front cover of Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain
Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain
Edited by Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor
University of London Press, 2021
The history of child welfare through the eyes of children themselves. 
 
Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain demonstrates how the young have been integral to the creation, delivery, and impact of welfare. The book brings together the very latest research on welfare as provided by the state, charities, and families in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The ten chapters consider a wide range of investments in young people’s lives, including residential institutions, Commonwealth emigration schemes, hospitals and clinics, schools, social housing, and familial care. Drawing upon thousands of personal testimonies and oral histories—including a wealth of writing by children themselves—the book shows that we can only understand the history and impact of welfare if we listen to children’s experiences.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
The Culture of Property
The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain
Jordanna Bailkin
University of Chicago Press, 2004
What kind of property is art? Is it property at all? Jordanna Bailkin's The Culture of Property offers a new historical response to these questions, examining ownership disputes over art objects and artifacts during the crisis of liberalism in the United Kingdom. From the 1870s to the 1920s, Britons fought over prized objects from ancient gold ornaments dug up in an Irish field to a portrait of the Duchess of Milan at the National Gallery in London. They fought to keep these objects in Britain, to repatriate them to their points of origin, and even to destroy them altogether. Bailkin explores these disputes in order to investigate the vexed status of property within modern British politics as well as the often surprising origins of ongoing institutional practices. Bailkin's detailed account of these struggles illuminates the relationship between property and citizenship, which has constituted the heart of liberal politics as well as its greatest weakness.

Drawing on court transcripts, gallery archives, exhibition reviews, private correspondence—and a striking series of cartoons and photographs—The Culture of Property traverses the history of gender, material culture, urban life, colonialism, Irish and Scottish nationalism, and British citizenship. This fascinating book challenges recent scholarship in museum studies in light of ongoing culture wars. It should be required reading for cultural policy makers, museum professionals, and anyone interested in the history of art and Britain.
[more]

front cover of Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain
Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain
Edited by Jon Agar and Jacob Ward
University College London, 2018
Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a broad, multifaceted look at how technology and the environment have become intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last three hundred years. For the first time, the book brings together two perspectives with ample insights into the history of Britain since the Industrial Revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Both technologies and our living and nonliving environment comprise material forms of organization—or self-organization—and both have changed over time, sometimes in intersecting ways. Among the technologies discussed in the collection are bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays, and biotechnologies. Environments discussed include both places of natural beauty and pollution, bogs, cities, farms, land, and sea. The book explores this diversity and offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
 
[more]

front cover of Marketable Values
Marketable Values
Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain
Desmond Fitz-Gibbon
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The idea that land should be—or even could be—treated like any other commodity has not always been a given. For much of British history, land was bought and sold in ways that emphasized its role in complex networks of social obligation and political power, and that resisted comparisons with more easily transacted and abstract markets. Fast-forward to today, when house-flipping is ubiquitous and references to the fluctuating property market fill the news. How did we get here?
 
In Marketable Values, Desmond Fitz-Gibbon seeks to answer that question. He tells the story of how Britons imagined, organized, and debated the buying and selling of land from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century. In a society organized around the prestige of property, the desire to commodify land required making it newly visible through such spectacles  as public auctions, novel professions like auctioneering, and real estate journalism. As Fitz-Gibbon shows, these innovations sparked impassioned debates on where, when, and how to demarcate the limits of a market society. As a result of these collective efforts, the real estate business became legible to an increasingly attentive public and a lynchpin of modern economic life.
 
Drawing on an eclectic range of sources—from personal archives and estate correspondence to building designs, auction handbills, and newspapers—Marketable Values explores the development of the British property market and the seminal role it played in shaping the relationship we have to property around the world today.
 
[more]

front cover of Precarious Professionals
Precarious Professionals
Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain
Edited by Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas
University of London Press, 2021
Precarious Professionals details the fight for equality in the workplace, particularly among women and queer people in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain.
 
Precarious Professionals uncovers the inequalities and insecurities which lay at the heart of professional life in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. This book challenges conventional categories in the history of work, exploring instead the everyday labor of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the traditional professions. Situating new historical perspectives on gender at the forefront of their research, the contributors explore how professional cultures could not only define themselves against but often flourished outside of, the confines of patriarchal codes and structures.

Precarious Professionals offers twelve fascinating case studies, ranging between the 1840s and the 1960s. From pioneering female lawyers and scientists to ballet dancers, secretaries, historians, humanitarian relief workers, social researchers, and Cold War diplomats, this book reveals that precarity was a thread woven throughout the very fabric of modern professional life. Together, these essays enrich our understanding of the histories and mysteries of professional identity and help us to reimagine the future of work in precarious times.
[more]

front cover of Restaging the Past
Restaging the Past
Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain
Edited by Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, and Alexander Hutton
University College London, 2020
Restaging the Past is the first collection devoted to the study of pageants in Britain, ranging from their Edwardian origins to the present day. In the twentieth century, people all across Britain succumbed to “pageant fever.” Thousands of people dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from local history, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between 1900 and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns, and tiny villages, and engaged a wide range of organizations and social groups, from Women’s Institutes to political parties, schools to churches, and even youth organizations.
 
Pageants were community events, bringing people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians, and other writers, and as a result were featured repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, the contributors argue that it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change—and, they show, because of its former prominence, some lingering signs of “pageant fever” can still be seen in Britain today.
 
[more]

front cover of Women Making News
Women Making News
Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain
Michelle Elizabeth Tusan
University of Illinois Press, 2005
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, female editors and journalists created a new genre of political journal they proclaimed to be both for and by women. Specialized periodicals like Women's Penny Paper and Shafts fostered the proliferation of diverse political agendas aimed at reimagining women's status in society. At the same time, the institutional infrastructure of the women's press provided women with job opportunities in a nontraditional field.

Michelle Tusan tells two stories. First, she examines alternative print-based political cultures that women developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, she explores how British female subjects forged a wide range of new political identities through the pages of "their press." Tusan employs social and cultural historical analysis in the reading of popular printed texts, as well as rare and previously unpublished personal correspondence and business records from archives throughout Britain.

Insightful and filled with fascinating detail, Women Making News uncovers how the relationship between print culture and gender politics provided a vehicle for women's mobilization in the political culture of modern Britain.

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter