Browse

‘The 10th of June, 1854, promises to be a day scarcely less memorable in the social history of the present age than was the 1st of May, 1851’ boasted the Chronicleon 10 June 1854, comparing the opening of the Crystal Palace, newly installed on the crown of Sydenham Hill, to that of the Great Exhibition. Many contemporary commentators deemed the Sydenham Palace’s contents superior, the building more spectacular and its educative potential much greater than its predecessor. Yet their predictions proved to be a little wide of the mark, and for a long time, studies of the Great Exhibition of 1851 have marginalised the Sydenham Palace. This collection of essays will look beyond the chronological confines of 1851 and address the significance of the Crystal Palace as a cultural site, image and structure well into the twentieth century, even after it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

This original and fresh approach to the emotions of adolescence focuses on the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men in the inter-war years. Being Boys challenges many stereotypes about their behaviour. It offers new perspectives on familiar and important themes in interwar social and cultural history, ranging from the cinema and mass consumption to boys' clubs, personal advice pages, street cultures, dancing, sexuality, mobility and the body. It draws on many autobiographies and personal accounts and is particularly distinctive in offering an unusual insight into working-class adolescence through the teenage diaries of the author's father, which are interwoven with the book's broader analysis of contemporary leisure developments. Being Boys will be of interest to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences and is also relevant to those teaching and studying in the fields of child development, education, and youth and community studies.

The British Empire contributed greatly to the globalising of western buildings, towns and cities across the world. The requirements of security necessitated the construction of forts and barracks everywhere, while the need for mobility and ceremonial led to the use of large numbers of tents. As towns and cities developed, building types required for imperial rule, the operations of colonial economies and the comfort and cultural edification of Europeans appeared everywhere. These included government houses, town halls, courthouses, assembly and parliament buildings, company headquarters, customs houses and hotels. As the white bourgeoisie became a major global class, their representative buildings, such as clubs, libraries, museums, theatres, religious institutions, mission stations and schools, also spread worldwide. Some of these were designed for the dissemination of European culture to indigenous peoples, as well as the proselytisation of Christianity. Imperial rulers, their officials and troops additionally required particular settlements for leisure, recreation and the restoration of health, and these included hill stations in many colonies. The new technologies of the age, such as the telegraph and railways, also generated significant structures, widely dispersed. In addition to the great public and civic buildings, residential accommodation was created for Europeans, servants and workers. The result was a striking built environment which offers many insights into the nature, character and social and economic development of imperial rule, not least in the patterns of racial and class inclusion and exclusion which such buildings represented. It is an environment which remains key to the understanding of the modern world, and one which has survived, often through the modern fascination with ‘heritage’ as well as through its incorporation into new postcolonial arrangements.

From British rule the independent Irish state inherited an effectively denominational system of university education and a complementary set of science and arts institutions. Under independent rule denominational influence increased and resource starvation prevailed until the end of the 1950s. Then, as the formation of human capital, education began to be treated as an input into economic growth and American initiatives stimulated new research activity. These changes played a vital role in the rebalancing of power between the Catholic Church and the state. Social science, where the Catholic Church had been a monopoly provider, supplies a dramatic case study of the interlinking of this power shift with the process of knowledge generation.

The utility dream palace is a cultural history of cinemagoing and the cinema exhibition industry in Britain during the Second World War, a period of massive audiences in which vast swathes of the British population went to the pictures on a regular basis. Yet for all that wartime films have received a great deal of academic attention, and have been discussed in terms of the escapist pleasures they offered, the experiential pleasures offered by the cinemas in which such films were watched were inextricably connected to the places and times in which they operated. British cinemas – and the people who worked in, owned and visited them – were acutely sensitive to their spatial and temporal locations, unable to escape the war and intimately bound up in and contributing to the public’s experience of it. Combining oral history, extensive archival research, and a wealth of material gathered from contemporary trade papers, fan magazines and newspapers, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of both the cinema’s position in wartime society, and the impact that the war had on the cinema as a social practice. Dealing with subjects as diverse as the blackout, the blitz, evacuation, advertising, staffing and conscription, Entertainments Tax, showmanship and clothes rationing, The utility dream palace asserts that the cinema was, for many people, a central feature of wartime life, and argues that the history of British cinemas and cinemagoing between 1939 and 1945 is, in many ways, the history of wartime Britain.

On Labor Day in 1988 two hundred hungry and homeless people went to Golden Gate Park in search of a hot meal, while fifty-four activists from Food Not Bombs, surrounded by riot police, lined up to serve them food. The riot police counted twenty-five served meals, the legal number allowed by city law before breaking permit restrictions, and then began to arrest people. The arrests proceeded like an assembly line: an activist would scoop a bowl of food and hand it to a hungry person. A police officer would then handcuff and arrest that activist. Immediately, the next activist in line would take up the ladle and be promptly arrested. By the end of the day fifty-four people had been arrested for “providing food without a permit.” These arrests were not an aberration but part of a multi-year campaign by the city of San Francisco against radical homeless activists. Why would a liberal city arrest activists helping the homeless? In exploring this question, the book uses the conflict between the city and activists as a unique opportunity to examine the contested nature of urban politics, homelessness, and public space, while developing an anarchist alternative to liberal urban politics, which is rooted in mutual aid, solidarity, and anti-capitalism.

The structure of book is chronological but also thematic. Our analysis begins in Chapter 1, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an inquiry into the nature of early sport and early cricket. The following chapter, Chapter 2, investigates the way in which the early cricket clubs were formed. It will relate the development of cricket clubs to the social, economic and cultural changes that took place during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. We then move on, in Chapter 3, to the issue of competition. What was the nature of early competition? We will assess the concept of the challenge match and also evaluate how such events contributed to the early development of the sport. Moving into the twentieth century, in Chapter 4 we investigate the significance of the two world wars as regards the development of cricket. In what sense were they a rupture? As regards the post-war era, Chapter 5 examines a range of issues, including multiculturalism in the grassroots game, the role of women, equipment and junior cricket. The final chapter, Chapter 6, brings the story of cricket up to date and investigates such issues as competition, globalisation, commercialisation, and the role of the ECB.

Dancing in the English style explores the development, experience, and cultural representation of popular dance in Britain from the end of the First World War to the early 1950s. It describes the rise of modern ballroom dancing as Britain’s predominant popular style, as well as the opening of hundreds of affordable dancing schools and purpose-built dance halls around the country. It focuses in particular on the relationship between two emerging commercial producers – the dance profession and dance hall industry – and the consumers who formed the dancing public. Together these groups negotiated the creation of a ‘national’ dancing style and experience, which constructed, circulated, and commodified ideas about national identity. At the same time, the book emphasizes the global, exploring the impact of international cultural products on national identity construction, the complexities of Americanisation, and Britain’s place in a transnational system of production and consumption that forged the dances of the Jazz Age.

Britain is often revered for its extensive experience of waging ‘small wars’. Its long imperial history is littered with high profile counter-insurgency campaigns, thus marking it out as the world's most seasoned practitioners of this type of warfare. Britain's ‘small wars’ ranged from fighting Communist insurgents in the bamboo-laden Malayan jungle, marauding Mau Mau gangs in Kenyan game reserves, Irish republican terrorists in the back alleys and rural hamlets of Northern Ireland, and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan's Helmand province. This is the first book to detail the tactical and operational dynamics of Britain's small wars, arguing that the military's use of force was more heavily constrained by wider strategic and political considerations than previously admitted. Outlining the civil-military strategy followed by the British in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, Defending the Realm argues that Britain's small wars have been shaped by a relative decline in British power, amidst dramatic fluctuations in the international system, just as much as the actions of military commanders and civilian officials ‘on the spot’ or those formulating government policy in London. Written from a theoretically-informed perspective, grounded in rich archival sources, oral testimonies and a reappraisal of the literature on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism, Defending the Realm is the definitive account of the politics of Britain's small wars. It will be of interest to political scientists and historians, as well as scholars, students, soldiers and politicians who wish to gain a more critically informed perspective of the political trappings of war.

From the early eighteenth century, a vibrant English associational culture emerged that was, by many measures, ethnic in character. English ethnic organisations spread across North America from east to west, and from north to south, later becoming a truly global phenomenon when reaching Australasia in the later nineteenth century. This books charts the nature, extent and character of these developments. It explores the main activities of English ethnic societies, including their charitable work; collective mutual aid; their national celebration; their expressions of imperial and monarchical devotion; and the extent to which they evinced transnational communication with the homeland and with English immigrants in other territories. The English demonstrated and English people abroad demonstrated and experienced competitive and sometimes conflictual ethnic character, and so the discussion also uncovers aspects of enmity towards an Irish immigrant community, especially in the US, whose increasingly political sense of community brought them into bitter dispute with English immigrants whom they soon outnumbered. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the extent of English ethnic associational culture in North America was such that it resonated within England herself, resulting in the formation of a central organization designed to coordinate the promotion of English culture. This was the Royal Society of St George. Ultimately, the book documents that the English expressed their identity through processes of associating, mutualism and self-expression that were, by any measure, both ethnic and diasporic in character. The English Diaspora is based on a very large amount of untapped primary materials from archives in the United States, Canada, and the UK relating to specific locations such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, and Kingston, and London. Thousands of newspaper articles have been trawled. Several long runs of English associational periodicals have been garnered and utilized. Comparative and transnational perspectives beyond the US and Canada are enabled by the discovery of manuscript materials and periodicals relating to the Royal Society of St George.

Middle-class women made use the informal power structures of Victorian and Edwardian associationalism in order to participate actively as citizens. This investigation of women's role in civic life provides a fresh approach to the ‘public sphere’, illuminates women as agents of a middle-class identity and develops the notion of a ‘feminine public sphere’, or the web of associations, institutions and discourses used by disenfranchised middle-class women to express their citizenship. The extent of middle-class women's contribution to civic life is examined through their involvement in reforming and philanthropic associations as well as local government. Feminist historians have developed increasingly nuanced understandings of the relationship between ‘separate spheres’ and women's public lives, yet many analyses of middle-class civic identity in nineteenth-century Britain have conformed to over-rigid interpretations of separate spheres to largely exclude an exploration of the role of women. By examining under-used Scottish material, new light is shed on these issues by highlighting the active contribution of women to in this process. Employing a case study of women's temperance, Liberal and suffrage organisations, this analysis considers the relationship between separate spheres ideology and women's public lives; the contribution to suffrage of organisations not normally associated with the Victorian and Edwardian women's movement; and the importance of regional and international perspectives for British history.

An acute housing shortage was one of the defining features of Soviet life. This book explores the housing problem throughout the 70 years of Soviet history, looking at changing political ideology on appropriate forms of housing under socialism, successive government policies on housing and the meaning and experience of ‘home’ for Soviet citizens. The book's main concern is housing as a gendered issue. To this end, it examines the use of housing to alter gender relations, and the ways in which domestic space was differentially experienced by men and women. The book places the research firmly in the context of existing literature. While this includes a number of short works that consider the gendered implications of housing policy in specific periods, the book provides an analysis of housing as a gendered issue throughout Soviet history, comparing and contrasting housing policy and the experience of home life under different leaders. Much of the material comes from Soviet magazines and journals, which enables the book to demonstrate how official ideas on housing and daily life changed during the course of the Soviet era, and were propagandised to the population. Through a series of in-depth interviews, the book also draws on the memories of people with direct experience of Soviet housing and domestic life.

Collectively, the Civil Service and the London County Council (LCC) employed tens of thousands of women in Britain in the early twentieth century. As public employers, these institutions remained influential for each other and for private employers more widely as a benchmark for the conditions of women’s white-collar work. This book examines three key aspects of women’s public service employment: inequality of pay, the marriage bar and inequality of opportunity. In so doing, it delineates the levels of regulation and rhetoric surrounding women’s employment and the extent to which notions about femininity and womanhood shaped employment policies and, ultimately, women’s experiences in the workplace. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, including policy documents, trade union records, women’s movement campaign literature and employees’ personal testimony, this is the first book-length study of women’s public service employment in the first half of the twentieth century. It is also a new lens through which to examine the women’s movement in this period and a contribution to the debate about the effect of the First World War on women’s employment. Scholars and students with interests in gender, British social and cultural history and labour history will find this an invaluable text.

This is the first history of the hippy trail. Based on interviews and self-published works, it records the joys and pains of budget travel out to Kathmandu, India, Afghanistan and other ‘points east’ during the 1960s and 1970s. It’s written in a clear, simple style, and it provides a detailed analysis of the motivations and the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of young people who travelled eastwards. The happiness and calm that many found is noted, but the work also has a critical edge: it notes the limitations of the travellers’ journeys and the mistakes they made. We discuss the rapidly changing meanings and connotations of the term ‘hippy’, and set these themes in the context of the 1960s counter-culture. The work is structured around four key debates: were the travellers simply motivated by a search for drugs? Did they encounter love or sexual freedom on the road? Were they just tourists? Did they resemble pilgrims? Finally a fifth chapter considers how the travellers have been represented in films, novels and autobiographical accounts. We’ve written this book with two main audiences in mind: firstly, people with some personal interest in the trail, such as the travellers themselves (or their children); secondly, students taking courses concerned with the 1960s and its counter-cultures.

This book explores the contribution that five conservative, voluntary and popular women's organisations made to women's lives and to the campaign for women's rights throughout the period 1928 to 1964. The five groups included in this study are: the Mothers’ Union, the Catholic Women's League, the National Council of Women, the National Federation of Women's Institutes and the National Union of Townswomen's Guilds. The book challenges existing histories of the women's movement that suggest the movement went into decline during the inter-war period only to be revived by the emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s. It is argued that the term women's movement must be revised to allow a broader understanding of female agency encompassing feminist, political, religious and conservative women's groups who campaigned to improve the status of women throughout the twentieth century. This book provides an analysis of the way in which these five voluntary women's organisations adopted the concept of democratic citizenship, with its rights and duties, to legitimate their demands for reform. Their involvement in a number of campaigns relating to social, welfare and economic rights is explored and assessed. The book provides a radical re-assessment of this period of women's history and in doing so makes a significant contribution to on-going debates about the shape and the impact of the women's movement in twentieth century Britain. The book is essential reading for those interested in modern British history and the history of the women's movement.

What makes a good historian? When historians raise this question, as they have done for centuries, they often do so to highlight that certain personal attitudes or dispositions are indispensable for studying the past. Yet their views on what virtues, skills or competencies historians need most differ remarkably, as do their models of how to be a historian (‘scholarly personae’). This volume explores why scholarly personae were, and are, so important to historians as to generate lots of debate. Why do historians seldom agree on the marks of a good historian? What impact do these disagreements have on historical research, teaching and outreach? And what does this tell about the unity, or disunity, of the field called historical studies? In addressing these questions, How to be a historian develops a fascinating new perspective on the history of historiography. It challenges conventional narratives of professionalization by demonstrating that the identity of the ‘professional’ was often contested. At the same time, it shows that personae could be remarkably stable, especially in relation to race, class and gender assumptions. With chapters by Monika Baár, Ian Hunter, Q. Edward Wang and other recognized specialists, How to be a historian covers historical studies across Europe, North America, Africa and East Asia, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. The volume will appeal not only to readers of historiography, but to all historians who occasionally wonder: what kind of a historian do I want to be?

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

This collection explores how concepts of intellectual or learning disability evolved from a range of influences, gradually developing from earlier and decidedly distinct concepts, including ‘idiocy’ and ‘folly’, which were themselves generated by very specific social and intellectual environments. With essays extending across legal, educational, literary, religious, philosophical, and psychiatric histories, this collection maintains a rigorous distinction between historical and contemporary concepts in demonstrating how intellectual disability and related notions were products of the prevailing social, cultural, and intellectual environments in which they took form, and themselves performed important functions within these environments. Focusing on British and European material from the middle ages to the late nineteenth century, this collection asks ‘How and why did these concepts form?’ ‘How did they connect with one another?’ and ‘What historical circumstances contributed to building these connections?’ While the emphasis is on conceptual history or a history of ideas, these essays also address the consequences of these defining forces for the people who found themselves enclosed by the shifting definitional field.

This book explores a number of new critical contexts in which nineteenth century literature can be discussed. The volume also explores the idea of the Victorian ‘Afterlife’ and examines neo-Victorian text based narratives and film adaptations. Topics discussed include science, poetry, the Gothic, anatomical exhibitions, the spread of liberalism, Anglo-American publishing, and Punjabi popular culture. The national contexts of literary production are explored as are the international cultural exchanges of the period. The book is intended to provide a critical re-examination of the long nineteenth century by bringing together a number of intellectually challenging perspectives that seek to develop the field of nineteenth century studies.

Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.