What did ‘the people’ want?: the meaning of the 1945 general election

1992 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 623-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Political Process ◽  
Second World War ◽  
General Election ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
The People ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

AbstractLabour's victory at the general election of 1945, the first in which the party won an absolute majority in the house of commons, had fundamental implications for Britain's post-war history. Despite this, historians have failed to examine the popular political temper which made Labour's term of office possible. Instead, they have largely assumed that the Second World War radicalized the public, turning an unprecedented number into enthusiastic Labour voters. Whilst not denying that the war had a profound impact on the politics of some sections of society this article proposes a rather different perspective to that normally offered. Instead of promoting pro-Labour sentiment it seems that the conflict left many members of the public disengaged from the political process and cynical about the motives of all politicians. As a consequence, rather than have Labour hold office by itself the generally favoured outcome appears to have been the formation of a progressive coalition committed to the implementation of the Beveridge report. However, in reality, electors who did not want to see the return of a Conservative government had no choice but to vote ‘straight left’.

Colossus, Codebreaking, and the Digital Age

Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Budiansky
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The paths that took men and women from their ordinary lives and deposited them on the doorstep of the odd profession of cryptanalysis were always tortuous, accidental, and unpredictable. The full story of the Colossus, the pioneering electronic device developed by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) to break German teleprinter ciphers in the Second World War, is fundamentally a story of several of these accidental paths converging at a remarkable moment in the history of electronics—and of the wartime urgency that set these men and women on these odd paths. Were it not for the wartime necessity of codebreaking, and were it not for particular statistical and logical properties of the teleprinter ciphers that were so eminently suited to electronic analysis, the history of computing might have taken a very different course. The fact that Britain’s codebreakers cracked the high-level teleprinter ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe high command during the Second World War has been public knowledge since the 1970s. But the recent declassification of new documents about Colossus and the teleprinter ciphers, and the willingness of key participants to discuss their roles more fully, has laid bare as never before the technical challenges they faced—not to mention the intense pressures, the false steps, and the extraordinary risks and leaps of faith along the way. It has also clarified the true role that the Colossus machines played in the advent of the digital age. Though they were neither general-purpose nor stored-program computers themselves, the Colossi sparked the imaginations of many scientists, among them Alan Turing and Max Newman, who would go on to help launch the post-war revolution that ushered in the age of the digital, general-purpose, stored-program electronic computer. Yet the story of Colossus really begins not with electronics at all, but with codebreaking; and to understand how and why the Colossi were developed and to properly place their capabilities in historical context, it is necessary to understand the problem they were built to solve, and the people who were given the job of solving it.

scholarly journals THE ORIGINS OF SOE IN FRANCE

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 935-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER J. MURPHY
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
World War ◽  
Special Operations ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Counterpart ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Public Record ◽  
Office Of Strategic Services ◽  
Second World

This article explores the official motivation behind the authorization in 1960 of research into the activities of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War by M. R. D. Foot, leading to the publication of SOE in France in 1966. The work has traditionally been viewed as the official response to critical investigative works on SOE published during the 1950s, combined with the vocal campaign of Dame Irene Ward, who made several calls in the House of Commons for an official account of SOE to be published. Material now available at the Public Record Office reveals that these were not the sole considerations in official minds, nor the most significant, concerning the possibility of publishing such a work. The foreign office was particularly concerned that Britain's contribution to wartime resistance in Europe, exemplified by SOE, was being overshadowed by both soviet propoganda, emphasizing the communist contribution to resistance, and the publicity being given to SOE's American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The ‘campaign’ of Dame Irene Ward, supported by the negative slant given to SOE in the books of Jean Overton Fuller and Elizabeth Nicholas, unknowingly gave support to a frame of mind that was already in existence in favour of an unofficial account of SOE activity, albeit for different reasons.

THE SWANSONG OF THE MANDARINS: HUMBOLDT’S IDEA OF THE UNIVERSITY IN EARLY POST-WAR GERMANY

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHAN ÖSTLING
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Future Role ◽  
The Public ◽  
Intellectual Elite ◽  
Post War ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World ◽  
Idea Of The University

In the wake of the Second World War, Germany saw an intensive debate about the idea of the university and its future role in society. All were agreed that the country's universities had to be revitalized after the ravages of Nazism, but the question was what weight should be given to the classical German heritage, and the Humboldtian tradition in particular. The mandarins, the older humanist scholars, dominated the public debate about the fundamental principles of research and higher education, and this essay focuses on the contribution made by three of them—Karl Jaspers, Gerhard Ritter, and Werner Richter. In making their points, they all revealed a strong historical orientation, but equally very different views on the Humboldtian legacy. This essay argues that their ideas about the German university must be seen against the background of the specific experiences of their generation. In the event, the immediate post-war period was the last time their academic ideals were to gain much of a hearing. The university debate proved to be the swansong for Germany's intellectual elite.

scholarly journals The emergence of the Netherlands as a ‘democratic’ country

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
Henk te Velde
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Democratic Country

This contribution sketches the emergence of democratic self-definitions in the Netherlands, from the end of the 18th century until the post-war period, when it had become commonplace to define the country as democratic. Its point of departure is the use of the word and concept of democracy by contemporaries and Dutch and foreign historians, and it argues that the history of Dutch ‘democracy’ has been characterized by an emphasis on freedom, self-government by a broadly defined elite and a strong civil society, rather than by participation of the population at large. Democracy only became really popular after the Second World War when it could be defined as protection against dictatorship. The Dutch case shows that we should be careful about equating a strong civil society or even the rule of law with democracy in the sense of the power of the people at large. Democracy was definitely accepted as a label to characterize the Netherlands after it had been redefined as in essence the opposite of dictatorship instead of the opposite of aristocracy. The Dutch case also shows that a highly developed, civil society can even confine rather than promote the need for political democracy and for a vibrant independent political sphere.

Squatting: The Fight for Decent Shelter, 1970s–1980s

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Housing Policies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Housing Needs ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

During the twenty years after the Second World War, housing began to be seen as a basic right among many in the west, and the British welfare state included many policies and provisions to provide decent shelter for its citizens. This article focuses on the period circa 1968–85, because this was a time in England when the lack of affordable, secure-tenured housing reached a crisis level at the same time that central and local governmental housing policies received wider scrutiny for their ineffectiveness. My argument is that despite post-war laws and rhetoric, many Britons lived through a housing disaster and for many the most rational way they could solve their housing needs was to exploit loopholes in the law (as well as to break them out right). While the main focus of the article is on young British squatters, there is scope for transnational comparison. Squatters in other parts of the world looked to their example to address the housing needs in their own countries, especially as privatization of public services spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Dutch, Spanish, German and American squatters were involved in a symbiotic exchange of ideas and sometimes people with the British squatters and each other, and practices and rhetoric from one place were quickly adopted or rejected based on the success or failure in each place.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

ABCs of the Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-291
Author(s):  
Egor A. Yesyunin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Development History ◽  
The People ◽  
Red Army ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Revolution

The article is devoted to the satirical agitation ABCs that appeared during the Civil War, which have never previously been identified by researchers as a separate type of agitation art. The ABCs, which used to have the narrow purpose of teaching children to read and write before, became a form of agitation art in the hands of artists and writers. This was facilitated by the fact that ABCs, in contrast to primers, are less loaded with educational material and, accordingly, they have more space for illustrations. The article presents the development history of the agitation ABCs, focusing in detail on four of them: V.V. Mayakovsky’s “Soviet ABC”, D.S. Moor’s “Red Army Soldier’s ABC”, A.I. Strakhov’s “ABC of the Revolution”, and M.M. Cheremnykh’s “Anti-Religious ABC”. There is also briefly considered “Our ABC”: the “TASS Posters” created by various artists during the Second World War. The article highlights the special significance of V.V. Mayakovsky’s first agitation ABC, which later became a reference point for many artists. The authors of the first satirical ABCs of the Civil War period consciously used the traditional form of popular prints, as well as ditties and sayings, in order to create images close to the people. The article focuses on the iconographic connections between the ABCs and posters in the works of D.S. Moor and M.M. Cheremnykh, who transferred their solutions from the posters to the ABCs.

Enhancing Teaching Pedagogy through Bowen Mechanism:

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 780-789
Author(s):  
Honoureen Beatrice Gamble
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Job Market ◽  
Teaching Pedagogy ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Student Community ◽  
Hard Skills ◽  
Good Product ◽  
The People ◽  
Second World

Language has become a never- ending phenomenon in day-day life. To articulate one’s own idea language has become an artifact in showcasing the rudiments of everyday life. It is a tool which bridges the gap between the people so that the conflict between known and the unknown will not take place. The major portal of communication is language and it operates at every level and without this the mode will not function. Teaching is quite challenging in the contemporary times and it expects the teaching fraternity to be a facilitator than a moderator. A few decades back book based teaching was foregrounded and knowledge based teaching was back grounded whereas in the present scenario knowledge based teaching which comprises hard skills and soft skills matters a lot along with that the curriculm too evolves. This paradigmatic shift is to make the student community a good product in the job market. Literature is unique in nature and it informs the reader about the scenarios which will take place in the coming days and all this is possible only through the artistic talent of the writers and they are the real oracles. Bowen Mechanism having its deep origin in America when the society was fragmented owing to the Aftermaths of the second world war .  A psychologist by nature has framed a few methodologies to eliminate the human’s misunderstanding and for that communication acts as an impetus.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE PEOPLE OF UZBEKISTAN IN THE VICTORY OF OVER FASCISM IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-11
Author(s):  
Dilorom Bobojonova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Additional Material ◽  
Historical Aspect ◽  
The People ◽  
Second World

In this article, the author highlights the worthy contribution of the people of Uzbekistan, along with other peoples, to the victory over fascism in World War II in a historical aspect. This approach to this issue will serve as additional material to previously published works in international scientific circles

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document