Name David Underdown | ||
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Died September 26, 2009, Merced, California, United States Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books Revel - Riot - and Rebellion, Fire from Heaven: Life in an, Pride's Purge: Politics in, A freeborn people, Somerset in the Civil War and I | ||
David underdown tandem skydive
David Edward Underdown (19 August 1925 – 26 September 2009) was a historian of 17th-century English politics and culture and Professor Emeritus at Yale University. Born at Wells, Somerset, Underdown was educated at the Blue School and Exeter College, Oxford. His best-known historical works are Revel, Riot, and Rebellion and Fire from Heaven, which won prizes from the North American Conference on British Studies and the New England Historical Association. After retiring from Yale in 1996, Underdown wrote a well-received book about the history of cricket in the Hambledon era, Start of Play.
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Historian Phil Withington argued in 2015 that Underdown's famous 1985 book on "Revel, Riot and Rebellion and The Social History of Politics was highly praised in its day, as an:
early attempt to ... build a new narrative of popular political participation and activism. But in doing so, it drew a straightforward and somewhat unlikely chain of causality between locale, cultural practices and conflict, and national political allegiances after 1642 – a chain all the more suspect if the sturdy concepts of localism and popular culture out of which it was forged are found to be a little rusty." The book now appears to rest on major fallacies and misinterpretations.Underdown's sense of localism has been superseded by new scholarship, as has his sense of popular culture, says Withington.