Histories of Everyday Life
The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979
Publication | Table des matières | Critiques
Résumé
- The first study of non-academic social history in Britain between 1918 and the 1970s
- Covers a range of popular history-making in one comprehensive study, including publishing, schools, museums, and the BBC
- Challenges the idea that popular history is always a product of university academics engaging with the wider public
Histories of Everyday Life is a study of the production and consumption of popular social history in mid-twentieth century Britain. It explores 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 that emerged after 1918. It was popularized to ordinary people in educational settings, through books, in classrooms and museums, and on BBC radio. After tracing its development and dissemination between the 1920s and the 1960s, this book argues that ‘history of everyday life’ declined in the 1970s not because academics invented an alternative ‘new’ social history, but because bottom-up social change rendered this form of popular social history 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 we should see the twentieth century as Britain’s educational century.
Table des matières
Introduction: Education and popular social history in Britain
Part I: Defining and justifying a new social history after 1918
1:The publishing of popular social history books
2:Social history for ‘ordinary’ school pupils
Part II: Mid-twentieth century popularization
3:The ‘history of everyday life’ on BBC radio
4:’Histories of everyday life’ in local museums
5:The ‘history of everyday life’ as a cultural policy in London local government
Part III: The educational unmaking of popular social history
6:Social history and mass education in the 1970s
Conclusion: Everyday life at the end of the educational century
Critiques
- “This important volume from an authoritative international team of authors sheds significant new light on the comparative development of post-war Conservatism in the western world.”
– Stuart Ball, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK - “The rich essays collected in this illuminating volume show that the rise of right-wing politics in the United Kingdom, the United States, and France since the 1970s was a remarkably transnational phenomenon. As they attacked social democracy and cultural pluralism, right-wing movements borrowed ideas, visions, vocabularies, and tactics from each other, adapting them to their own national idioms and using advances in one country to win advances elsewhere. Anyone interested in confronting the problems that have proliferated in the wake the right’s reconfiguration of politics – surging inequality, belligerent ethno-nationalism, worker disempowerment and insecurity, and lost faith in the capacity for democratic self-government – has much to learn about the origins of these problems from this important book.”
– Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University, USA, author of Collision Course