scholarly journals ‘A New Order is Being Created’: Domestic Modernism in 1930s Britain

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-428
Author(s):  
Daniel Moore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
New Order ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Living Space ◽  
Standards Of Living

This article addresses the attempts in Britain in the 1930s to integrate modernist aesthetics with the home. A number of initiatives during this period were directed towards improving both standards of living and the public's taste: arising from exposure to continental modernism (Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier) and with a fervent belief in the democratisation of the living space, innovators such as Wells Coates, Jack and Molly Pritchard, and Maxwell Fry sought to re-invent the home for the twentieth century. The results were often short-lived, and in some cases, abject failures. Yet the negotiations that these designers, architects, and visionaries made between high-minded aesthetics and the practicalities of quotidian British life reveal much about standards of taste during the 1930s. This article takes two case studies in detail: The Lawn Road Flats – the Isokon Building – in Hampstead, London, and the activities of the Design and Industries Association (DIA). In doing so, I chart the ways in which interior design developed in Britain during the decade before the outbreak of World War Two, and explore how small-scale, short-lived activities in this period laid the foundations for a flowering of new modes of living post-1945.

‘The Lure of Pleasure’

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Sue Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Married Woman ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Good Mother

Sue Kennedy considers how Marghanita Laski’s provocative novel To Bed with Grand Music addresses the fantasy of fulfillable desires through the story of a young, married woman taking advantage of everything available in the ‘lucid abnormality’ of London during World War Two. This interfeminist counter-narrative of the protagonist’s libidinal life and her failure to perform as a good mother and faithful wife deviates from the propaganda of the People’s War rendering Laski’s undermining of this ideal at a raw moment in the nation’s psyche contentious. The essay considers the representation of the actions of a young woman and questions whether she is deserving of admiration or censure for her refusal to conform to expectations of feminine conduct. It suggests that her progress is in many ways more eighteenth than mid-twentieth century in tone presenting a woman who begins by embracing her own pleasure but later engages in ‘infamous commerce’.

Union and its Challengers in the United Kingdom

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Michael Keating
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
The State ◽  
Clear Distinction ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Parliamentary Sovereignty ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Over Time

The United Kingdom was created over time without a clear plan. Creation of the state largely coincided with the creation of the Empire so that there was not a clear distinction between the two. The union preserved many of the elements of the pre-union component parts, but was kept together by the principle of unitary parliamentary sovereignty. Within the union, the distinct nationalities developed in the modern period and produced nationalist movements. Most of these aimed at devolution within the state, but some demanded separation. Management of these demands was a key task of statecraft in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the post-World War Two era, the nationalities question appeared to have gone away but it returned in the 1970s. Devolution settlements at the end of the twentieth century represented a move to stabilize the union on new terms.

‘The Colossus of the North’: One Man's Account of Queensland During the First World War

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
Malcolm Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Principal Source ◽  
First World

Australians — not least of all historians and political scientists — have long wondered whether Queensland was any different from the other colonies/states. Some of the ways in which it differs from most of its southern sisters — such as its geographical size and decentralised population — have always been obvious. No less well known has been its pursuit of agrarian policies. For much of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, governments of all political persuasions in Queensland preferred to develop primary rather than secondary industries, and consequently favoured rural rather than urban areas. An integral part of agrarianism was its emphasis on closer settlement — that is, breaking the pastoralists' (or squatters') hold over vast areas of land and making smaller and suitable plots of land available to men of limited means, people most often referred to almost romantically as ‘yeoman farmers’. Governments envisaged a colony or state whose economy was based less on huge industries concentrated in a few hands and situated in the cities than on a class of small-scale agriculturalists whose produce would not only feed the population but also be a principal source of wealth.

Continuity and Change in the Belfast Press, 1900–1994

2020 ◽  
pp. 377-395
Author(s):  
Nora Moroney ◽  
Stephen O’Neill
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
National Library ◽  
News Letter ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

This chapter examines the political and textual transformations of the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish News, and the Belfast News Letter in the twentieth century. It discusses the creation and expression of separate forms of national and editorial identities in regard to the northern Unionist-leaning Telegraph and News Letter, and the nationalist Irish News. All three would eventually be transformed by their reportage of the World War, and the later Troubles. Describing the enduring popularity of all three papers as platforms for political expressions across the spectrum of twentieth century Irish history and politics, it argues that their longevity speaks to the success of their readjustments during these tumultuous years. Drawing on archives in the National Library of Ireland and the Belfast Central Library, the chapter includes case studies focusing on how each paper reported the failure of the Boundary Commission in 1925, the Belfast Blitz in 1941, and the IRA Ceasefire in 1994.

Imitation of Life and the Depiction of Suburban Space

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
General Context ◽  
American City ◽  
Color Line ◽  
World War ◽  
The Impact

After some discussion of the impact of the automobile on the shape of the twentieth-century American city, Chapter 4 ("Imitation of Life and the Depiction of Suburban Space") contrasts John Stahl's 1934 adaptation with Sirk's 1959 cinematic version of Fanny Hurst's best-selling 1933 novel. Among other things, this comparison shows how the director has inscribed the "color line" that divided African-Americans from whites after World War II into Lora Meredith's leafy suburb in the later remake. The historically informed interpretation of the built environment that supports this conclusion also establishes the general context for the final section of this book, which consists of two architectural case studies that are each devoted to one particularly significant film.

Genocide: Clarifying Concepts and Causes of Cruelty

2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto Verdeja
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.

A Wartime Family Romance: Narratives of Masculinity and Intimacy during World War Two

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Abrams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Emotional Openness ◽  
Romance Narratives

This chapter focuses on a neglected facet of Scottish men’s sense of self – the expression of intimacy and emotion in the context of one man’s letters home to his wife during an extended posting abroad in World War Two. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire - these are not qualities commonly identified in the narratives of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century. The war provided the backdrop for a correspondence which allowed a serving soldier to explore his emotional side, and sustain his marriage, not only by consuming narratives of love but producing them too. Through a close examination of personal correspondence this chapter argues that this correspondent encapsulated a modern masculine self that Scottish men were to practice with greater confidence in the postwar decades.

The Adelaide Geosyncline: A Century of Controversy

1986 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reg. Sprigg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
South Australia ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
Late Precambrian ◽  
Late Cambrian ◽  
Extensive Region

Late Proterozoic (Adelaidean) to Late Cambrian sediments of the Adelaide Geosyncline form a mountainous backbone to South Australia. Geological studies of the region date back to the beginning of European exploration and colonisation, although these were limited until the 1940s due to the small, isolated nature of the geological community. No detailed understanding of this extensive region emerged until the beginning of the twentieth century when sections were measured and the significance of widespread Late Precambrian glaciation was recognised. The search for fossils has been long and often unsuccessful. Trilobites and archaeocyatha, which were later determined as Cambrian, were found as early as 1879. The internationally famous Ediacara fauna was discovered in 1946. Unusual piercement structures containing breccias were only widely mapped after World War Two with a diapiric origin being proposed in 1960. In 1952, the province was classified as basically miogeo-synclinal with a late stage eugeosyncline in the southeast. This has recently been reinterpreted in terms of plate tectonics.

Response

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-122
Author(s):  
Catherine Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
World War ◽  
Novel Studies ◽  
Stellar Group ◽  
The Military

I felt both tremendously honored and slightly alarmed when I learned that this roundtable was being organized. I was delighted that such a stellar group of novel critics was willing to read Telling It Like It Wasn't but worried about their reactions to what Deidre Lynch has called the book's “deeply weird materials.” Much of the historical substance, especially the military and economic historiography, are far from our usual interests, and many of the literary texts are obscure and ephemeral. Furthermore, I passed over the opportunity to write about the best-known novels (like Philip Roth's Plot Against America) by limiting my twentieth-century case studies to American Civil War and British World War II counterfactuals. So I worried that a panel on this eccentric book might seem merely an irrelevant interruption, especially in the context of a meeting of the Society for Novel Studies.

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