During the second half of the 20th century, life in Britain was transformed by radical changes in standards of living, affecting housing, food and transport, as well as by major shifts in social, cultural and moral values. This study examines the diverse developments which so altered the country and its people. examines the remarkable extent to which a marked decline of popular support for orthodox institutions such as the monarcy, religion, marriage and trade unions resulted in a far more flexible and diverse society - a society in which women, the young and members of ethnic minorities played increasingly important roles. It also stresses the extent to which British society has been influenced by foreign developments. Separate chapters on the impact of American culture and European institutions, as well as modern architecture and planning, all explore the ways in which British life has been profoundly affected by factors which are not normally considered by social historians. as well as students of modern British culture and society.
Now available in a fully-revised and updated second edition, A History of Modern Britain: 1714 to the Present provides a comprehensive survey of the social, political, economic and cultural history of Great Britain from the Hanoverian succession to the present day. Places Britain in a global context, charting the rise and fall of the British empire and the influence of imperialism on the social, economic, and political developments of the home country Includes revised sections on imperialism and the industrial revolution that have been updated to reflect recent scholarship, a more reflective view on New Labour since its demise, and an all new section on the performance of the Conservative – Lib/Dem coalition that came into office in 2010 Features illustrations, maps, an up-to-date bibliography, a full list of Prime Ministers, a genealogy of the royal family, and a comprehensive glossary explaining uniquely British terms, acronyms, and famous figures Spans topics as diverse as the slave trade, the novels of Charles Dickens, the Irish Potato Famine, the legalization of homosexuality, coalmines in South Wales, Antarctic exploration, and the invention of the computer Includes extensive reference to historiography
In a century of rapid social change, the British people have experienced two world wars, the growth of the welfare state and the loss of Empire. Charles More looks at these and other issues in a comprehensive study of Britain’s political, economic and social history throughout the twentieth century. This accessible new book also engages with topical questions such as the impact of the Labour party and the role of patriotism in British identity.
This study patterns national identity over a number of important historical milestones and brings the debates over Europe up-to-date with an analysis of recent happenings including the referendum on Scottish independence, the global economic crisis and the current crisis in Syria.
By the end of the twentieth century, Freemasonry had acquired an unsavoury reputation as a secretive network of wealthy men looking out for each others’ interests. The popular view is of an organisation that, if not actually corrupt, is certainly viewed with deep mistrust by the press and wider society. Yet, as this book makes clear, this view contrasts sharply with the situation at the beginning of the century when the public’s perception of Freemasonry in Britain was much more benevolent, with numerous establishment figures (including monarchs, government ministers, archbishops and civic worthies) enthusiastically recommending Freemasonry as the key to model citizenship. Focusing particularly on the role of the press, this book investigates the transformation of the image of Freemasonry in Britain from respectability to suspicion. It describes how the media projected a positive message of the organisation for almost forty years, based on a mass of news emanating from the organisation itself, before a change in public regard occurred during the later twentieth-century. This change in the public mood, the book argues, was due primarily to Masonic withdrawal from the public sphere and a disengagement with the press. Through an examination of the subject of Freemasonry and the British press, a number of related social trends are addressed, including the decline of deference, the erosion of privacy, greater competition in the media, the emergence of more aggressive and investigative journalism, the consequences of media isolation and the rise of professional Public Relations. The book also illuminates the organisation’s collisions with nationalism, communism, and state welfare provision. As such, the study is illuminating not only for students of Freemasonry, but those with an interest in the wider social history of modern Britain.
This book offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to Pop art scholarship through a recuperation of popular music into art historical understandings of the movement. Jukebox modernism is a procedure by which Pop artists used popular music within their works to disrupt decorous modernism during the sixties. Artists, including Peter Blake, Pauline Boty, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol, respond to popular music for reasons such as its emotional connectivity, issues of fandom and identity, and the pleasures and problems of looking and listening to an artwork. When we both look at and listen to Pop art, essential aspects of Pop’s history that have been neglected—its sounds, its women, its queerness, and its black subjects—come into focus.
In No Turning Back, Paul Addison takes the long view, charting the vastly changing character of British society since the end of the Second World War. As he shows, in this period a series of peaceful revolutions has completely transformed the country so that, with the advantage of a longer perspective, the comparative peace and growing prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century appear as more powerful solvents of settled ways of life than the Battle of the Somme or the Blitz. We have come to take for granted a welfare state which would have seemed extraordinary to our forebears in the first decades of the century, based upon the achievement of a hitherto undreamed of mass prosperity. Much of the sexual morality preached if not practised for centuries has been dismantled with the creation of a 'permissive society'. The employment and career chances of women have been revolutionized. A white nation has been transformed into a multiracial one. An economy founded on manufacturing under the watchful eye of the 'gentlemen in Whitehall' has morphed into a free market system, heavily dependent on finance, services, and housing, while a predominantly working class society has evolved into a predominantly middle class one. And the United Kingdom, which once looked as solid as the rock of Gibraltar, now looks increasingly fragile, as Wales and especially Scotland have started to go their separate ways. The book ends with an assessment of the gains and losses that have resulted. As this makes clear, this is not a story of progress pure and simple, it is a story of fundamental transformation in which much has been gained and much also lost, perhaps above all a sense of the ties that used to bind people together. Paul Addison brings to it the personal point of view of someone who has lived through it all and seen the Britain of his youth turn into a very different country, but who in the final reckoning still prefers the present to the past.
In his enthronement sermon as archbishop of Canterbury in 1942 William Temple famously declared the ecumenical movement to be "the great new fact of our era." In this book Martin Camroux tries to face honestly how hope met reality. By the end of the century the enthusiasm had largely dissipated, the organizations that represented it were in decline, and organic unity looked further away than ever. One significant ecumenical merger took place in Britain--the creation in 1972 of the United Reformed Church, which saw its formation as a catalyst for ecumenical renewal. Its hopes, however, were largely illusory. With the failure of its ecumenical hope the church had little idea of its purpose, found great difficulty establishing an identity, and faced a catastrophic implosion in membership. This first serious study of the United Reformed Church also includes groundbreaking analysis of the unity process, the mixed fortunes of Local Ecumenical Projects and how the national ecumenical organizations withered. All of this is put in the wider context of religion in British society including secularization, individualism, and post-denominationalism. What failed was not ecumenism but a particular model of it and the book ends with a commitment to a renewed ecumenical hope.