Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968-2000

Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

This book examines class identities and politics in late twentieth-century England. Class remained important to ‘ordinary’ people’s identities and their narratives about social change in this period, but in changing ways. Using self-narratives drawn from a wide range of sources, the book shows that many people felt that once-clear class boundaries had blurred since 1945. By the end of the period, ‘working-class’ was often seen as a historical identity, related to background and heritage. The middle classes became more heterogeneous, and class snobberies ‘went underground’, as people from all backgrounds began to assert the importance of authenticity, individuality, and ordinariness. The book argues that it is more useful to understand the cultural changes of these years through the lens of the decline of deference, which transformed people’s attitudes towards class, and towards politics. The final two chapters examine the claim that Thatcher and New Labour wrote class out of politics. This simple—and highly political—narrative misses important points of distinction. Thatcher was driven by political ideology and necessity to dismiss the importance of class, while the New Labour project was good at listening to voters—particularly swing voters in marginal seats—and echoing back what they were increasingly saying about the blurring of class lines and the importance of ordinariness. But this did not add up to an abandonment of a majoritarian project, as New Labour reoriented socialism to emphasize using collective action to empower the individual.

What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


Author(s):  
David Temperley

This chapter presents the scope, rationale, and approach of the book. Unlike much previous research on rock, the book is focused on musical rather than sociocultural aspects; it is primarily theoretical (focused on general features of the style) rather than analytical (focused on understanding individual works), though it is argued that developing a stronger theoretical foundation for rock will benefit analysis. Rock is defined broadly, to include a wide range of late twentieth-century Anglo-American popular styles. The chapter addresses some potentially controversial aspects of the book, such as the idea of rock as a musical “language,” the use of concepts from common-practice theory, the use of music notation, and the focus on purely musical aspects of the rock style. The chapter also describes the corpus of harmonic analyses and melodic transcriptions that is used in the book.


2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Bauer

This article proposes to analyze the idea of organism and other closely related ideas (function, differentiation, etc.) using a combination of semantic fields analysis from conceptual history and the notion of boundary objects from the sociology of scientific knowledge. By tackling a wide range of source material, the article charts the nomadic existence of organism and opens up new vistas for an integrated history of the natural and human sciences. First, the boundaries are less clear-cut between disciplines like biology and sociology than previously believed. Second, a long and transdisciplinary tradition of talking about organismic and societal systems in highly functionalist terms comes into view. Third, the approach shows that conceptions of a world society in Niklas Luhmann's variant are not semantic innovations of the late twentieth century. Rather, their history can be traced back to organicist sociology and its forgotten pioneers, especially Albert Schäffle or Guillaume de Greef, during the last decades of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Michael Searby

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti is often described as a maverick by commentators on late twentieth-century music, and this article examines the evidence for using such a label. To what extent can Ligeti be genuinely considered a maverick? Or is this epithet an over-simplification of a more complex situation? The OED’s definition of a maverick (‘an unorthodox or independent-minded person: a person who refuses to conform to the views of a particular group or party: an individualist’) is close to the often stated view of Ligeti when compared with his peers, and it is also the view that Ligeti himself seemed to want to project in his many interviews. When accused by Helmut Lachenmann in 1984 of ‘selling out’—initiated by a performance of Ligeti’s rather postmodernist-sounding Horn Trio—Ligeti claimed that he was actually composing non-atonal rather than postmodernist music. This suggests that he felt that he was not following the prevailing new cultural movement of postmodernism, though works such as Hungarian Rock for harpsichord, with its use of tonality and influences of jazz, seem to undermine this assertion.  When one compares Ligeti’s Apparitions for orchestra with Penderecki’s contemporaneous Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, it is possible to observe the similarities of approach, which hint that Ligeti’s music conforms to a more general approach to composing in the 1960s, focused on texture and timbre. When one views Ligeti’s entire oeuvre, one can see that he did in fact follow various contemporary compositional trends. Through a nuanced evaluation of Ligeti’s approach, the article concludes that the term ‘maverick’ does not do justice to the wide range of his output.


Author(s):  
Adèle C. Green ◽  
David C. Whiteman

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is the principal cause of over 95% of keratinocyte cancers (basal cell carcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas of the skin), the most common cancers in white populations worldwide. UV radiation also causes an estimated 60%–90% of cutaneous melanoma, the cancer affecting the skin’s pigment-producing cells. In addition, UV radiation is the major cause of many eye diseases, including ocular cancers and cataract, the commonest cause of blindness, and is responsible for the underlying changes in skin aging, on which billions of dollars are spent annually in efforts to repair the damage. The sun is the principal source of human exposure to UV radiation. However, artificial sources are encountered in a wide range of industrial and medical settings, and increasingly from commercial tanning facilities. By the late twentieth century, nearly epidemic increases in skin cancer incidence had occurred in white populations, especially in Australia and New Zealand.


1989 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold C. Livesay

Reiterating and broadening a theme broached by its author over a decade ago, this article seeks to redirect the attention of business historians to the central role of the individual entrepreneur in American economic history. In both giant corporations and small start-up firms, in the late twentieth century and the early nineteenth, it argues, the presence—or absence—of intelligent, organized, and creative entrepreneurs has determined the success or failure of companies much more clearly than has the nature of their organizational charts.


Author(s):  
Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

This chapter explores the intertwined migration and expansion of two temperate zone transplants—Mennonites and soybeans—in semitropical Santa Cruz. The transnational history of Bolivian Mennonites offers several interrelated ironies that drive home the paradox of national development in lowland Bolivia. A revolutionary nation-state that sought to use colonization to transform traditional Indigenous subjects into citizens welcomed foreign Mennonites and explicitly freed them from the central components of modern citizenship. Seeking to develop modern, market-oriented agribusiness on its eastern frontier, the MNR invited a traditionalist agricultural community that shunned a wide range of technological innovations. Yet, surprisingly, horse-and-buggy Mexican Mennonites emerged over the following fifty years as exactly the sort of model, mechanized farmers the Bolivian state hoped to create of its own citizenry. In particular, the chapter situates Mennonites amid the dramatic expansion of late twentieth century soybean production that has converted the forested heart of the continent into the world’s preeminent soy region. By then, the logic of the March to the East had definitively shifted from national self-sufficiency to the export of profitable cash crops. Mennonites stood at the center of this neo-extractivism even as they continued to produce dairy within an earlier logic of food security.


Author(s):  
William Whyte

This chapter explores the way in which developments in the apparently rather narrow field of undergraduate finance tell us something about perceptions of the university in the late twentieth century and, more importantly, about how debates over higher education illuminate wider attitudes to the relationship between the individual, the state, and civil society. It also uses these debates—and the legislation they inspired—to discuss the difficulties the state and other actors faced in dealing with higher education in an era characterized by anxieties about Britain’s perceived decline, and about inequities in British society. The tangled and tortured development of student finance in the last four decades of the twentieth century illustrates the value of Jose Harris’s approach, whilst also enabling historians to trace the longer-lasting legacy of idealist thought.


2014 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 142-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

AbstractWhite workers and white working-class politics have been neglected in the historiography of South Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to extricate white workers from this historiographical neglect and fracture homogenizing representations of white, specifically Afrikaner, experiences of democratization. It does so by reintroducing class to a debate dominated by race. Employing a discursive analysis sensitive to issues of class, it shows that white workers were confronted with democratizing change and disempowerment more than a decade before the end of apartheid and suggests that class politics continue to inform white responses in post-apartheid South Africa. In this way, it argues for a historical, discursive approach to uncovering the power dynamics of class and the complex intersection of working-class and racial identities in the late twentieth century.


Author(s):  
P.A. Kordovska

Introduction. In the music of the late twentieth century the realization of the creative potential of performers is rarely limited with the framework of direction which was chosen in the beginning of career. The field of the academic music may be too narrow for the artist, but this does not mean a definitive departure from this area. The life and performances of Italian singer, actress and composer Daisy Lumini (1936–1993) could be considered as one of the examples of the twentieth century “variability” of the artist’s way. She developed from a graduate of the Conservatory to a pop star and a cabaret singer, from a medieval folklore performer to an interpreter of contemporary academic music. Daisy Lumini’s unique performing experience led her to collaborate with Italian composers of the late twentieth century. Theoretical background. The extraordinary personality of Daisy Lumini received a certain resonance in the European press. High historical value is the biographical essay “Daisy e la musica. Una grande e tragica storia” (2019) by Chiara Ferrari, based on the memories of Beppe Chierici. Daisy Lumini and her works are mentioned in digest “The Singer-Songwriter in Europe: Paradigms, Politics and Place” (2016) and in Jacopo Tomatis’s “Storia culturale della canzone italiana” (2019). The purpose of this paper is to reveal the specifics of the interaction of the composer and performer in the post-avant-garde music based on the creative collaboration of Daisy Lumini and Italian composers of the late twentieth century (Franco Mannino, Luciano Berio, Salvatore Sciarrino). This study requires the use of analytical, style and performing methods of scientific research. Results of the research. Daisy Lumini’s singing style has implicated using a lot of types of intonational practices which is usually associated with the mass twentieth century culture (including pop songs, folk music, cabaret aesthetic etc.). Nevertheless, she had started her musician career with getting education (as a composer and pianist) in totally academic environment in Luigi Cherubini Conservatory (Florence, Italy). Being a daughter of the Florentine painter Vasco Lumini, Daisy Lumini had would be able to continue a calm and comfortable existence in Florence. However, after she had been graduated from the Conservatory in late 1950s she decided to change her life vector, moved to Rome, started her activity as a cantautrice (female singer-songwriter) and produced her first singles. During this period, Lumini found success in collaboration with lyric writer Aldo Alberini and well-known Italian singers Mina Mazzini and Claudio Villa. Along with traditional vocal techniques, Lumini used the whistling technique, due to which she got the nickname “l’usignolo di Firenze” (“the Florentine nightingale”) and was invited by Ennio Morricone to whistle in the soundtrack of Lina Wertmüller’s “I Basilischi” (“The Lizards”, 1963). In 1960s a work in Gianni Bongiovanni’s Derby Club Cabaret (Milan) and a collaboration with the RCA (Radio Corporation of America) turned into the fields of Lumini’s creative activity. The acquaintanceship with Beppe Chierici, an actor, who would become her husband, lead to a new “folklore” stage of Lumini’s career. As a result of careful research of Italian folk music founded on the materials of Conservatory Santa Cecilia Library (Rome), the singer together with Beppe Chierici had produced several musical performances in the aesthetics of poor theater based on the Tuscan and Piedmontese songs of the XV–XIX centuries, as well as the Songs of Minstrels album based on the texts of the XII–XIV centuries. There was DaisyLumini’s gradual return to the environment of academic music in 1970s. Singer’s friendly communication with conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti, composers Franco Mannino, Domenico Guaccero and others, who represented Santa Cecilia Conservatory, has resulted in a number of creative collaborations. In 1973, even being immersed in ethnographic research, Daisy Lumini performed as mezzo-soprano in Franco Mannino’s “Il diavolo in giardino”. Another milestone in Daisy Lumini’s work became 1982, when director Roberto Scaparro invited the singer to participate in the Italian premiere of Luciano Berio’s “La vera storia”. In the opera, which is a creative reinterpretation of Verdi’s “Troubadour”, Daisy Lumini played the role of one of the cantastorie – singing storytellers or narrators describing and commenting events of the plot. Daisy Lumini achieved a real success as a performer of the post-avant-garde music in the 1980s, in collaboration with Salvatore Sciarrino. Daisy Lumini has premiered a great number of his chamber works, such as “Efebo con Radio”, “Canto degli specchi”, “Vanitas”, “Lohengrin” and some others. Conclusions. Although Daisy Lumini is an individual case, the phenomena and strategies discussed here may turn out to be symptomatic for contemporary music practice. Performers may rarely allow themselves to remain within the same intonational practice in the contemporary music art. It is especially important if it comes to the first performing of the post-avant-garde music that requires a certain congeniality of the performer and the author. The interaction of the composer and the performer is often a factor affecting the creation of a musical work at all stages, from the appearance of an idea for a premiere performance. The musician with a rich life experience and wide range of performing techniques may be considered as the co-author of the score.


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