The Chartists and the English Reformation

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.G. Paz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Thomas Cooper ◽  
First Time

This article addresses three topics. It describes Chartisms creation of a ‘peoples history’ as an alternative to middle-class history, whether Whig or Tory. It locates the sources, most of which have not been noticed before, for the Chartist narrative of the English Reformation. William Cobbetts reinterpretation of the English Reformation is well known as a source for the working-class narrative; William Howitts much less familiar but more important source, antedating Cobbetts History of the Protestant Reformation in England, is used for the first time. The article reconstructs that narrative using printed and manuscript lectures and published interpretations dating from the first discussions of the Peoples Charter in 1836 to the last Chartist Convention in 1858. The manuscript lectures of Thomas Cooper are an essential but little-used source. The article contributes to historical understanding of the intellectual life of the English working class.

Sex in the Cinema: War, Moral Panic, and the British Film Industry, 1906–1918

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Rapp
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Leisure Activity ◽  
Young Audiences ◽  
Police Action ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

The film era in Britain commenced in early 1896, but its moral impact on viewers was not considered very much during its first decade. This was primarily because film was dispersed in a variety of venues like music halls and fairgrounds where other entertainment was provided, or in unused shops and other premises that were temporarily rented. Film thus had no permanent, separate identity as a leisure activity that took place in one particular type of public space, hence it was difficult for moralists to recognize, much less discern and evaluate its moral influence. Moreover, many of the middle class (from whom most moralists came) dismissed the early film industry as a passing, vulgar fad of the working class that need not be taken seriously.But moralists did begin to notice the impact of the industry when film acquired a conspicuous new identity of its own in the years after 1906 when thousands of purpose-built cinemas were constructed. The tremendous growth of both the cinemas and their mostly working-class, youthful audiences led some middle-class moralists to focus their attention on film for the first time. They soon concluded that the cinemas undermined the morality of their young audiences and launched a crusade against the film industry. The general outlines of the campaign are well known. Moralists charged that the darkened cinemas provided cover for couples to court and for some men to abuse children. They also asserted that many films were sensational ones about sexual indecency, crime, and violence. Such fare, they contended, encouraged immorality and incited juvenile delinquency among youth who imitated the crimes they saw enacted on screen. The moralists therefore demanded censorship of the films, brighter lighting in the cinemas to discourage sexual misbehavior, and police action against indecency. Moreover, Sabbatarians opposed the opening of the cinemas on Sundays as a further desecration of that holy day of rest.

The Unspeakable Events at the Glasgow Music Halls, 1875

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (43) ◽  
pp. 225-229
Author(s):  
Dagmar Kift
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Edition ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
National Perspective

The history of the music hall has for the most part been written as the history of the London halls. In Dagmar Kift's book, The Victorian Music Hall and Working-Class Culture (the German edition of which was reviewed in NTQ 35, and which is due to appear in English from Cambridge University Press), she attempts to redress the balance by setting music-hall history within a national perspective. Arguing that between the 1840s and the 1890s the halls catered to a predominantly working-class and lower middle-class audience of both sexes and all ages, she views them as instrumental in giving these classes a strong and self-confident identity. The sustaining by the halls of such a distinct class-awareness was one of their greatest strengths – but was also at the root of many of the controversies which surrounded them. The music-hall image of the working class – with its sexual and alcohol-oriented hedonism, its ridicule of marriage, and its acceptance of women and young people as partners in work as in leisure – was in marked contrast to most so-called Victorian values. The following case study from Glasgow documents the shift of music-hall opposition in the 1870s away from teetotallers of all classes attacking alcohol consumption towards middle-class social reformers objecting to the entertainment itself. Dagmar Kift, who earlier published an essay on the composition of music-hall audiences in Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Open University Press), is curator of the Westphalian Industrial Museum in Dortmund.

Labor's Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 106 (4) ◽  
pp. 1106-1107
Author(s):  
Gregory L. Kaster
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
History Of

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashad Shabazz
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Agriculture ◽  
Stress Reduction ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
Fruits And Vegetables ◽  
White Neighborhoods ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
Retail Access

This epilogue focuses on Chicago's changing racial geography, arguing that this change is creating not only gentrification in parts of the city, but also openings for Black Chicagoans to augment their geography. Since the mid-1990s abandoned lots all over Chicago have been turned into spaces of agricultural production. Not limited to middle-class white neighborhoods, urban gardens have sprung up in poor and working-class communities on the South and West Sides of the city. This is not the first time Chicagoans have performed agriculture in the city. The city has a long history of urban agriculture. This epilogue shows that green spaces can undo the consequences of carceral space by enabling Black Chicagoans to eat fresh fruits and vegetables in places with little retail access to them and creating environments of stress reduction for the entire community. It also demonstrates that the poor and the working class can be architects and planners, that they can augment their geographies in ways that produce healthy people and vital, vibrant communities—on their own terms.

Making Black Los Angeles

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marne L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
American Founding ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country. Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.

THE DOMESTICATION OF THE MALE? RECENT RESEARCH ON NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH MASCULINITY

2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN FRANCIS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Male Bonding ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Film

This review will survey some of the most important historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British masculinity which have appeared in the last decade. It endorses John Tosh's insistence that it is necessary to move beyond the homosocial environments and explicit ideologies of ‘manliness’ studied by those historians who, in the 1980s, first sought a gendered history of men in modern Britain. However, it also warns that a commendable desire to ensure that men's identities are located in relationship to women, children, and the home must be accompanied by a degree of scepticism towards unproblematic narratives of male domestication. Men constantly travelled back and forth across the frontier of domesticity, if only in the realm of imagination, attracted by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, but also enchanted by various escapist fantasies (especially the adventure story or war film) which celebrated militaristic hypermasculinity and male bonding. This commentary also insists that, in order to enrich our understanding of male domesticity, existing studies of middle-class men will have to be supplemented by further research on aristocratic and working-class masculinities, and that national, ethnic, and racial differences also need to be more fully registered.

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