‘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.

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.

scholarly journals Generation Crisis: How Population Research Defined the Baby Boomers

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Bouk
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Baby Boom ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
Baby Boom Generation ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Mature Population ◽  
The Welfare State

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.

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 Poetry and Prose of Everyday Life in Communist Kraków: Moths, Old Maids, and the Memoirs of Adam Zagajewski

Slavic Review ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-356
Author(s):  
Larry Wolff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Witold Gombrowicz ◽  
Czeslaw Milosz ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

This essay analyzes Adam Zagajewski’s recent memoir W cudzym pigknie (Another beauty), in which he reflects particularly on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a student and young poet in Kraków. The essay addresses Zagajewski’s perspective on the city of Kraków, his reflections on communism in Wladyslaw Gomulka’s Poland, his sense of the relations between older and younger Polish generations, and his efforts to negotiate a personal balance between poetry and politics. Zagajewski’s memoir is discussed in the context of his own poetry, of Polish intellectual life, and of Kraków’s cultural history from the 1890s to the 1980s. Intellectual points of reference and comparison range from Tadeusz “Boy“ Żeleński and Stanisław Wyspiański in fin-de-siècle Kraków, to Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, and Adam Michnik in later twentieth-century Polish letters and politics. The essay, finally, attempts to assess the significance and implications of communism for Polish poetry, literature, and intellectual life.

scholarly journals Captain Swing: A Retrospect

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 419-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Randall
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
Fortieth Anniversary ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

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.

Archaeocyaths—a history of phylogenetic interpretation

2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (6) ◽  
pp. 1065-1078 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Rowland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Schools ◽  
New School ◽  
Calcareous Sponges ◽  
Extant Species ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Submarine Cave ◽  
The 1960S

Archaeocyaths are calcareous, conical, Cambrian fossils with a long history of phylogenetic uncertainty and changing interpretations. The history of phylogenetic interpretation of archaeocyaths reveals five distinct schools of thought: the coelenterate school, the sponge school, the algae school, the Phylum Archaeocyatha school, and the Kingdom Archaeata school. Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century paleontologists worked within a paradigm of inexorably increasing diversity through time, and they did not believe in the concept of extinct phyla. Consequently, prior to about 1950, archaeocyaths were bounced around from coelenterates to sponges, to algae. By the 1930s, after considerable study, all workers agreed that archaeocyaths were sponges of one type or another. In the mid-twentieth century a significant paradigm shift occurred in paleontology, allowing the viability of the concept of a phylum with no extant species. Correspondingly, two new schools of thought emerged regarding archaeocyathan taxonomy. The Phylum Archaeocyatha school placed them in their own phylum, which was inferred to be closely related to Phylum Porifera within Subkingdom Parazoa. A second new school removed archaeocyaths and some other Paleozoic problematica from the animal kingdom and placed them in Kingdom Archaeata (later Kingdom Inferibionta). The Phylum Archaeocyatha school was the mainstream interpretation from the 1950s through the 1980s. However, the widespread use of SCUBA beginning in the 1960s ultimately led to the rejection of the interpretation that archaeocyaths belong in a separate phylum. SCUBA allowed biologists to study deep fore-reef and submarine cave environments, leading to the discovery of living calcareous sponges, including one aspiculate species that is morphologically similar to archaeocyaths. These discoveries in the 1960s and 1970s stimulated a re-examination of sponge phylogeny generally, and comparisons between archaeocyaths and sponges in particular. The result was the abandonment of the Phylum Archaeocyatha school in the 1990s. Present consensus is that archaeocyaths represent both a clade and a grade—Class Archaeocyatha and the archaeocyathan morphological grade—within Phylum Porifera.

HISTORY AND HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY: DIVERGENT PATHS IN THE STUDY OF AGEING

2001 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Phillipson
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
English History ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
History Of Old Age ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Past Experiences

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).

Whither growth? International development, social indicators, and the politics of measurement, 1920s–1970s

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Macekura
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Development ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Alternative Measure ◽  
Quality Of Life Index ◽  
Major Reform ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractFew concepts in the history of twentieth-century history proved as important as economic growth. Scholars such as Charles Maier, Robert Collins, and Timothy Mitchell have analysed how the notion that an entity called ‘the economy’ (defined by metrics such as Gross National Product, or GNP) could be made to grow came to define economic thought and policy worldwide. Yet there has been far less attention paid to the fact that neither growth nor GNP went without challenge during their emergence and global diffusion. This article focuses on one set of growth critics: those who advocated for ‘social indicators’ in international development policy during the 1960s and 1970s. It advances three overlapping arguments: that advocates for social indicators harkened back to early twentieth-century transnational efforts to make workers’ ‘standard of living’ the primary statistical framework for policy-makers; that, while supporters of social indicators expressed frustration with technocratic governance, their reform efforts nevertheless represented technocratic critiques of modernity; and finally, that one of the major reform efforts, Morris David Morris’s advocacy on behalf of the ‘Physical Quality of Life Index’ (PQLI), as an alternative measure of national wellbeing, ultimately struggled to challenge the GNP growth paradigm, and yet proved influential in spawning subsequent research into new measures and approaches to development.

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.

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