Twentieth Century British History最新文献

Beginning in January 2021, Twentieth Century British History asked a group of scholars to reflect on what decolonization means to the field of British history. Twentieth Century British History co-editor Erik Linstrum (University of Virginia) posed questions over email for three rounds of discussion which concluded in December 2021. Stuart Ward (University of Copenhagen), Vanessa Ogle (University of California, Berkeley), and Saima Nasar (University of Bristol) took part. Priyamvada Gopal (Cambridge University) offered a final comment from the perspective of postcolonial studies. Contributions have been lightly edited but the relatively conversational style and flow of ideas in the original exchange have been preserved.

This article explores how inter-war ideas about the 'flapper' and the place of women in modern society interacted with archaeological discoveries. Looking at how the discovery of the Royal Cemetery of Ur in Iraq (excavated from 1922 to 1934) was reported in the British daily and weekly press demonstrates the popularity of archaeological reporting in inter-war newspapers and magazines and its influence on public debates. The article uses approaches from media history and gender studies to study textual as well as visual material such as cartoons, photographs and archaeological reconstructions created to bring readers the news from the past. It explores how archaeology informed contemporary stereotypes of young women as characteristically irrational and emotional and how his overlapped with similar traits perceived to be typical of the 'Oriental' races and lower-middle and working classes.

This article examines patients' and doctors' emotional and psychological entanglements with the development of appointment systems in British general practice between the 1948 and 1980. Waiting, especially in the form of the queue, has been subject to recent historical analyses. However, the focus has often been on negative emotional responses, on how waiting has been politicized, and on the disciplinary power of the waiting room. Frameworks of rationalization and discipline have also dominated historical and sociological assessments of temporal regulation, and especially the rise of standardized, ordered, clock and calendar time that appointments embodied. Though productive, focusing too closely on these processes in relation to time and waiting risks underplaying the complex affective life of regulatory technologies, for both their operators and their subjects. By focusing tightly on how myriad, often contradictory, responses to appointment systems operated within the setting of post-war general practice, this article looks to place such emotional and psychological relations in historical context. In so doing, it develops recent work on the emotional history of the National Health Service and, by extension, of the diverse affective and temporal modes of the British welfare state.

Overseas broadcasting has been an integral part of the BBC's remit since the creation of its Empire Service in 1932. Throughout its history, the BBC has consistently argued that its services for overseas listeners should not be classified as a form of British propaganda, but instead understood as a fundamentally benevolent undertaking, providing objective, impartial, and trustworthy news and information to hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide. In the post-imperial era, the World Service increasingly depicted itself as not just a 'global public service broadcaster', but also as a kind of humanitarian endeavour, an 'Oxfam of the Mind' which made a significant contribution to Britain's wider efforts in the field of overseas development. This article critically evaluates this vision of the BBC World Service as a post-imperial 'gift to the world'. It outlines how, in the early 1990s, the World Service created the first BBC-branded overseas development NGO, the Marshall Plan of the Mind (MPM), which used both UK government and external philanthropic funding to help promote British commercial and diplomatic interests in post-communist Eastern Europe. MPM is then contextualized in relation to the World Service's longer (and largely overlooked) history of overseas development work and its relationship with the NGO sector, both before and after the end of the Cold War. By exploring how and why the World Service inserted itself into the NGO sphere, this work contributes to ongoing historical debates regarding the BBC's relationship with the state and the role(s) that global development NGOs have played in shaping Britain's post-imperial 'place in the world'.

The presence of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the British ports of London, Manchester, Cardiff, and Barry during the 1920s has yet to be charted by historians of either Garveyism or Black Britain. Uncovering this history provides fresh insights into both fields. Far from the localism emphasized by much of recent Garveyism historiography, followers of the movement in Britain were closely connected to their fellow Garveyites distributed around the globe. Meanwhile, although recent literature on the transnational character of Black Britain has detailed the activism of relatively elite figures and groups, the presence of Garveyism in port areas elucidates an alternative vein of diasporic Black political culture among working-class seafaring communities extending beyond the capital. Far from the parochial victims portrayed in much historiography, Black people living in Britain's ports were deeply invested in the global project of Garveyism. Through their travels, readings of and writings to the UNIA's Negro World newspaper, and participation in sophisticated aural and visual cultures, Garveyites in Britain connected their struggles to a mass diasporic movement which profoundly altered global Black politics.

Britain was the first country to suffer casualties as the result of a ballistic missile attack, when German V-2 rockets began landing in London and the South-East in September 1944. This new menace posed critical challenges, not only to the civilians whose lives were endangered once again, but also to the British government. Policymakers had to decide what, if any, information they released to the public, amid fears of creating panic, providing free propaganda to the Nazis, and helping the V-2 launching units improve their aim. Their commitment to secrecy in this period was both resolute and largely unnecessary, not to mention ineffective. In the absence of official information released from above, the public drew their own conclusions and myriad rumours emerged, many of which were remarkably accurate. This article will explore the ways in which government policy surrounding censorship and publicity changed during the V-2 bombardment and the extent to which this affected those in the firing line. It will also add considerable nuance to our understanding of public morale in this period, which was rather less steadfast than many accounts suggest, and which continued to be a major government preoccupation, despite the diminishing likelihood of a descent into mass panic or defeatism.

In February 1926, Chinese art collector John Hilditch opened the Hilditch-McGill Chinese Palace Temple in Manchester. Filling a garage with Chinese objects and performing what he claimed to be Buddhist rituals, Hilditch insisted the temple offered visitors a chance to see Chinese art in 'actual Chinese fashion and atmosphere'. This article analyses Hilditch's attempts to construct an authentic temple and visitor accounts of its realism to analyse the relationship between high and low culture, and how China was understood and imagined in the 1920s. It shows how Hilditch's combination of sensory effects adopted from mass culture and claims to museum notions of scientific verification, in addition to the projection of well-established stereotypes of China, skewed understandings of authenticity and invited faith-albeit most likely 'ironic' faith-in the temple's legitimacy. Scholars have argued that the rise of mass culture prompted art museums to restructure on high cultural values but interpretation of the temple as a museum shows that the lines between mass culture and museums were blurred. The temple thereby encourages a broader definition of museums and complicates our understanding of interwar culture more generally by showing how the categories of high and low culture were less stable than some scholars have presumed.

Using the lens of the largest female youth organization in interwar Britain, the Girl Guides, I argue girls became important to the rebuilding of the post-war world as future wives, mothers, and keepers of the hearth. Yet this message of return to home was complicated by a wartime message of patriotic service, citizenship, and adventure. Thus, uniformed clubs such as the Guides tried to balance these ideals, with female war veterans leading the way. Guiding taught homemaking skills in the 1920s while also offering alternative ways for girls and young women to continue to maintain a meaningful service to the nation. Such groups became a haven both for those who had performed war work and for a new generation of girls who longed to be patriots and active public-minded women. Finally, the Guides performed an exemplary role in enacting gender roles for a postwar generation, especially given the group's connection as a complementary 'sister' group to Boy Scouting, which created a symmetrical training program for boys and girls.

Harold Wilson's attack on 'Selsdon Man' in the run-up to the 1970 general election has generally been seen as a flawed rhetorical gambit, which inadvertently gave coherence to Edward Heath's policies. The subsequent invocation of 'Selsdon' by critics of Heath's 'u-turns' has meant that the episode has mainly attracted scrutiny from historians of the Conservative Party. Yet the debate over Selsdon can also be seen as a landmark in Wilson's transition from the 'modernizing' politics of the 1960s to a more defensive posture, in which he presented Labour as a bulwark against regressive market-liberal policies. This article explores Wilson's critique of the 'new Conservatism' and argues that the themes which he established in 1970 played an important role in framing Labour's opposition to the Heath government during the subsequent Parliament. In particular, his focus on the distributional effects of Tory policies dovetailed with an emerging body of social science research on income and wealth and so contributed to a 'rediscovery of inequality'. In the turbulent economic climate of the mid-1970s, however, Labour's efforts to protect working-class households from the effects of market pricing proved difficult to sustain in office. The rise and fall of this politics of 'decommodification' has important implications for our understanding of the changing fortunes of British social democracy.