The Making of Modern Britain

The Making of Modern Britain PDF Author: Andrew Marr
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230747175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
In The Making of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr paints a fascinating portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century as the country recovered from the grand wreckage of the British Empire. Between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Second World War, the nation was shaken by war and peace. The two wars were the worst we had ever known and the episodes of peace among the most turbulent and surprising. As the political forum moved from Edwardian smoking rooms to an increasingly democratic Westminster, the people of Britain experimented with extreme ideas as they struggled to answer the question ‘How should we live?’ Socialism? Fascism? Feminism? Meanwhile, fads such as eugenics, vegetarianism and nudism were gripping the nation, while the popularity of the music hall soared. It was also a time that witnessed the birth of the media as we know it today and the beginnings of the welfare state. Beyond trenches, flappers and Spitfires, this is a story of strange cults and economic madness, of revolutionaries and heroic inventors, sexual experiments and raucous stage heroines. From organic food to drugs, nightclubs and celebrities to package holidays, crooked bankers to sleazy politicians, the echoes of today's Britain ring from almost every page.

The Making of Modern Britain

The Making of Modern Britain PDF Author: Andrew Marr
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230747175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

Get Book

Book Description
In The Making of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr paints a fascinating portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century as the country recovered from the grand wreckage of the British Empire. Between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Second World War, the nation was shaken by war and peace. The two wars were the worst we had ever known and the episodes of peace among the most turbulent and surprising. As the political forum moved from Edwardian smoking rooms to an increasingly democratic Westminster, the people of Britain experimented with extreme ideas as they struggled to answer the question ‘How should we live?’ Socialism? Fascism? Feminism? Meanwhile, fads such as eugenics, vegetarianism and nudism were gripping the nation, while the popularity of the music hall soared. It was also a time that witnessed the birth of the media as we know it today and the beginnings of the welfare state. Beyond trenches, flappers and Spitfires, this is a story of strange cults and economic madness, of revolutionaries and heroic inventors, sexual experiments and raucous stage heroines. From organic food to drugs, nightclubs and celebrities to package holidays, crooked bankers to sleazy politicians, the echoes of today's Britain ring from almost every page.

A History of Modern Britain

A History of Modern Britain PDF Author: Andrew Marr
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1429931019
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what they are doing, but find themselves confounded. Every time, the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted. Throughout, Britain is a country on the edge – first of invasion, then of bankruptcy, then on the vulnerable front line of the Cold War and later in the forefront of the great opening up of capital and migration now reshaping the world. This history follows all the political and economic stories, but deals too with comedy, cars, the war against homosexuals, Sixties anarchists, oil-men and punks, Margaret Thatcher's wonderful good luck, political lies and the true heroes of British theatre.

The Making of Modern Britain

The Making of Modern Britain PDF Author: Andrew Marr
Publisher: Pan MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
A portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century as the country recovered from the grand wreckage of the British Empire.

Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700-1920

Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700-1920 PDF Author: Christopher Lawrence
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134873840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Christopher Lawrence's critical overview of medicine's place in the development of modern Britain examines the significance of the clinical encounter in contemporary society. * first short synoptic study of its kind * breaks new ground by bringing together specialised scholarship into a broad argument * shows how the medical profession created a very specific role for itself * relates medicine to general social policy

Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity

Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity PDF Author: Irene Morra
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135048959
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric around popular music and the dissemination of that rhetoric in various forms. Since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of modern British culture and identity. This position has been enforced in popular culture, literature, news and music media, political rhetoric -- and in much popular music itself, which has become increasingly self-conscious about the expectation that music both articulate and manifest the inherent values and identity of the modern nation. This study examines the implications of such practices and the various social and cultural values they construct and enforce. It identifies two dominant, conflicting constructions around popular music: music as the voice of an indigenous English ‘folk’, and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire. These constructions are not only contradictory but also exclusive, prescribing a social and musical identity for the nation that ignores its greater creative, national, and cultural diversity. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive critique of an extremely powerful discourse in England that today informs dominant formulations of English and British national identity, history, and culture.

The Making of the English Working Class

The Making of the English Working Class PDF Author: Edward Palmer Thompson
Publisher: IICA
ISBN:
Category : England
Languages : en
Pages : 862

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Book Description


Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism

Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism PDF Author: Arianne Chernock
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804772932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism calls fresh attention to the forgotten but foundational contributions of men to the creation of modern British feminism. Focusing on the revolutionary 1790s, the book introduces several dozen male reformers who insisted that women's emancipation would be key to the establishment of a truly just and rational society. These men proposed educational reforms, assisted women writers into print, and used their training in religion, medicine, history, and the law to challenge common assumptions about women's legal and political entitlements. This book uses men's engagement with women's rights as a platform to reconsider understandings of gender in eighteenth-century Britain, the meaning and legacy of feminism, and feminism's relationship more generally to traditions of radical reform and enlightenment.

The Game of Our Lives

The Game of Our Lives PDF Author: David Goldblatt
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0670920592
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
WINNER of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2015 In the last two decades football in Britain has made the transition from a peripheral dying sport to the very centre of our popular culture, from an economic basket-case to a booming entertainment industry. What does it mean when football becomes so central to our private and political lives? Has it enriched us or impoverished us? In this sparkling book David Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon tracks the momentous economic, social and political changes of the post-Thatcherite era in a more illuminating manner than football, and no cultural practice sheds more light on the aspirations and attitudes of our long boom and now calamitous bust. A must-read for the thinking football fan, The Game of Our Lives will appeal to readers of Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby and Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson. It will also be relished by readers of British social history such as Austerity Britain by David Kynaston. 'Brilliantly incisive. Goldblatt is not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been. Goldblatt's book could hardly be more impressive' Sunday Times

The Human Tradition in Modern Britain

The Human Tradition in Modern Britain PDF Author: C. J. Litzenberger
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742537354
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This engaging book provides a gateway to larger themes in modern British history through a set of fascinating portraits of individuals that explore important events and movements from the perspective of the people involved. As a rich and humanized supplement to traditional survey texts, this book offers readers a deeper understanding of key facets of British life in the early modern and modern periods.

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain

Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain PDF Author: Jon Agar
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1911576585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.