Modern British history最新文献

The green entanglements of the inter-war British far right are well-documented. Martin Pugh has drawn attention to the predominantly rural, agricultural support base of the British Union of Fascists. We know that the aspiration to go 'back to the land' was deeply enmeshed with a politics of racial hygiene, which equated the urban with miscegenation and the rural with purity. However, in the post-war world, British far-right ecologism has typically been interpreted as a curious anomaly driven by cynical realpolitik. This article contends environmental themes as an intellectual staple of British fascism-running from the interwar far right, through the NF, and into the latter's largest successor organization, the Flag Group. The Front's preoccupation with the environment, and its racism, were mutually reinforcing, central pillars of its politics. Its environmentalism was alternately revolutionary and conservative, nostalgic and future oriented.

Focusing on three specific organizations-The Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), Blackliners, and The NAZ Project (Naz)-this article explores the different ways in which voluntary organizations responded to Black gay men (BGM) in Britain during the AIDS crisis from the 1980s to 2000. Illustrating how the place of BGM in Britain at this time was multidimensional and often contradictory, the first section demonstrates how they required safer-sex messaging that took account of the heterogeneous ways in which they experienced the intersection of racism and homophobia. Situated in this context, the second section explores for the first time the well-documented work of THT as it applied to BGM. It shows how although the Trust increasingly recognized the need to reach BGM, white activists struggled to grapple with issues of race. It demonstrates how their work on race was shaped by the broader context of changes to voluntary organizations' relationship to the state. In doing so, it makes clear the challenges of intersectional activism with communities of colour for white-dominated organizations and sheds light on how the HIV/AIDS voluntary sector responded to communities with particular needs. Taking Black AIDS organizations as its focus, the final section uncovers how Blackliners and Naz centred gay men in their work and reveals their nuanced and culturally sensitive initiatives. By tracing the contrasting ways in which these organizations navigated contested understandings of race in the final decades of the twentieth century, this article demonstrates the real-world consequences of the fragmentation of political conceptions of Blackness.

Delivered a day after Britain's National Health Service (NHS) reached its 75th year since its opening on the Appointed Day of 5 July 1948, the Pimlott Lecture for 2023 explored the culture of NHS anniversary-making. What can the marking of these anniversaries tell us about changing attitudes towards the service, and indeed, the British state? Here, examining evidence from the media, government archives, and Mass Observation, we argue that NHS anniversaries have long functioned as points of reflection but that their role as moments of national celebration and even communion has come to the fore only recently and culminated in the apparent 'anniversary fever' of 2018. We will explore the reasons behind the growing public fervour, what it can tell us, and the lessons offered by our work on this (still) best-loved of British institutions for historians working on highly politicized objects in 'fevered' times.

The explosion of pop culture in Britain between the late 1950s and the late sixties is usually taken to have been an urban phenomenon. Pop was the 'sound of the city' in Britain as much as America. But what kind of 'urban' was involved-big city, small town, centre, suburb? What kind of geographical reach did pop have across the different parts of the United Kingdom in the 1960s? What was the significance of London in a cultural movement that was simultaneously national and international? Understanding where pop was made and performed in its formative years helps explain why it took off so spectacularly in sixties Britain; it illuminates why post-war Britain was so receptive to and generative of pop music as well as the music's nationwide appeal. In this respect, the article contributes not just to the history of pop music and youth but to the larger cultural history of post-war Britain.

This article explores the significant yet underappreciated role of medical experts in consolidating the promotion of moderate drinking as a viable solution to Britain's alcohol problem during the interwar period. The country's experience with alcohol regulation in the First World War showed that widespread drunkenness could be effectively managed through policies that restricted the availability of alcohol and encouraged moderation. This realization weakened the political standing of the temperance movement, as support for alcohol prohibition and abstinence waned, leading to the liberalization of social attitudes towards drinking. Such circumstances facilitated the emergence of New Moderationism, a renewed policy approach that regarded moderate drinking as relatively benign while cautioning against the dangers of heavy consumption. Medical professionals provided the conceptual foundation for New Moderationism by reassessing several assumptions on alcohol's conflicting reputation as either a 'poison' or a 'food', its benefits to drinkers, and its potential to cause disease. These considerations led to the conclusion that alcohol policy should focus not on whether people should drink, but on how much. This study thus underscores the pivotal contribution of medical professionals in the evolution of the alcohol debate between the two world wars, revealing the transformative impact of expertise on policymaking and social change in modern Britain.

This article considers elite and popular attitudes to speech and accent in inter-war Britain, specifically with regard to children and young people. It begins by showing that speech was a consistent preoccupation of educationalists, for whom classed prejudices complemented more progressive concerns about citizenship and employment. It continues by considering everyday school practices, charting the ways in which schools tried to influence their pupils' speech. Efforts were often variable-and Mass-Observation accounts show that teachers' attitudes were not always consistent either-but children might respond positively nonetheless. Finally, it considers influences external to school such as family attitudes, the wireless, and the cinema, showing that concerns with speech and language were not limited to an educational hierarchy but were often shared by working-class parents and sometimes children themselves. The article thus suggests that there was less of a difference between official attitudes and the (literal and metaphorical) vernacular than is and was often assumed. It argues that widespread attention to speech and language was one way in which social and educational aspirations were fostered amidst the new technologies, consumerism, and democracy of inter-war Britain.

Between 1925 and 1975, the British railway industry elected beauty queens from the daughters of employees. Focusing upon the Railway Queens, this article will reveal the importance of beauty queens as 'civic celebrities', a novel role for public figures that emerged between the wars and helped to sustain a vibrant civic culture across the early to mid-twentieth century. It combined the traditional ceremonial function of 'civic' representative with the modern consumerist ethos of media 'celebrity'. Despite the gendered constraints of such competitions, this article posits that serving as a beauty queen enabled young working-class women to become legitimate representatives of various civic communities for the first time, whilst also enabling participation in the media's image-making of glamorous, consumerist femininities. As such, the role rendered civic and consumer cultures more inclusive and increasingly inextricable. This article further suggests that civic celebrities altered how communities were represented to themselves within British civic culture. If elites continued to represent hierarchical communities of authority and deference, then from the 1920s onwards, civic celebrities such as beauty queens began to represent relatively democratic communities of non-partisan inclusivity and consumer aspiration.

Bust cards first emerged in the late 1960s as a way of obtaining help following arrest, giving the user the number of a 24-h telephone line to call on arrival at the police station. In the 2020s, such cards were used by direct action groups involved in civil disobedience campaigns, but tracing bust cards back reveals that their original purpose was different. The bust card was a novel way of enabling an individual to push back against the immediate experience of hostile policing, while enabling organizers to collate information on what was happening. By foregrounding the object and examining its creation and development, this article explores how various influences, initiatives and imperatives intersected, and how activist ideas or tools spread across groups. As this article demonstrates, the bust card became part of wider activism to reform the criminal justice system. It was also about pushing to remake the relationship between the state and marginalized individuals, whether that was through an interaction with the police or through accessing public services.

The histories of the global anti-apartheid struggle, and particularly the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), have predominantly been examined through a transnational and national prism, creating an inaccurate impression of a highly centralized and homogeneous movement. We argue, however, that refining the analysis to focus on the local setting reveals a more complex and diverse movement, which has not been fully captured in the existing scholarship. Using Dundee as a case study, this article charts the emergence, character, and evolution of anti-apartheid sentiment and activity in this small, peripheral industrial Scottish city. By exploring student activities in the 1970s, the brief but influential presence of Southern African exiles in the city, the radical politics of Dundee AAM (DAAM), and the symbolic solidarity of civic actors, the article demonstrates where local AAM group autonomy and regionally specific conditions intersected to shape the distinct trajectory of anti-apartheid in Dundee. Within this local history, we uncover divergences with wider national trends, most notably DAAM's accommodation of the radical Revolutionary Communist Group, which complicates dominant narratives of entryism and tension between the far-left and the AAM. The Dundee example demonstrates that analysing anti-apartheid activities through a local lens establishes alternative readings of the multi-layered and divergent nature of British activism and of twentieth-century international solidarity movements more broadly.

During the Second World War and the austerity period that followed it, the British government operated clothes rationing as a welfare policy. Its official aim was to ensure that all citizens had equal access to essential clothing. Despite being associated with the principle of 'fair shares', rationing did not work well for large-bodied consumers. Government agents' assumptions about citizens' bodies generated a rationing scheme that overlooked large bodies. As a result, rationing regulations and economic controls amplified the normalizing impulses of mass production, creating a constant shortage of ready-made large garments and a market in which purchasing power and access to goods depended on body size. Struggling to navigate this market, consumers attempted to hold the government accountable for its declarations of equality. Tracing this issue in government records and in local, national, and trade press, this article discusses how the conflicting motivations of state, trade, and citizens shaped rationing in a way that prioritized the culturally and statistically 'normal' and reflects on what mass welfare meant for citizens with 'abnormal' needs.