Professor John Tosh

My principal interest is in gender in modern British social history. I am interested in defining what contribution this perspective makes to our understanding of historical experience and explanation. Specifically I have worked on the history of masculinities for two decades. Initially I focused on the relationship between masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England. More recently I have turned my attention to the place of masculinity in the empire-building impulses of ordinary British people during the 19^th century. Here emigration has been particularly neglected, and my current research concerns the Cape emigration scheme of 1820.
Parallel with this research interest, I have for many years been thinking about how the discipline of history should be presented – to students and also to the wider public. In my most recent nook, Why History Matters, I pursued the argument that good citizenship requires critical history, and that historians have a social obligation to provide it in a form which can be practically applied.

A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, Yale University Press, 1999
Historians on History: an Anthology, Longman, 2000
[with Stefan Dudink & Karen Hagemann] Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, Manchester University Press, 2004
Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire, Longman, 2005
“Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800-1914”, Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005), pp. 330-42
Thinking with History: a Resource for Citizens, Kathleen Fitzpatrick Lecture, University of Melbourne, 2006
Why History Matters, pp. 1-173. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, 5rd edition, Longman, 2010
“The History of Masculinity: an Outdated Concept?”, in J.H. Arnold & S. Brady (eds), What Is Masculinity?, Palgrave, 2011, pp. 17-34
“To save a perishing but loyal family from destruction”: child emigrants to the Cape of Good Hope, 1819-20”, History Australia 9/2 (2012), forthcoming