Our first event of the term at the Centre for Modern & Contemporary History is upon us! All welcome and details are below.
Abstracts:
The Confidence Game of the Chicago School
Prof Matt Houlbrook
(Birmingham)
It is easy to find the confidence trickster anywhere, if you are looking closely enough. The global networks of trade and empire along which people and goods moved from the sixteenth century, the expanding cities of the modern United States, and the turmoil of revolution and civil war in the new Soviet Union: in each of these contexts the trickster was identified as characteristic or archetypal. Mobility and anonymity provided opportunities for personal reinvention and social advancement. They also allowed fakes and frauds to flourish, created intense anxieties about the difficulties of trusting those one met, and ensured social interactions and commercial exchange were haunted by the possibility of deceit. Britain’s bogus honorable and…
View original post 396 more words
Modern British Studies Birmingham 