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. The books Revel, Riot, and Rebellion and Fire from Heaven 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.
According to The Guardian:
His most famous study, Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (1971), is a narrative of the tangle of events that took place in England during the late 1640s and led to the purge of the Long Parliament and the execution of King Charles I. Almost four decades on, the book remains a fixture of undergraduate reading lists. Underdown went on to pioneer the study of local history, popular politics, gender and sport.[1]
Historian Phil Withington argued in 2015 that Underdown's sense of localism has been superseded by new scholarship, as has his sense of popular culture. The 1985 book on Revel, Riot and Rebellion and The Social History of Politics was 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.[2]
John Morrill argues that Revel, Riot and Rebellion received much less enthusiastic reviews compared to Underdown's earlier and later books. He concludes it is a book that was either published too early or too late.[3]
^See Paul Lay. "David Underdown obituary" The Guardian 26 Oct 2009
^Phil Withington, "Revel, Riot and Rebellion and The Social History of Politics," Cultural and Social History 12:3 (2015) pp: 331-335, DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2015.1050893 https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2015.1050893
^John Morrill, "Revel, Riot and Rebellion Revisited." Cultural and Social History 12.3 (2015): 301-308.
David Edward Underdown (19 August 1925 – 26 September 2009) was a historian of 17th-century English politics and culture and Professor Emeritus at Yale...
Underdown is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: David Edward Underdown (DavidUnderdown) (1925–2009), English historian Charles Edward...
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at the behest of the Duke of Dorset, chief among club members, and DavidUnderdown saw it as the first step in a process which removed professional cricket...
Stuart Press. ISBN 1-85804-156-2. Underdown, David (1973). Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. ISBN 0-7153-5805-7....
Nyren, The Cricketers of my Time (ed. Ashley Mote), Robson, 1998. DavidUnderdown, Start of Play, Allen Lane, 2000. H. T. Waghorn, Cricket Scores, Notes...
Wight, Volume 2 (Westminster, U.K.: 1903) p. 366 Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown, Gender, Culture, and Politics in England, 1560-1640: Turning the...
(link) "Dorchester, List of Church Officials". freepages.rootsweb.com. DavidUnderdown (1994). Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth...
York at Stony Brook in 1970. He proceeded to graduate study under DavidUnderdown at Brown University, receiving his M.A. in 1972 and his PhD in 1977...
Cowan,2005, p. 76 DavidUnderdown, "The Harringtonian Moment", The Journal of British Studies, 18:2, (Spring, 1979). p. 176. David Allen, "Political Clubs...
the account of those great days handed down to us by John Nyren". DavidUnderdown called it "a wonderfully evocative, nostalgic account of the (Hambledon)...
Cricketers of My Times (1967) Geoff Tibballs No-balls and Googlies (2007) DavidUnderdown Start of Play (2000) H T Waghorn Cricket Scores 1730–1773 (1899) The...
Lord Briggs, Culture and Communication in Victorian England 1991–92 DavidUnderdown, A Freeborn People: politics and the nation in seventeenth-century...
and Cultural Politics in Early Modern Europe: Essays presented to DavidUnderdown, Manchester University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-7190-4695-7, pp.112–132...
personality, to the beginning of system managed by party politics. DavidUnderdown, "Party Management in the Recruiter Elections, 1645–1648", The English...
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