"I say that this is a dirty, filthy book, and the test of it is that no human being would allow that book on his table, no decently educated English husband would allow even his wife to have ità." ...Such was the uncompromising pronouncement of Sir Hardinge Gifford, Her Majesty's Solicitor General, who in 1877 prosecuted Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for publishing Dr. Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy.Knowlton's work was the first American medical handbook on contraception. It had become an incredibly popular book among Britons who believed the neo-Malthusian dictum that the only solution to poverty in Britain was a limit on the growth of its population. They saw effective birth control measures as a way to make such a limit practicable. In 1877, its publisher was hauled into court and pleaded guilty to printing obscene material. Bradlaugh and Besant tested the right of official harassment by bringing out an edition of the Fruits of Philosophy that bore an introduction explaining their motives. The pair was arrested and charged with violating the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.Their arrest, trial, conviction, and eventual acquittal constitute a landmark in the history of the world birth control movement. The enormous publicity accorded the principals and their cause brought the subject of family planning into the homes of nearly every Briton who read the newspapers' sensational coverage. What followed thereafter is telling: a dramatic, steady decline in the English birthrate. By their simple act of publishing Knowlton's short book, Bradlaugh and Besant helped establish England's pioneering role in the dissemination, democratization, and implementation of birth control information.Sripati Chandrasekhar is an internationally respected demographer and social scientist. He is a former minister of health and family planning in India and was vice-chancellor of Annamalai University in South India. He is the author of numerous books and articles on population and family planning.
Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África es el más conocido de los libros de viajes de Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. En él narra sus impresiones de la Guerra del África de 1859, de una manera vivida y ...realista. Narra desde dentro la vida que llevaban los soldados en aquella campaña en territorio de Marruecos y los lugares por donde se movían.Este libro procede de los relatos periodísticos que Pedro Antonio de Alarcón envió a su editor durante el conflicto y contiene una amplia descripción de la vida militar, conocida por Alarcón quien se alistó como voluntario al inicio de las guerras en las colonias españolas en Marruecos.Aquí también aparecen numerosos personajes de la política española de aquellos tiempos. Entre ellos cabe citar a Juan Prim, quien posteriormente derrocó a la reina Isabel II de Borbón y fue presidente de España y Leopoldo O'Donnell, quien llegó a ocupar el mismo puesto de gobierno.Diario de un testigo de la guerra de África (1861) es la crónica de esta experiencia, una visión inusitada del Islam y el nacionalismo hispánico. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón recibió un balazo en un combate, y su libro fue tan popular que se vendieron cincuenta mil ejemplares en su época.El Diario es el relato heroico de las acciones bélicas de España en el Magreb. Alarcón parece una extraña mezcla de romántico y patriota colonial. Escribe fascinado por la aventura africana y por las victorias españolas en esta guerra hoy casi olvidada. Sin embargo, cabe destacar que fue uno de los primeros en denunciar la manipulación política que hubo en torno a esta contienda.
The British parliament in the nineteenth century reflected the increasingly democratic stability of the British state in a century that saw numerous convulsions on the European continent. It embodied ...the majesty of British law, the idea that all adult males who dwelt in Britain shared the universal rights of a true-born Englishman, including the right to speak on the affairs of the nation. The repeated attempts of the Jewish Baron Lionel de Rothschild and the atheist Charles Bradlaugh to take their seats after having been lawfully elected to parliament showed, however, that barriers remained against those who were in some way considered 'un-British'. The debates that the perseverance of both men engendered inside the parliament reveal how strongly the conservative British establishment clung on to what it considered to be the Protestant national character. To make British laws, one had to be British in more than citizenship. In essence, it was a debate about British national identity in an increasingly 'liberal' world. The eventual inclusion of both Rothschild and Bradlaugh marked a further shift away from religious conformity as a measure of 'Britishness' as the century drew to a close.
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