Twentieth Century British History最新文献

In recent decades, scholars of modern British history have increasingly revisited the classic social science of the post-war period. Within this 'social scientific turn' in modern British history we can discern closely-related but distinct strands of work. One group of historians, influenced by intellectual history and political history methods, have examined how post-war social science and social scientists have shaped modern British politics and culture. Other historians have engaged closely with the original research materials of post-war social science as source bases for understanding lived experience, and explored the gulf between how sociologists and researchers talked about people, and how they understood themselves. Understanding the different aims and methods with which modern British historians have engaged with post-war social research is essential to understanding the methodology and value of the 'social scientific turn' in modern British history today.

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.

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.