Richard Stone has drawn on his extensive knowledge of the National Library of Australia's treasure trove of ephemera to compile this fascinating visual journey. Whether designed to inform, persuade or shock, these remarkable 'reminders' are a fascinating record of Australian life over the last 150 years.
Apartheid's Festival highlights the conflicts and debates that surrounded the 1952 celebration of the 300th anniversary of the landing of Jan Van Riebeeck and the founding of Cape Town, South Africa. Taking place at the height of the apartheid era, the festival was viewed by many as an opportunity for the government to promote its nationalist, separatist agenda in grand fashion. Leslie Witz's fine-grained examination of newspapers, brochures, pamphlets, and advertising materials reveals the expectations of the festival planners as well as how the festival was engineered, historical figures were reconstructed, and the ANC and other anti-apartheid organizations mounted opposition to it. While laying open the darker motives of the apartheid regime, Witz shows that the production of local history is part of a global process forged by the struggle between colonialism and resistance. Readers interested in South Africa, representations of nationalism, and the making of public history will find Apartheid's Festival to be an important study of a society in transition.
This book examines how football, as a mass spectator sport, came to represent a novel, unique cultural identity of Bengali people in terms of nation, community, region/locality and club, contributing to the continuity of everyday socio-cultural life. It explains how football became a viable popular social force with a rare emotional spontaneity and peculiar self-expressive fan culture against the background of anti-imperial nationalist movement and postcolonial political tension and social transformation. In the process, it investigates certain key questions and problems in the social history of football in Bengal, which have hitherto been ignored in the existing works on the subject. The author offers some original arguments in treating football as a cultural phenomenon, setting it squarely in the context of Bengali politics and society. It strengthens the premise that social history of South Asian sport can be meaningfully understood only by looking beyond the sports field. The study, using sport as a lens, has tried to consider some relevant themes of social history, and brings forth important issues of political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal. Simultaneously, it highlights the transformed role of football as an instrument of reaction, resistance and subversion. It indicates that the football field of Bengal proves to be a mirror image of what society experiences in its cultural and political field, through a series of historical projections of identity, difference and culture.
Examining urban heritage in twentieth-century Australia, James Lesh reveals how evolving ideas of value and significance shaped cities and places. Over decades, a growing number of sites and areas were found to be valuable by communities and professionals. Places perceived to have value were often conserved. Places perceived to lack value became subject to modernisation, redevelopment, and renewal. From the 1970s, alongside strengthened activism and legislation, with the innovative Burra Charter (1979), the values-based model emerged for managing the aesthetic, historic, scientific, and social significance of historic environments. Values thus transitioned from an implicit to an overt component of urban, architectural, and planning conservation. The field of conservation became a noted profession and discipline. Conservation also had a broader role in celebrating the Australian nation and in reconciling settler colonialism for the twentieth century. Integrating urban history and heritage studies, this book provides the first longitudinal study of the twentieth-century Australian heritage movement. It advocates for innovative and reflexive modes of heritage practice responsive to urban, social, and environmental imperatives. As the values-based model continues to shape conservation worldwide, this book is an essential reference for researchers, students, and practitioners concerned with the past and future of cities and heritage. The Foreword and Chapter 1/Introduction of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Enriched by the methods and insights of social history, the history of mentalites, linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, and art history, intellectual and cultural history are experiencing a renewed vitality. The far-ranging essays in this volume, by an internationally distinguished group of scholars, represent a generous sampling of these new studies."
The Australia Day Regatta has been held on Sydney Harbour every year since 1837. Believed to be the oldest continuously held annual regatta in the world, it has grown and flourished and today involves close to 700 vessels − from ocean-going yachts to small sailing dinghies − and thousands of participants. Illustrated with vibrant images of regattas past and present, this book offers a slice of Sydney’s history through its enduring yachting traditions. It traces not only the fascinating history of this unique event, but the story of sailing in Sydney since the early years of the colony, and the regatta’s dedicated supporters and patrons.
Three sections explore the complex lives of ordinary people who continually made choices about the way they expressed their faith. Part one begins with a brief survey of the context of lay Catholics in Adelaide and Perth between 1922 and 1962, considering the place of Catholics in wider society and
This is an exacting social history of Indian cricket between 1780 and 1947. It considers cricket as a derivative sport, creatively adapted to suit modern Indian socio-cultural needs, fulfil political imperatives and satisfy economic aspirations. Majumdar argues that cricket was a means to cross class barriers and had a healthy following even outside the aristocracy and upper middle classes well over a century ago. Indeed, in some ways, the democratization of the sport anticipated the democratization of the Indian polity itself. Boria Majumdar reveals the appropriation, assimilation and subversion of cricketing ideals in colonial and post-colonial India for nationalist ends. He exposes a sport rooted in the contingencies of the colonial and post-colonial context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. Cricket, to put it simply, is much more than a ‘game’ for Indians. This study describes how the genealogy of their intense engagement with cricket stretches back over a century. It is concerned not only with the game but also with the end of cricket as a mere sport, with Indian cricket’s commercial revolution in the 1930s, with ideals and idealism and their relative unimportance, with the decline of morality for reasons of realpolitik, and with the denunciation, once and for all, of the view that sport and politics do not mix. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport