Men and masculinities provides an engaging, accessible and provocative introduction to histories of masculinity for all readers interested in contemporary gender politics. The book offers a critical overview of ongoing historiographical debates and the historical making of men’s lives and identities and ideas of masculinity between the 1890s and the present day. In setting out a new agenda for the field, it makes an ambitious argument for the importance of writing histories which are present-centred and politically engaged. This means that the book engages head-on with ferocious debates about men’s social position and the status of masculinity in contemporary public life. In establishing a critical genealogy for the proliferation of this crisis talk, it sets out new ways of understanding how men’s lives and ideas of masculinity have changed over time while patriarchy and male power have persisted.

Public Men offers an introduction to an exciting new field: the history of masculinities in the political domain and will be essential reading for students and specialists alike with interests in gender or political culture. By building upon new work on gender and political culture, these new case studies explore the gendering of the political domain and the masculinities of the men who have historically dominated it. As such, Public Men is a major contribution to our understanding of the history of Britain between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth centuries.

Cooling Out: Has the World Changed, or Have I Changed? -- Notes -- Index

In the space of barely fifteen years, the history of masculinity has become an important dimension of social and cultural history. John Tosh has been in the forefront of the field since the beginning, having written A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999), and co-edited Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britainsince 1800 (1991). Here he brings together nine key articles which he has written over the past ten years. These pieces document the aspirations of the first contributors to the field, and the development of an agenda of key historical issues which have become central to our conceptualising of gender in history. Later essays take up the issue of periodisation and the relationship of masculinity to other historical identities and structures, particularly in the context of the family. The last two essays, published for the first time, approach British imperial history in a fresh way. They argue that the empire needs to be seen as a specifically male enterprise, answering to masculine aspirations and insecurities. This leads to illuminating insights into the nature of colonial emigration and the popular investment in empire during the era the New Imperialism.

An in-depth analysis into the construction of male identity as well as a unique and comprehensive historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed in British literature from the Middle Ages to the present. This book is an important contribution to the emerging field of masculinity studies.

On consumerism.

In this collection, a group of historians explores the role of masculinity in the modern history of politics and war. Building on three decades of research in women's and gender history, the book opens up new avenues in the history of masculinity. The essays by social, political and cultural historians therefore map masculinity's part in making revolution, waging war, building nations, and constructing welfare states. Although the masculinity of modern politics and war is now generally acknowledged, few studies have traced the emergence and development of politics and war as masculine domains in the way this book does. Covering the period from the American Revolution to the Second World War and ranging over five continents, the essays in this book bring to light the many "masculinities" that shaped--and were shaped by--political and military modernity.