Twentieth Century British History最新文献

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.

Archival research is foundational to the writing of most works of academic history and is a central part of the professional identity of historians. Despite this, we know very little about what historians do in archives, and how it shapes the process of writing history. This article uses quantitative data from The National Archives of the UK to analyse one part of this puzzle, namely how historians choose what to look at in an archive. It explores the nature of archive catalogues, and their relationship to the collections they describe. It goes on to assess how catalogues shape what historians choose to view when they visit an archive, and concludes by looking more widely at historians' information seeking practices. Through this analysis the article will argue that external factors have a far greater impact on archival research, and through it the writing of history, than is traditionally acknowledged, and as such historians need to pay considerably more attention to the ways in which their access to archives is shaped by these factors.