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influenced the aspirations of those who had never set foot in the British Isles. 4 Among the elite, symbols of Scottish identity sat easily within the generalised British culture which characterised early twentieth-century British Columbia. For example, the Scot Henry O. Bell-Irving, one of the province’s leading industrialists, created the stereotypical ‘Wee Scottie’ brand of
2 The ‘Big State’ versus the ‘Big Society’ in twentieth-century Britain Pat Thane Recent political discourse, in particular references to the ‘Big Society’, has drawn attention, including that of historians, to the role of voluntary action in British society over the past century or so. ‘Big Society’ rhetoric, insofar as it is clear about anything, seems to suggest that the growth of a substantial welfare state apparatus over the past century, especially since 1945, and driven by the Labour party, has squeezed out once-vibrant voluntary action, which therefore
This book examines women’s experiences of motherhood in England in the years between 1945 and 2000. Based on a new body of 160 oral history interviews, the book offers the first comprehensive historical study of the experience of motherhood in the second half of the twentieth century. Motherhood is an area where a number of discourses and practices meet. The book therefore forms a thematic study looking at aspects of mothers’ lives such as education, health care, psychology, labour market trends and state intervention. Looking through the prism of motherhood provides a way of understanding the complex social changes that have taken place in the post-war world. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the field of twentieth-century British social history. However it will also be of interest to scholars in related fields and a general readership with an interest in British social history, and the history of family and community in modern Britain.
This book provides an academic study of J. B. Priestley—novelist, playwright, screen-writer, journalist and broadcaster, political activist, public intellectual and popular entertainer, one of the makers of twentieth-century Britain, and one of its sharpest critics. From his scathing analysis of a slump-stricken nation in the best-selling English Journey, to his popular wartime broadcasts that paved the way to 1945 and the welfare state, his post-war critique of ‘Admass’ and the Cold War (he was a co-founder of CND), and his continual engagement with the question of ‘Englishness’, Priestley addressed the key issues of the century from a radical standpoint in fiction, journalism and plays which appealed to a wide audience and made him one of the most successful writers of his day, in a career that spanned the 1920s to the 1980s. The book explores the cultural, literary and political history of twentieth-century Britain through the themes that preoccupied Priestley throughout his life: competing versions of Englishness; tradition, modernity and the decline of industrial England; ‘Americanisation’, mass culture and ‘Admass’; cultural values and ‘broadbrow’ culture; consumerism and the decay of the public sphere; and the loss of spirituality and community in ‘the nervous excitement, the frenzy, the underlying despair of our century’. It argues that Priestley has been unjustly neglected for too long: we have a great deal to learn both from this multi-faceted man, and from the English radical tradition he represented.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, museums in Europe and North America were at their largest and most powerful. New buildings were bigger; objects flooded into them, and more people visited them than ever before. The Manchester Museum is an ideal candidate for understanding cultures of display in twentieth-century Britain. It is a treasure trove of some four million priceless objects that are irreplaceable and unique. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. This book traces the fate of his cabinet from his death in 1814. The establishment of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) allowed naturalists to carve out a space in Manchester's cultural landscape. The Manchester Museum's development was profoundly affected by the history of the University in which it operated. In January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and an interim commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society transferred its collections the following year. The new collection was to be purely scientific, comprising geology, zoology and botany, with no place for some of the more exotic specimens of the Society. The objects in the collection became part of Manchester's civic identity, bringing with them traces of science, empire and the exotic. Other museological changes were afoot in the 1990s. Natural history collections became key sites for public engagement with environmental issues and biodiversity and more recently as sites for exhibiting art.
Public relations was established in Britain by a group of liberal intellectuals in the aftermath of the slump. This book argues that the development was a product of the Great Depression. It challenges the template of British public relations history popularised by Professor Sam Black. While Civil Servants began to develop ideas about the necessity of public relations, state use of 'propaganda' during the Great War had been a controversial intervention that cast a grim shadow across the postwar period. Sir Stephen Tallents stands at the centre of this story, touching every significant public relations innovation in early twentieth-century Britain. The book tracks the development of public relations through the peaks and troughs of Tallents's career, which is to build a holistic understanding of the discipline's political, professional, organisational and personal genesis. Transferred to the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), Tallents saw an imaginative correlation between Frank Pick's co-ordination of the existing underground railway companies with Britain's relationship to its Empire. The EMB Film Unit established in 1928 was crucial to the development of this radical function of public relations. Introducing public relations at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Ministry of Information pitted Tallents's subtle sensibility against more powerful ideological, institutional and political competition. Under Tallents, the General Post Office (GPO) produced a range of educational materials, supplying schools with educational posters, toy telephone sets, model post offices and instructional pamphlets on the history of communication. He and others formed the Institute of Public Relations in 1948.
, institutions, and ideas all located in the complex, shifting social and cultural ferment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Over that two-century period physicians and scientists found themselves, often reluctantly, occupying a new role as members of an ever-more specialist and ever-more medical enterprise called neurology. That story of their reluctance not only describes the by now well-worn tale of medical resistance to the advance of specialisation; significantly, it also calls attention to the fact that in Britain neurology was considered a socially
twentieth century, viewed from the vantage of a British-raised writer who has often been worried by the racial inflection of African American politics.’ 1 I would concur with McLeod, and suggest that, while much of Phillips’s play is set in Africa and North America, Phillips remains concerned with twentieth-century Britain, in particular, and the ways in which belonging has been made difficult for non-white citizens. The black soldiers in Rough Crossings soon realise that, although they have been fighting for the British side, there will be no legitimate place for
influential organisations representing housewives and mothers in twentieth-century Britain. Each group recognised the primary roles that women had as housewives and mothers. In doing so they set out to provide members with support and advice on domestic matters, marriage and motherhood. The origins and aspirations of each group will be outlined and discussed in Chapter 1. In spite of their endorsement of domesticity, the MU, CWL, NCW, WI and TG insisted that housewives and mothers would be mistaken to devote themselves exclusively to family life. On the contrary this study
3047 Priestleys England 5/4/07 12:31 Page 1 Introduction Although this is a book about a writer, it is neither biography nor literary criticism: it is probably best described as cultural history. It deals with a man who, while pre-eminently an imaginative writer, one of the best known and most widely read in twentieth-century Britain, was several other things as well, often simultaneously: journalist, broadcaster, social commentator, political activist and all-round public figure. The purpose of this book is to ask what this prolific body of work and