scholarly journals Captain Swing: A Retrospect

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Randall

SummaryCaptain Swing, authored by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé and published in 1969, was one of the key texts in the development of the new British social history of the 1960s and 1970s. On its fortieth anniversary, this introduction to the special theme looks back at the significance and impact that Captain Swing had, and continues to have, on the study of popular protest. The author locates the approach taken by its writers within the political and historiographical context of its time and examines how successive historians – including the two authors following this retrospect – have built upon and challenged the arguments which the book advanced.

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID M. CRAIG

ABSTRACTRecent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Bouk

This article presents an intellectual and social history of the concept of the baby boom. Researchers first invented the notion of a population bulge in the mid-twentieth-century United States to explain birth rates that were higher than predicted by their theories of a mature population and economy. As the children born during this “baby boom” entered schools in the 1950s, they were drawn into a pre-existing conversation about an educational emergency that confirmed researchers’ suspicions that the bulge would spread crisis over time throughout all of the nation's age-graded institutions. New sociological and demographic explanations of the bulge subsequently merged with heightened talk of generational conflict during the 1960s and 1970s to define, with journalistic help in 1980, the “baby boom generation” and the “baby boomer.” Crisis talk has pursued the boomers into the present, mobilized most effectively by opponents of the welfare state.


2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 81-88
Author(s):  
Samuel Mössner ◽  
Tim Freytag

Abstract This paper approaches the global city concept from a local perspective taking into account the political action of local elites in times of urban neoliberalisation. Drawing on the empirical research carried out in Frankfurt (Main), we argue that the very beginnings of the global city formation were less a result of global processes superseding local ones, as is often argued, but rather emerged out of local political action contested by local protests. In the first part, we will revisit the global city concept and contrast it against a critique of urban neoliberalisation. The second focuses on reviewing the history of urban restructuring in the Frankfurt Westend during the 1960s and 1970s. We suggest that the transformation of the Westend into a “strategic site of global control” (Sassen 2011) has been constructed as a narrative in order to legitimise local forms of real estate speculation, marketisation of commodification. Our paper tries to unfold the logics and strategies of such neoliberal urbanisation by critically reflecting upon historical events since the 1960s


2021 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Laura Carter

The second part of this book, of which this chapter is part, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This chapter examines the ‘history of everyday life’ in local community settings. It argues that folk museums were the museological vehicles of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. The British folk museum movement is traced via museum case studies in Luton, Cambridge, York, and the Highlands. Collecting practices, curation, visitors, and the educational programmes within each museum are analysed. The practices of several curator-collectors of everyday life, notably Enid Porter and Isabel Grant, are explored in depth. The chapter argues that folk history, so often thought of as a talisman of the extreme right, was recast at a community level into a feminized and conservative ‘history of everyday life’ for ordinary people. The final part of the chapter connects the ‘history of everyday life’ to debates about the emergence of commercial and industrial heritage in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.


2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Phillipson

Pat Thane. Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 536 pp. £25.00 ISBN 0-19-820382-9.John Macnicol. The Politics of Retirement in Britain, 1878-1948. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. 425 pp, £47.50, ISBN 0-52162273- 5.Research on the history of old age has been an important area of scholarship in gerontology over the past two decades. From the impetus provided by Laslett's work in the 1960s and 1970s, historical research had opened out by the 1980s into what Stearns and Van Tassel viewed as a ‘promising and provocative subfield of social history’ (1986: ix).


2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes

Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.


2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-6
Author(s):  
LILIA LABIDI

The two photographs I am examining, which are taken from a series involving some sixty married couples from across Tunisia and over three generations (covering the period from the 1940s to the 1990s), concern the second generation of couples—those marrying in the 1960s and 1970s, when the marriage photo became a significant element in family practice. These portraits reveal new patterns of behavior, testifying to the impact of (1) discussions about a woman's right to choose her spouse that took place after the promulgation of the Personal Status Code in 1956, (2) mixed-gender education, and (3) campaigns denouncing the negative effects on new couples of expensive marriage ceremonies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Fleming

AbstractAlthough the “new social history” of the 1960s and 1970s quickly bequeathed its universal ambitions to a “new cultural history” in the 1980s, the attraction of the social historical category for study of the ancient Near East remains its potential to transform how we see the entire landscape of each past setting, still evoking E. P. Thompson’s history “from the bottom up.” Cuneiform writing offers a wealth of materials from the transactions of everyday life, in spite of the fact that the scribal profession served the centers of power and families of means, and a social historical perspective allows even documents from administrative archives to be viewed from below as well as from the rulers’ vantage. The potential for examining ancient society from below, in all its variety and lack of order, is illustrated in the archives of Late Bronze Age Emar in northwestern Syria. It is to be hoped that specialists in the ancient Near East will join a larger conversation among historians about how to approach the movement of societies through time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Enstad

The tale reads as a classic fall from grace. In the 1960s and 1970s, historians investigated the economy. They were serious and politically relevant. But then the discipline fell to the beguiling ways of cultural and social history. Fractured and fragmented, scholars wandered off like cats into various alleyways, pawed at incomprehensible theories, and lost track of the common reader. There is hope, however, because in the past decade or so a new movement has arisen to lead historians out of the obscure alleyways and back to the main path: the economy, so long neglected.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Irmline Veit-Brause

The formation of a national elite in Germany during the period before and after political unification, 1871, is still a largely unexplored topic in German social history. The Prussocentric perspective in German historiography, which is still prevailing in much of the work done by the so-called critical history of the 1960s and 1970s, has tended to give scant consideration to the sociocultural diversity underlying and enshrined in the federal structure of the Empire. The process of national consolidation of Imperial society could profitably be studied along the center-periphery continuum of national integration. It would be interesting, in particular, to subject to closer scrutiny the notion of “preindustrial elites,” which held on to the reigns of power in Prussia-Germany at a time of such rapid social and economic change.


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