls into three sections. The first…
Short notices
John Morgan, Godly Learning. Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education 1560–1640 (1986), x + 366 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35). Sarah Pearson, Rural Houses of the Lancashire Pennines, 1560–1760, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, Supplementary Series, 10 (1985), x + 202 (HMSO, £16.95). Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General Practitioner 1750–1850 (1986), xvi + 354 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, …
Short notices
Susan Migden Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio (1987), xxi + 356 (Duke University Press, Durham, N.C., $45.00). W. Hamish Fraser, Conflict and Class. Scottish Workers 1700–1838 (1988), 202 (John Donald, £20.00). Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport, Tennessee: A Planned American City (1987), xii + 259 (The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, £24.00). Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives. Women of the U…
Sites, Cities, and Technologies
Questions of Power
The Big Smoke
Monuments to Social History
Journal Article Monuments to Social History Get access F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Volume 1: Regions and Communities, ISBN 0-521-25788-3. Volume 2: People and Their Environment, ISBN 0-521-25789-1. Volume 3: Social Agencies and Institutions, ISBN 0-521-25790-5. £110; $150 (box set). BILL LUCKIN BILL LUCKIN *Division of Humanities, Bolton Institute of Hig…
Questions of Power
Accidents, disasters and cities
Despite a massive proliferation in the literature on ‘risk’ and ‘disaster management’ in the contemporary world, historians have been slow to clarify their thoughts on these issues. The paper seeks to remedy this state of affairs. For the purposes of exegesis, it separates disasters, mishaps and accidents into ‘natural’, ‘social’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘individual’ categories, before summarizing and interrogating the influential theoretical work of Karl…
Evolution of infectious disease
Accidents in History
There is now an extensive literature on the social and environmental consequences of living in the risk society. Studies of trauma are also increasingly prominent. But scant attention has been paid to perceptions of risk and danger in the past — in particular, to the history of accidents and the meanings of the accidental. This collection of interdisciplinary essays addresses this lacuna providing a theoretically informed historical sociology of …
Urban history and historical epidemiology
Advocating a closer relationship between urban and epidemiological history, the paper concentrates, firstly, on a critical overview of the McKeown thesis. It next identifies components from the work of John Landers as a means of constructing a structural model of mortality experienced during the period under review. The paper goes on to examine the manner in which this model might be applied to London during an era in which the classic killing in…
Versions of the Environmental
Patient Pathways
This paper confronts a major problem in relation to the metropolitan and urban mortality declines in Britain during the later nineteenth century: the extent to which cause-specific death rates at district level were distorted by an official failure to redistribute deaths occurring in institutions back to "normal" place of residence. Describing and analysing the manner in which hospital and infirmary provision in the capital during this period det…
Effluent America
Together with Joel Tarr and William Cronon, Martin Melosi is among the most innovative urban-environmental historians of his generation. Exceptionally productive, he has written eight books, including the recent and highly praised Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (2000). Melosi has also authored countless articles, thirty of which are cited in the notes to the genial autobiographical note that pref…
Surgery, Science and Industry
This clearly written book describes the development of a remarkable and somewhat mysterious organization. Anyone who has crashed to the ground while running for a bus, or found himself trapped at the bottom of a rugby scrum, will know something about "osteosynthesis": the process whereby a surgeon opens up a fractured limb and, using metal implants and plates, performs an operation that allows freedom of movement to the injured area during the he…
Inviting Disaster
Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology. By James R. Chiles. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Pp. xxx+338. $28/$15.95
The heart and home of horror
This article centres on the unprecedentedly severe fog crisis which afflicted London between the 1870s and the mid-1890s. An overview of meteorological developments prefaces an interrogation of the mid-Victorian origins of environmental cost-benefit analysis and the only slowly dawning awareness that adverse weather conditions might make a significant contribution to mortality and morbidity from respiratory disease. At the same time, exceptionall…
Constructing a Pipe-Bound City
Constructing a Pipe-Bound City: A History of Water Supply, Sewerage, and Excreta Removal in Norrköping and Linköping, Sweden, 1860-1910. By Jonas Hallström. Linköping, Sweden: Department of Water and Environmental Studies, Linköping University, 2002. Pp. 362
Nuclear Meltdown and the Culture of Risk
Nuclear Meltdown and the Culture of Risk Bill Luckin (bio) During the last twenty-five years the hydra-headed idea of risk—nuclear, industrial, health-, allergy-, and terrorist-related—has exerted a profound influence over the shape and direction of social scientific research. Informing academic debate and policy formation, it has modified collective perceptions of everyday life. Construction workers no longer expect to be allowed on site without…
London's Thames
Reviewed by Bill Luckin London's Thames: The River that Shaped a City and Its History. By Gavin Weightman. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004. Pp. x+150. $23.95. In recent years, the environmental, social, and economic history of the Thames has begun to attract sustained scholarly attention. Dale Porter, who goes unmentioned in Gavin Weightman's brief and unhelpful bibliography, has narrated the astonishingly complex and contested story of the co…
Political science (26 works) · History (23 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (17 works) · History (13 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (12 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Economic history (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Engineering (9 works)