Results by title

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.

Building on his acclaimed The Third Spring, Adam Schwartz presents a pioneering analysis of the social commentary of G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. These four converts were exemplars of the Catholic literary revival as a “counter-politics” that provided a radical, supernaturalist alternative to predominant secularist social ideologies and systems from a distinctly Roman Catholic standpoint.  Disturbers of the Twentieth Century explores this facet of each writer’s work more thoroughly than earlier studies have done, and does so in comparison to his counterparts’ thought.  The Catholic literary revival hence emerges as a vital, yet largely neglected, voice in historical and sociological discussions of the relationship between religion and politics in the modern era. In the process, Schwartz uniquely situates these Catholic authors in broader heritages of British and Western protest thought dating to the Romantics, showing how their shared resistance to industrial technocracy (and its socio-political effects) and growing secularization was defined distinctively by Roman Catholicism.  The converts’ challenge was bolder than post-Reformation British Catholics had usually uttered in an often-hostile political culture.  Nonetheless this quartet’s criticism was always constructive, as they eschewed nostalgia and endeavored consciously to engage twentieth century society in its particular genres and discrete conditions to transform it into an “alternative modernity” governed by Roman Catholic principles. Schwartz therefore recasts understanding of movements like Chesterton’s distributism while elucidating originally other counterstatements, such as Dawson’s Christian corporatism, and deploying newly discovered and published material, including poetry and prose by Jones and letters and journalism by Greene.  Schwartz in turn interrogates misconstruals of the authors’ relationships to totalitarian ideologies, even as he confronts forthrightly controversial subjects such as antisemitism.  Disturbers of the Twentieth Century is thus an accurate, textured account of the “public doctrine” these trenchant Catholics proposed as the source of social renewal and cultural regeneration for a “century of bones.”

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.

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.
 

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.