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From the 1920s until the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand filled British shop windows, newspaper columns, and cinema screens with “British to the core” Canadian apples, “British to the backbone” New Zealand lamb, and “All British” Australian butter. In remarkable yet forgotten advertising campaigns, prime ministers, touring cricketers, “lady demonstrators,” and even boxing kangaroos were pressed into service to sell more Dominion produce to British shoppers. But as they sold apples and butter, these campaigns also sold a Dominion-styled British identity. Selling Britishness explores the role of commodity marketing in creating Britishness. D...
"A must-read for anyone interested in the history of drag performance."--Publishers Weekly A rich and provocative history of drag's importance in modern British culture. Drag: A British History is a groundbreaking study of the sustained popularity and changing forms of male drag performance in modern Britain. With this book, Jacob Bloomfield provides fresh perspectives on drag and recovers previously neglected episodes in the history of the art form. Despite its transgressive associations, drag has persisted as an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture--drag artists have consistently asserted themselves as some of the most renowned and significant entertainers of their day. As Bloomfield demonstrates, drag was also at the center of public discussions around gender and sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Victorian sex scandals to the "permissive society" of the 1960s. This compelling new history demythologizes drag, stressing its ordinariness while affirming its important place in British cultural heritage.
A study of the role blood quantum played in the assimilation period between 1887 and 1934 in the United States.
Photographers often depict Ireland with bucolic rural landscapes, but during the twentieth century, men and women across Ireland picked up cameras to create and curate photographs revealing more complex and diverse images of Ireland. Snapshot Stories Uses diverse photographic archives, both professional and personal, to explore these stories.
Many commentators tell us that, in today's world, everyday life has become selfish and atomised—that individuals live only to consume. But are they wrong? In Me, Me, Me, Jon Lawrence re-tells the story of England since the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people—including his own parents— to argue that, in fact, friendship, family, and place all remain central to our daily lives, and whilst community has changed, it is far from dead. He shows how, in the years after the Second World War, people came increasingly to question custom and tradition as the pressure to conform to societal standards became intolerable. And as soon as they could, millions escaped the closed, face-...
Night Raiders is the first history of burglary in modern Britain. Until 1968, burglary was defined in law as occurring only between the 'night-time' hours of nine pm and six am in residential buildings. Time and space gave burglary a unique cloak of terror, since burglars' victims were likely to be in the bedroom, asleep and unawares, when the intruder crept in, prowling near them in the darkness. Yet fear sometimes gave way to sexual fantasy; eroticized visions of handsome young thieves sneaking around the boudoirs of beautiful, lonely heiresses emerged alongside tales of violence and loss in popular culture, confounding social commentators by casting the burglar as criminal hero. Night Rai...
"By the late nineteenth century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation's rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs"--
A history of the British Crown honours system in the 20th century, showing its evolution through a period of democratisation and decolonisation, Tobias Harper examines how governments used the honours system to shape ideologies of loyalty and service, while dissidents turned the symbolism of honours against the Crown.
Seeking Love in Modern Britain charts the emergence of the modern British single through an account of the dating industry that sprang up to serve men and women. It shows how – amid a period of unprecedented sexual and social change – 'the single' became a key unisex identity and lifestyle. From around 1970, a growing, cottage-style matchmaking industry in Britain was offering the romantically solo a choice between computer dating firms, such as Dateline or Compudate, introduction agencies and the lonely hearts pages of Private Eye, Time Out and others. Zoe Strimpel reveals how this rapidly expanding landscape of services was catering to a new breed of single people, and how – by the late 1990s – singleness had become the culturally mainstream, wholly expected part of the romantic life cycle that it is today. Refuting the widespread idea that the Internet invented modern dating, this book uses an eclectic and engaging range of first-person accounts and snapshots from the time to show that the story of contemporary romance, mediated courtship and singleness began in a time long before Tinder.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a diverse community of Australians settled in Shanghai. There they forged a ‘China trade’, circulating goods, people and ideas across the South China Sea, from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Sydney and Melbourne. This trade has been largely forgotten in contemporary Australia, where future economic ties trump historical memory when it comes to popular perceptions of China. After the First World War, Australians turned to Chinese treaty ports, fleeing poverty and unemployment, while others sought to ‘save’ China through missionary work and socialist ideas. Chinese Australians, disillusioned by Australian racism under the White Australia Policy, arrived to participate in Chinese nation building and ended up forging business empires which survive to this day. This book follows the life trajectories of these Australians, providing a means by which we can address one of the pervading tensions of race, empire and nation in the twentieth century: the relationship between working-class aspirations for social mobility and the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of white settler societies.