MONMOUTH, Ill. — Simon Cordery, assistant professor of history at Monmouth College, has authored his first book, “British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914,” published this year in England by Palgrave Macmillan. The U.S. edition is being released in September.

Friendly societies, such as the Grand United Order of Oddfellows and the Independent Order of Rechabites, “provided working people with the security of mutual insurance alongside opportunities of regular, ritual-based sociability,” wrote Cordery in the book’s introduction. “They constituted the largest set of voluntary associations in Britain, reaching about six million members – equivalent to one-half of all adult males – by 1904.”

Cordery isn’t the first historian to address the topic, but he is the first to do so in almost half a century, an oversight he calls “astonishing.”

“This small book is designed to bridge a large gap,” Cordery wrote. “In 1961, historian P. H. J. H. Gosden published ‘The Friendly Societies in England, 1815-1875’ … Astonishingly, there has been no effort to revisit the history of British friendly societies from the perspective of forty years of writing after Gosden.”

The main purpose of the “innovative interpretation of British Friendly Societies,” says the book’s jacket, is to place “organized mutual insurance societies as central actors in the formation of laboring politics and culture. It shows how friendly societies used direct political pressure to promote the ideology of voluntarism and shape self-help legislation in Britain.”

While Cordery chose to write his first book about his native England, he said the history of friendly societies in the United States is nearly as long and is equally compelling.

“There’s been a resurgence of interest in fraternal orders in the U.S. in the last few years,” said Cordery, who moved to America with his family while he was in high school. “That wasn’t the case until recently. In 1995, for example, I was invited to give a paper on U.S. fraternal orders because there was no one else who could.”

Cordery, who joined the Monmouth College faculty in 1994, said his interest in friendly societies was piqued while he was in graduate school and he learned that Joshua Hobson, a radical editor in Victorian England, was also an Oddfellow.

“Here you had this rabble rouser who in his spare time was a member of this very conservative friendly society,” said Cordery. “I decided I would write my dissertation on friendly societies. I went to England to do some research, and I found tons of stuff.”

Like his wife, associate professor of history Stacy Cordery, who regularly juggles various book projects, Cordery is not finished with his writing.

“I’m about two-thirds through the process of converting my Ph.D. dissertation into a book, specifically on railway friendly societies,” said Cordery, an avid railroad buff who is the advising director to the National Railroad Hall of Fame. “It’s been a 10-year project, and I hope to have a first draft finished by the end of the summer.

“I enjoyed writing this book,” he added. “As I wrote, I would think very deeply about issues relating to the dissertation. It was fun to write. This would not have been possible without the 1.5 schedule that Monmouth College designed for Stacy and me. Having a semester off gave me the time to write.”

It also gave him the time to achieve a lifelong ambition.

“This is a dream fulfilled,” he said. “Ever since I understood what it took to do history, I’ve always wanted to publish a book.”

Within the past year, Cordery also had an article published in the Labour History Review entitled “Mutualism, Friendly Societies, and the Genesis of Railway Trade Unions.”

“British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914” is available through www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com.