Bringing Political Economy Back In

1998 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura L. Frader
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Power Of Language ◽  
The 1960S

As other contributors to this roundtable suggest, the practices of social and labor history as we have known them have been in methodological and epistemological turmoil for some time. The dominant paradigms that guided much of the work of social historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have been thrown into question by poststructuralism and by the emergence of new analytical perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicities. Attention to culture and to the meanings that historical subjects imposed on the habits of everyday life, as well as to the constitutive power of language and cultural practices, have now become a central aspect of much historical work that has sought to analyze the operations of gender, race, and ethnicities as the subjects of social history and the history of working people in particular.

‘Histories of Everyday Life’ in Local Museums

2021 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Community Settings ◽  
Industrial Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Folk History ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

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.

The ‘History of Everyday Life’ on BBC Radio

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-127
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Director General ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

The second part of this book, which starts with this chapter, is about the ‘history of everyday life’ in practice. This opening chapter is about the broadcasting of history on BBC radio before the 1960s, drawing on programme schedules, scripts, and production documents. The ‘history of everyday life’ flourished as part of the BBC’s educational, citizen-making project, underpinned by the ethos of John Reith, the BBC’s first Director-General between 1922 and 1938. This chapter reveals how the ‘history of everyday life’ was bound up with the concentration of female talent within the inter-war BBC and the emergence of new radiophonic technologies during the 1930s. Sound effects, music, and femininity helped to construct a genre of ‘light’ social history broadcasting, designed to appeal to ordinary listeners across both schools and general programming. This trend is highlighted through a focus on the work of Rhoda Power, a BBC educationaist. A particular shift is identified during the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, when history content on the radio became stratified between the ‘expert’ and the ‘popular’ due to gendered and professionalizing impulses within the BBC. As a consequence, the ‘history of everyday life’ came to be regarded as history for leisure in the post-1945 period.

Women and Capitalism: Oppression or Emancipation? A Review Article

1988 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Transition To Capitalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Status Of Women

In the last few years, work in social history and the history of women has centred on the transition to capitalism and the great bourgeois political revolutions—also variously described as industrialization, urbanisation, and modernisation. Throughout this work runs a steady debate about the improvement or deterioration brought about by these changes in the lives of women and working people. On the whole, sociologists of the 1960s and early 1970s and many recent historians have been optimistic about the changes in women's position, while feminist and Marxist scholars have taken a much more gloomy view.1 There has been little debate between the two sides, yet the same opposed arguments about the impact of capitalism on the status of women crop up not only in accounts of Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also in work on women in the Third World, and cry out for critical assessment.

Labor History and Public History: Introduction

2009 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Miller Klubock ◽  
Paulo Fontes
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Labor History ◽  
New Left ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

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.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
The Other ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One

The introduction proposes the key argument that the twentieth century was Britain’s educational century. It discusses how the democratization of historical knowledge in Britain between 1918 and 1979 occurred as a process of negotiation between policymakers, elites, and educationists on the one hand, and ordinary people on the other. The concept of the ‘history of everyday life’ is introduced and defined. The introduction then discusses the important role of women in the making of popular social history, and its relationship to classed, gendered, racial, imperial, and national categories. The ‘history of everyday life’ is briefly discussed in relation to other ‘origin stories’ of British social history, especially the new academic social history of the 1960s and the importance of the ‘everyday’ in mid-century social science. Finally, the introduction discusses the book’s methodological approach and provides an overview of each of the chapters.

Social History for ‘Ordinary’ School Pupils

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-86
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
British Society ◽  
Practical Skills ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
Average Ability ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Chapters 1 and 2 make up Part I of this book, which explains how the ‘history of everyday life’ developed and why it had such purchase in mid-twentieth-century British society. This chapter is about the theory and practice of teaching social history in schools between the 1920s and the 1960s. It explains the pedagogical framework in which ordinary consumers of history came to be conceptualized in the mid-twentieth century. It is argued that social history in schools was increasingly associated with average ability and younger pupils after 1918. Through mass education, the ‘history of everyday life’, with its premium on local settings, practical skills, emotions, and the visual, became the type of history prescribed for the ordinary, ‘modern’ pupil.

“Sou Inglesa! Sou Inglesa!”: Memórias de uma Menina Anglo-Portuguesa (1907-1930)

2017 ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Miguel Alarcão
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

Textualizing the memory(ies) of physical and cultural encounter(s) between Self and Other, travel literature/writing often combines subjectivity with documental information which may prove relevant to better assess mentalities, everyday life and the social history of any given ‘timeplace’. That is the case with Growing up English. Memories of Portugal 1907-1930, by D. J. Baylis (née Bucknall), prefaced by Peter Mollet as “(…) a remarkably vivid and well written observation of the times expressed with humour and not little ‘carinho’. In all they make excellent reading especially for those of us interested in the recent past.” (Baylis: 2)

Marxism and Historiography: Perspectives on Roman History

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Giardina
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Italian History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Changing Role

Marxism has slowly declined in recent literature on the economic and social history of the ancient world. If one happens to run into the name of Marx or the term Marxism, it is generally within the context of polemical remark. In spite of recurrent attempts to resuscitate it as an ideal foil for anti-Communist polemic, Marxism made its final exit from the field of ancient historical studies in the 1960s, when new Marxist and Marxist-inspired historiography came to the fore. This chapter discusses the changing role of Marxism in Italian history-writing. It focuses on the historians who claim themselves as Marxists, and those who employ Marxist categories and draw on Marxist theory yet refuse to be defined as Marxists. The chapter examines the debates of the different groups on the historiographic phase marked by the circulation of Marxist concepts, analytical tools, and models outside the strictly Marxist milieu. One of the most striking aspects of this phase is the existence of a trend for the formation of research groups that shared not only an affinity or ideological adherence to Marxism, but also an interest in historical theory and a similar orientation in cultural politics. These interdisciplinary approaches stimulated the confluence of individual competences in group projects aimed at singling out new topics and developing investigational strategies. This historiographic phase also reflected a sense of community, a refusal of traditional academic hierarchies, a wish to keep individualism in check, and the rejection of erudite isolation. In Italy, these forms of association served as a means for ethical and political self-representation of cultural hegemony.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Dan Bendrups
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social History ◽  
Rapa Nui ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

This introduction offers a social history of Rapa Nui that puts into relief the various forces that have effected change in Rapanui society, extending from precontact times to the 1960s—the point at which the Rapanui people were finally endowed with recognition of their basic human rights and the point at which tourism commenced in earnest. This history includes a short detour through the discourses of collapse and “ecocide” that permeate Rapanui scholarship. This is followed by a discussion of music and sustainability that provides a theoretical and disciplinary grounding for the study. Finally, the introduction provides an explanation of the structure of the book and the chapters that follow.

Materials for the Study of Labor and Working Class History in Italy

1972 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Kenneth Kirkland
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The subject suggested in the title is so broad as to make it rather difficult to decide what boundaries to draw around the study of various resources available to the historian or other social scientist who sets out to study labor history, the social history of Italian workers and peasants, and the political and intellectual history of socialism and other radical movements. Keeping in mind that the following discussion is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather an indication of the necessary starting point to begin an investigation is probably the best way to understand this note.

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