About

Albion M. Urdank is a tenured Associate Professor of Modern British and European History at UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1983. His research interests include British social and economic history, with a focus on local and regional communities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Urdank has authored a book titled "Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale," which examines the wool weaving village of Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, during this period. He is engaged in a study of the historical demography of the same area, comparing the reproductive behavior of the Anglican laity to that of Protestant Dissenters, and studies popular religion through manuscript sermons by an evangelical Baptist minister active in the locale. Additionally, he plans to undertake a regional study of pastoral society along the Scottish/English border in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a project inspired by his interest in training Border Collies and participating in sheepdog trials, which are rooted in the folk culture of the Scottish borders. Urdank's work also explores the cultural significance of Border Collies, regarded as the most intelligent breed of sheepdog worldwide.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Political science
• Art
• Classics

Selected publications

• Letter to the Editor

  The Journal of Interdisciplinary History · 2017-05-31

  letter1st authorCorresponding

  The Editors:I write to clarify some misperceptions about my book, Birth, Death and Religious Faith in an English Dissenting Community: A Microhistory of Nailsworth and Hinterland, 1695–1837 (Lanham, 2016), which appeared in Kathryn Lynch’s review in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVII (2017), 414–415.The first misperception is that the study’s aim is to compare or contrast Baptist and Anglican fertility over the “long eighteenth century.” The central goal is actually to gauge the impact of religious enthusiasm on fertility, as registered via the evangelical revival, and only secondarily to compare/contrast Nonconformist and Anglican fertility in this context. The “event-history analysis” in Chapter 2 established that for Baptists, the probability of an additional birth occurring, following religious conversion, increased significantly, particularly among wives.The path analyses in the chapters about Baptist and Anglican fertility refined and affirmed this finding. Path analysis is a form of regression, in which the direct and indirect causal flows are broken down into their constituent parts. This method permitted an assessment of the relative importance of age at marriage, a standard socio-economic variable, and age at conversion, a religio-cultural variable, for procreative outcomes. So, in one example I write, “With regard to family size (D[ependent] V[ariable] ‘Kidcount’), age at marriage and age at conversion show parity in their respective direct effects, which are each robust, in terms of the size of coefficients and probability distributions. This remains true of the indirect effect of marriage age, although by the course of mediation by age at conversion, its coefficient size becomes reduced in its total effect, thereby rendering conversion age the dominant variable in the model” (69–70). The patterns of the diverse models, which are separated into pre-marital and post-marital subsets, in terms of the timing of religious conversion (which accounts for variation in sample size), are similar for Baptist and Anglican wives but not so much for husbands. Furthermore, sample sizes in the path analyses differ from those in other parts of the text because the data were reconfigured into a long form in order to maximize the number of Ns. In Figure 4.7 (49), for example, the N for the pre-marital subset is 151 based on 26 family clusters, whereas in the post-marital subset, the N equals 355 based on 69 family clusters. The number of Ns among Anglicans, in the post-marital subset especially, is much higher—2,424 based on 462 family clusters.The impact of evangelicalism on the marginal birth is especially evident among wives in the post-marital subset. However, calculations of fecund-fertility rates show that Baptist and Anglican patterns differed markedly among selected age cohorts (Figure 5.7, 72; Appendix 3). Hence, while the impact of evangelicalism on procreative outcomes might be broadly similar for Nonconformists and Anglicans, the respective fecund-fertility rates were not always similar.The main point is that a cultural variable, in the form of religious experience and practice enjoyed co-equal status with a standard socio-economic variable, age at marriage, virtually fetishized by English historical demographers. How unusual is that? Very unusual, I would say.Secondly, Lynch states that this study “fails to reveal whether Baptists constituted a well-defined community,” which would allow Baptist membership to predict reproductive behavior, “or whether they constituted an open fluid community, which would threaten the whole point of comparing Baptist and Anglican demographic rates.” This statement is odd, because elsewhere in the review she refers to my first book—Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780–1865 (Berkeley, 1990)—for material about the social and economic background of industrial revolution in the locale. This book devotes itself specifically to establishing the Shortwood Baptist Church (the largest Baptist church outside London) as a “well-defined community.” At the same time, as this book also shows, the Baptists operated within a Low (Anglican) Church environment which was equally evangelical and saw the Baptists as an institutional threat (Anglican laity often attended Baptist services as hearers). In other words, evangelicalism was ubiquitous throughout the region; in this sense, it was both “fluid” and concentrated in coherent nonconformist communities such as the Shortwoood Baptist Church. English social historians would know this implicitly, but Lynch is a French historian. Such is the basis, moreover, on which the path analyses, referred to above, were undertaken.The main point is that the book under review is a monographic outgrowth of a theme mentioned but not fully developed in the first book, as I state explicitly in the preface and conclusion, and so cannot be expected, as Lynch seems to want, to reproduce the social-historical background that the first one does. Instead of making gratuitous and unsupported remarks (“the book is marred by the misuse of standard demographic terminology”) or uninformed stylistic criticism (“repetition of wording in multiple places”—a feature designed actually to help readers navigate the thicket of the text), she might have concentrated more fruitfully on a discussion of the actual findings.

  PublisherDOI

• Fertility and Female Spirituality Among Gloucestershire Baptists, 1800-1837: a Quantitative, Local Study

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2012-08-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines quantitatively the comparative importance of female age-at-first marriage and age-at-conversion (adult baptism) among a sample of married female members of the Shortwood Baptist Church, located in Gloucestershire’s Nailsworth valley c. 1800-1837. English historical demographic studies usually decline to treat Protestant nonconformity separately from the Anglican laity; nor do they treat cultural phenomenon like religious affect as a variable in analyzing reproductive behavior, but rather emphasize socio-economic effects. The paper here is based on recent findings from my forthcoming family reconstitution monograph and based on a sample of 100 Baptist families, the profiles of which I have pieced together from an array of fragmentary sources. The data include the standard demographic indices but additionally contain data on the timing of religious conversion, the effects of which may be measured quantitatively through multiple regression analyses. Here female age-at-marriage and female age-at-conversion serve as explanatory variables in two structural equation models based on the technique of path analysis; these will seek to explain variation in such dependent variables as number of off-spring and age-at-last birth. Broadly, female age at marriage explains the number of off-spring, confirming the traditional importance of this variable found in the demographic literature. But age at conversion was found to have had a stronger impact on age-at-last birth. Frequently these last births occurred later than normal and increased family size on the margin; the regression coefficients suggest strongly that age-at-conversion, the moment of highest spiritual emotion, explains their occurrence. The conclusions tend to affirm that cultural factors were important in reproductive decisions, especially those associated with religion, as well as the broad perception found in the literature on popular religion that in this respect female spirituality was especially decisive.

  Publisher

• Timothy Larsen. Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 317. $110.00 (cloth).

  Journal of British Studies · 2008-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• The Rationalisation of Rural Sport: British Sheepdog Trials, 1873–1946

  Rural History · 2006-03-16 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The article analyses the evolution in both the forms and changing social content of British Sheepdog trials, from the first recorded event at Bala, Wales in 1873 to the advent of their revival following the Second World War (during which they had been suspended). Contrary to popular myth, early trials were gentry sponsored and therefore heavily freighted with elite values concerning the nature of the shepherds' craft. Early trials accented speed, agility and obedience in the dog, as well as sheer entertainment value, arising often from debacles that might ensue in any given run. The trials, too, remained adjuncts to elite, Kennel-club style dog-shows, with their focus on conformation and the physical beauty of the animal. As the social prominence of the aristocracy and gentry receded after 1880, so too did their role in defining the nature of the sheepdog trial. With the founding of the International Sheepdog Society in 1906 by shepherds and farmers, the rules for such trials became transformed, reflecting more the actual work of the shepherd, and indirectly the larger shift within agriculture toward more specialised sheep production. These new rules gave the trial a rigorous aspect at once more modern than earlier prototypes, yet rooted in the craft traditions of rural artisans. At the same time, the shepherds and farmers, who made practical use of sheepdogs, assumed direction of the sport. The founding of the ISDS thus coincided with the new self-assertiveness of labour occurring nationally, reflected in the founding of the Labour party the very same year. Elements of the elite show-ring, however, would linger residually in ISDS trials, reflecting a degree of continuity, but these would gradually atrophy. ISDS trials would accent both the independent work of the dog and its ability to function as a working partner to the shepherd. The article thus deconstructs the complicated social evolution in the nature of a rural sport, which reflected in turn changes in the larger socio-economic environment, through a detailed analysis of the changing patterns of the trials themselves.

  PublisherDOI

• Implicit Narratives: Textuality in English Historical Demography

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2003-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the diversity of individual responses to demographic events, as well as the reciprocal effects of these events, as suggested by the family reconstitution data, compiled for Horsley and Avening parishes, two contiguous rural-industrial Gloucestershire settlements, c. 1700 to 1837, at the center of which lay the dissenting, extra-parochial village of Nailsworth. In doing so, family reconstitution forms designed by the Cambridge historical demographers were used, adjusted however by nominal linkages to both conventional and less conventional sources.

  Publisher

• Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion . By K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 499. $74.95.

  The Journal of Economic History · 2002-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Keith Snell and Paul Ell have written a superb and definitive study of the geography of religion in Britain circa 1851, relying upon a massive database constructed by them from the original returns of the 1851 census of religious worship, which the government undertook, for the first and only time, as part of its decennial population census. The religious census measured attendance at worship, not individual professions of faith; the returns were head-counts at morning, afternoon, and evening services on census Sunday, submitted by the presiding minister of each denomination. These returns, despite inevitable doubts about their reliability, have long been recognized by historians as an extremely valuable source. But until now they have not been analyzed comprehensively or with the aid of multivariate statistics. Not only do the authors describe the distribution of the strength of each denomination across the whole of England and Wales, using parish-, registration-district-, and county-level data; they are also able to address associated historiographical issues with a decisiveness that convincingly settles many an important debate.

  PublisherDOI

• <scp>S. C. Williams</scp>. <i>Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark</i> c <i>1880–1939</i>. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. vi, 206. $70.00

  The American Historical Review · 2001-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article S. C. Williams. Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c 1880–1939. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. vi, 206. $70.00 Get access Williams S. C.. Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c 1880–1939. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. vi, 206. $70.00. Albion M. Urdank Albion M. Urdank University of California, Los Angeles Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 106, Issue 5, December 2001, Pages 1878–1880, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/106.5.1878-a Published: 01 December 2001

  PublisherDOI

• BOOK REVIEW: Marilyn Cohen.<b>LINEN, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY IN TULLYLISH, COUNTY DOWN, 1690-1914</b>. Dublin: Four Courts, 1997.

  Victorian Studies · 2001-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Marilyn Cohen has written an exceptionally detailed yet lucid and evocative study of the impact of capitalist development on Tullylish parish, near Belfast, the center of the Irish linen industry over two centuries. Cohen writes as an historical anthropologist in a genre of regional and local history, pioneered by the French Annales school, but now more stylishly dubbed "micro-history." In recent years, micro-history, following the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, had been associated with close textual readings of historical documentary sources. But now it has been applied by several historians who, like Cohen, are commendably reviving a genre that in its scope and complexity further enriches our appreciation of the meaning of "cultural studies."

  PublisherDOI

• Linen, Family and Community in Tullylish, County Down 1690-1914 (review)

  Victorian Studies · 2001-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Marilyn Cohen has written an exceptionally detailed yet lucid and evocative study of the impact of capitalist development on Tullylish parish, near Belfast, the center of the Irish linen industry over two centuries. Cohen writes as an historical anthropologist in a genre of regional and local history, pioneered by the French Annales school, but now more stylishly dubbed "micro-history." In recent years, micro-history, following the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, had been associated with close textual readings of historical documentary sources. But now it has been applied by several historians who, like Cohen, are commendably reviving a genre that in its scope and complexity further enriches our appreciation of the meaning of "cultural studies."

  PublisherDOI

• Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c 1880-1939

  The American Historical Review · 2001-12-01 · 31 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This book challenges the domination of the institutional church as the overriding concern of 19th-century religious history by taking as its starting point the nature and expression of religious ideas outside the immediate sphere of the church within the wider arena of popular culture. It considers in detail how these beliefs formed part of a richly textured language of personal, familial, and popular identity in the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants of the London Borough of Southwark between c.1880 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The study highlights the persistence of patterns dismissed as alien to the industrial and urban environment. The interaction of folk idioms with institutional religious language and practice is also considered and urban popular religion is identified as a distinctive system of belief in its own right. This study also pioneers a methodology for exploring belief and interpreting it as a popular cultural phenomenon. A wide range of source materials are drawn on including oral history. Centrality is given to understanding the ways in which individuals expressed and communicated their religious ideas.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Asa Briggs

  1 shared

• Sarah Williams

  University of Regina

  1 shared

• Barton R. Friedman

  1 shared

• Callum Brown

  East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust

  1 shared

• S. J. D. Green

  1 shared

• Robert Hole

  1 shared

• Donald E. Ginter

  1 shared

• Frances Knight

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Columbia University

  1983

Awards & honors

• Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale
• Collection of Articles International Sheepdog News
• Meeker Sheep, Past and Present, International Sheepdog News
• California dreaming: the 26th Portervile Spring Trial, Inter…
• San Diego Highland Games Trial, International Sheepdog News