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.

‘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 Publishing of Popular Social History Books

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-54
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
British Society ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Post War ◽  
History Books

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 uses the publishing of popular history books to investigate the emergence of the ‘history of everyday life’ as a new genre of popular social history in the inter-war period. Between the wars, publishers competed to capture burgeoning educational markets as the market for ‘traditional’ narrative and literary histories declined. As a result, they began to repackage illustrated source books, memoirs, and diaries as history books after 1918. This fed the appetites of an altered, post-war reading public, including women and juvenile workers.

Histories of Everyday Life

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
First World

Histories of Everyday Life is a study of the production and consumption of popular social history in mid-twentieth-century Britain. It traces how non-academic historians, many of them women, developed a new breed of social history after the First World War, identified as the ‘history of everyday life’. The ‘history of everyday life’ was a pedagogical construct based on the perceived educational needs of the new, mass democracy. It was popularized to ordinary people in educational settings, through books, in classrooms and museums, and on BBC radio. In the 1970s this popular social history declined, not because academics invented an alternative ‘new’ social history, but because bottom-up social change rendered the ‘history of everyday life’ untenable in the changing context of mass education. Histories of Everyday Life ultimately uses the subject of history to demonstrate how profoundly the advent of mass education shaped popular culture in Britain after 1918, arguing that the twentieth century was Britain’s educational century.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-242
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Women's History ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The conclusion first summarises the book’s argument about the rise and fall of the ‘history of everyday life’ in British culture between 1918 and 1979. It then considers some educational connections between ‘history from below’ and the ‘history of everyday life’, suggesting that as universities became sites of mass education in the late twentieth-century, academic social history could more easily adopt the language of everyday life. Finally, the conclusion explores synergies between the ‘history of everyday life’ and feminist women’s histories of the 1970s and 1980s, re-asserting the centrality of women to the production and consumption of popular social history in twentieth-century Britain. An important legacy of the mid-century ‘history of everyday life’ is found in campaigns to bring women’s history into schools in London during the 1980s.

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.

The Decline of Christianity in Twentieth-Century Britain

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas William Heyck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Church Membership ◽  
British Society ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Statistical Surveys

The history of religion in Britain—as distinct from church or ecclesiastical history—is making an impressive comeback in the consciousness of historians, with important implications for British cultural and social history. Not least affected is the history of Britain in the twentieth century. Fifteen years ago, the well-known social historian Alan Gilbert published his The Making of Post-Christian Britain, which soon became the standard account of the secularization of British society since the eighteenth century. Taking off from careful statistical surveys of Christian church membership and participation that he had done in two earlier books, and looking for explanation to a very broad range of cultural, economic, and social factors, Gilbert presented an argument that has seemed so powerful as to be an almost irresistible account of the apparent fact of the secularization of Britain. More recently, however, both religious historians and sociologists of religion have begun to question not only Gilbert's premises and argument, but also the very concept of secularization. The result of this questioning, exemplified by the books here reviewed, is a major controversy concerning the recent history of religion in Britain.

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 and Mass Education in the 1970s

2021 ◽  
pp. 199-236
Author(s):  
Laura Carter
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Education ◽  
Multicultural Education ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social History ◽  
Ethnically Diverse ◽  
Mass Education ◽  
Female Participation ◽  
New School ◽  
School Subjects ◽  
History Of

This chapter, and the final part of this book, explains the unmaking of the ‘history of everyday life’. It is about the teaching of social history in comprehensive schools during the 1970s, where mass secondary education up to the age of sixteen became the norm. We see first how the English comprehensive school utilized the ‘history of everyday life’ to teach its ordinary pupils, including ‘immigrant’ pupils and those taking the new ‘Certificate of Secondary Education’ (CSE) examination. However, these practices came to discredit the ‘history of everyday life’ as the decade drew on, especially when competing with new school subjects such as sociology and as part of the problematic project of ‘multicultural’ education. As Britain’s population became more ethnically diverse and female participation in post-16 education increased, young citizens demanded a social history that could accommodate the analysis of power. This shift ultimately evacuated the ‘history of everyday life’ from the spaces of mass education that it had once occupied.

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.

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