Drills, Fights and Defence

Author(s):  
Gareth Mulvenna

Chapter One examines the forebears of the Tartan gangs in Belfast throughout the Twentieth-Century, demonstrating that youth sectarian conflict had a strong lineage in the city. The chapter also examines the role of the Boys’ Brigade as a restraining influence on young men during this period, and the strong focus which was placed on a culture of militarism in Protestant working-class communities through involvement with church-led organisations and political enterprises such as the Young Citizen Volunteers during the period of the Irish Home Rule Crises. The chapter also demonstrates how memory and ‘ethno-memory’ are crucial facets in understanding the manner in which the Protestant working-class would respond in defending their communities at the beginning of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’.

Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-24
Author(s):  
Leonardo Capezzone

Abstract The history of Khaldunian readings in the twentieth century reveals an analytical capacity of non-Orientalists definitely greater than that demonstrated by the Orientalists. The latter, at least until the 1950s, prove to be prisoners of that syndrome denounced by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which projected on Islamic historical development a specificity and an alterity, which make it an exception in world history. Orientalist scholarship has often wanted to see in Ibn Khaldūn’s critical attitude to the philosophy of al-Fārābī and Averroes only the confirmation of the primacy of the sharīʿa over Platonic nomos. This article seeks to highlight some aspects of Ibn Khaldūn’s critique of classical political thought of Islamic philosophy. His critique focuses on the importance given to the juridical dimension of social becoming, and to the role of the political body of the jurists in the making of the City. Those aspects witness Ibn Khaldūn’s effort to interpret change and fractures as factors which make sense of history and decadence.


2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1435-1449 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS E. HAYNES

AbstractThis review examines three major books on the history of Bombay. Historians of the city have tended to focus primarily on the period before 1930; this tendency has seriously limited our understanding of the dramatic transformations that have taken place in Bombay over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the studies reviewed here devotes considerable attention to developments since the 1920s. Collectively these works make a significant contribution to the appreciation of such matters as working-class politics, the changing character of workers’ neighbourhoods, land use, urban planning, and the ways the city has been imagined and experienced by its citizens. At the same time, these works all shift their analytic frameworks as they approach more contemporary periods and this restricts the authors' ability to assess fully the character of urban change. This paper calls upon historians to continue to apply the tools of social history, particularly its reliance on close microcosmic studies of particular places and groups over long periods of time, as they try to bridge the gap between the early twentieth century and the later twentieth century. At the same time, it suggests that historians need to consider Gyan Prakash's view of cities as ‘patched-up societies’ whose entirety cannot be understood through single, linear models of change.


Author(s):  
Duncan Money ◽  
Danelle van Zyl-Hermann

Abstract This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike M. Vieten ◽  
Fiona Murphy

This article explores the ways a salient sectarian community division in Northern Ireland frames the imagination of newcomers and the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. We examine the dominant ethno-national Christian communities and how their actions define the social-spatial landscape and challenges of manoeuvring everyday life in Northern Ireland as an ‘Other’. We argue all newcomers are impacted to some degree by sectarianism in Northern Ireland, adding a further complexified layer to the everyday and institutional racism so prevalent in different parts of the UK and elsewhere. First, we discuss the triangle of nation, gender and ethnicity in the context of Northern Ireland. We do so in order to problematise that in a society where two adversarial communities exist the ‘Other’ is positioned differently to other more cohesive national societies. This complication impacts how the Other is imagined as the persistence of binary communities shapes the way local civil society engages vulnerable newcomers, e.g. in the instance of our research, asylum seekers and refugees. This is followed by an examination of the situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland. We do so by contextualising the historical situation of newcomers and the socio-spatial landscape of the city of Belfast. In tandem with this, we discuss the role of NGO’s and civil support organisations in Belfast and contrast these views with the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. This article is based on original empirical material from a study conducted in 2016 on the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees with living in Northern Ireland.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Jakub Štofaník

The article focuses on the role of religion among working-class inhabitants of two industrial towns in the Czech lands, Ostrava and Kladno, during the first half of twentieth century. It analyses the enormous conversion movement, the position of new actors of religious life, and the religious behavior of workers. Looking at the history of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the study understands religion as one of the constituent factors of society and its historic change. Traditional, new, and nonconformist religious actors appear as active agents in the private and public life of industrial towns. They mobilized workers, young people, and women, and they produced the major arena in which social, cultural, and church history come together.


Author(s):  
Adrian Devine ◽  
Bernadette Quinn ◽  
Frances Devine

This paper assesses whether or not a cultural event can play a peacebuilding role during the post violence phase of conflict. Cultural expression has long been a contentious issue in Northern Ireland, no more so than in Derry/Londonderry, the city at the centre of this study. Adopting a qualitative approach, the authors used the city’s Fleadh Cheoil (2013) event as a case study and found that it served three of the seven-peacebuilding functions outlined by Paffenholz and Spurk (2010): social cohesion, in-group socialisation and intermediation/facilitation. The findings suggest that the event enabled positive change by building ‘bridges’ and developing intercommunal trust and cross culture understanding. This did not happen by chance and nor was it unproblematic. However, inclusivity was a core objective and the event was planned and managed accordingly. This required strong leadership, risk taking, sensitivity and a willingness to negotiate and compromise. In turn, this created the conditions for cross community dialogue that had ramifications beyond the cultural realm. Whilst this paper has demonstrated how a cultural event can play a role in peacebuilding, it does not suggest that culture events are a panacea for sectarianism, bias or conflict in Northern Ireland or elsewhere. However, if planned properly they can contribute to the peacebuilding process by providing an opportunity for people to navigate difficulties and develop shared experiences in complex and challenging conditions. These can help build trust, tolerance, understanding and confidence that enable divided societies to co-exist more peacefully.


Author(s):  
Deonnie Moodie

In the mid-twentieth century, Kālīghāṭ became a site that middle-class actors could not only write about but also act upon in an official capacity. Because Kālīghāṭ was never royally patronized, East India Company and British official bodies did not take over the role of departing royal powers there as they did at other temples across India. Instead, middle-class actors took it upon themselves to modernize Kālīghāṭ’s management system in the mid-twentieth century. One Brahmin temple proprietor brought a complaint against 84 others to a district court in the 1930s, alleging that his brethren had mismanaged temple funds. Lawyers and judges at the district, state, and national levels worked to declare Kālīghāṭ a public temple and impose upon it a management committee that would be selected by educated, civically conscious Hindus in the city. This effectively removed authority from the temple’s Brahmin proprietors and put it in the hands of middle-class Hindus unaffiliated with the temple.


Author(s):  
Louise A. Jackson ◽  
Neil Davidson ◽  
Linda Fleming ◽  
David M. Smale ◽  
Richard Sparks

This chapter focuses specifically on the role of the Glasgow ‘beat man’ as well as the group identity and reputation that was forged in the city for ‘robust and ‘tough’ policing, grounded in male physical prowess (as embodied masculinity). It was constructed through the culture of the muster hall, inscribed into everyday life through the performance of policing on the beat, and was recognised by working-class communities (through resistance as much as acquiescence or deference). For those seen as ‘law-abiding’, the work of the police officer incorporated assistance, support and a significant social service role, with chivalric paternalism in evidence in relation to the aged and infirm. A different repertoire was deployed in relation to those viewed as anti-social, where ‘toughness’ spilled over into the routine use of physical force in the first half of the century, justified by the police themselves as necessary to maintain authority. The legal tool of ‘breach of the peace’ was a flexible device across the period to counteract the limitations assumed to arise from the rule of corroboration.


Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKKI PAUNONEN ◽  
JANI VUOLTEENAHO ◽  
TERHI AINIALA

ABSTRACT:The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document