Through a consideration of settlement patterns, economic activity, language use, and cultural and religious institutions, The Welsh in Metro America: Respectability and Assimilation in San Francisco, Seattle, Columbus, and Milwaukee, 1870–1930 provides a micro study of four Welsh immigrant communities in urban America. This book endeavors to understand the strength and long-term viability of these communities and the ways in which they changed by analyzing the forces that enabled Welsh immigrants and their children to so rapidly become Welsh Americans and, ultimately, to almost seamlessly enter the mainstream world of white, English-speaking, Protestant America.

it is the first book on the subject much of the research data provides a unique insight to the development of government policy and is exclusive to this book several of the research results are quite striking and will be of great interest to academics and policy actors alike

The Welsh princes were one of the most important ruling elites in medieval western Europe. This volume examines their behaviour, influence and power in a period when the Welsh were struggling to maintain their independence and identity in the face of Anglo-Norman settlement. From the mid-eleventh century to the end of the thirteenth, Wales was profoundly transformed by conquest and foreign 'colonial' settlement. Massive changes took place in the political, economic, social and religious spheres and Welsh culture was significantly affected. Roger Turvey looks at this transformation, its impact on the Welsh princes and the part they themselves played in it. Turvey's survey of the various aspects of princely life, power and influence draws out the human qualities of these flesh and blood characters, and is written very much with the general reader in mind.

A uniquely accessible history of the Welsh people.

This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.

The lack of educational provision for the majority towards the and of the 19th century attracted the attention of education policy-makers who wished to remedy the situation. This overview draws on unpublished sources to describe and analyse the crucible years for 20th-century English education.

Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country’s internal diversity. To that end, the author’s examined range – from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as ‘Margiad Evans’, to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a ‘micro-cosmopolitan country’, and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

Making Sense of Wales gives an account of the main changes that have taken place in Welsh society over the last fifty years, as well as analysing the major efforts to interpret those changes. By placing work done in Wales in the context of broader developments within sociological approaches over the period, Graham Day demonstrates that there is a body of work on Wales worth considering in its own right as a specific contribution to sociology. He also shows the relevance of sociological accounts of Wales for understanding contemporary empirical and theoretical concerns in social analysis. Beginning with post-war analysis which considered Wales in terms of regional planning and policy, Day shows how more theoretically informed perspectives have come to the fore in recent years. He also examines more contemporary developments, such as gender and class transformations, the emphasis on the centrality of the Welsh language for conceptions of Wales and Welshness, as well as the impact of new forms of governance and questions of social exclusion.

In the 1960s, Welsh-language popular music emerged as a vehicle for mobilizing a geographically dispersed community into political action. As the decades progressed, Welsh popular music developed beyond its acoustic folk roots, adopting the various styles of contemporary popular music, and ultimately gaining the cultural self-confidence to compete in the Anglo-American mainstream market. The resulting tensions, between Welsh and English, amateur and professional, rural and urban, the local and the international, necessitate the understanding of Welsh pop as part of a much larger cultural process. Not merely a 'Celtic' issue, the cultural struggles faced by Welsh speakers in a predominantly Anglophone environment are similar to those faced by innumerable other minority communities enduring political, social or linguistic domination. The aim of 'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop Music is to explore the popular music which accompanied those struggles, to connect Wales to the larger Anglo-American popular culture, and to consider the shift in power from the dominant to the minority, the centre to the periphery. By surveying the development of Welsh-language popular music from 1945-2000, 'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop examines those moments of crisis in Welsh cultural life which signalled a burgeoning sense of national identity, which challenged paradigms of linguistic belonging, and out of which emerged new expressions of Welshness.

Crucial texts from ninth- and tenth-century Wales analysed to show their key role in identify formation. WINNER OF THE FRANCIS JONES PRIZE 2022 Early medieval writers viewed the world as divided into gentes ("peoples"). These were groups that could be differentiated from each other according to certain characteristics - by the language they spoke or the territory they inhabited, for example. The same writers played a key role in deciding which characteristics were important and using these to construct ethnic identities. This book explores this process of identity construction in texts from early medieval Wales, focusing primarily on the early ninth-century Latin history of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), the biography of Alfred the Great composed by the Welsh scholar Asser in 893, and the tenth-century vernacular poem Armes Prydein Vawr ("The Great Prophecy of Britain"). It examines how these writers set about distinguishing between the Welsh and the other gentes inhabiting the island of Britain through the use of names, attention to linguistic difference, and the writing of history and origin legends. Crucially important was the identity of the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of the entirety of Britain; its significance and durability are investigated, alongside its interaction with the emergence of an identity focused on the geographical unit of Wales.