Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945–85

Stress in Post-War Britain, 1945–85
Author: Mark Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317318048

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

Lovers and Strangers

Lovers and Strangers
Author: Clair Wills
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2017-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0141974966

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian 'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review 'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence. Lovers and Strangers is an extremely important book, one that is full of enjoyable surprises, giving a voice to a generation who had to deal with the reality of life surrounded by 'white strangers' in their new country.

Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain

Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain
Author: Dennis L. Dworkin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1997
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822319146

A history of British cultural Marxism. This book traces its development from beginnings in postwar Britain, through transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, up to the advent of Thatcherism, to reflect a tradition, that represents an effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left.

Postwar

Postwar
Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 1000
Release: 2006-09-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780143037750

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.

An Affluent Society?

An Affluent Society?
Author: Lawrence Black
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351959174

During an election speech in 1957 the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, famously remarked that 'most of our people have never had it so good'. Although taken out of context, this phrase soon came to epitomize the sense of increased affluence and social progress that was prevalent in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, despite the recognition that Britain had moved away from an era of rationing and scarcity, to a new age of choice and plenty, there was simultaneously a parallel feeling that the nation was in decline and being economically outstripped by its international competitors. Whilst the study of Britain's postwar history is a well-trodden path, and the paradox of absolute growth versus relative decline much debated, it is here approached in a fresh and rewarding way. Rather than highlighting economic and industrial 'decline', this volume emphasizes the tremendous impact of rising affluence and consumerism on British society. It explores various expressions of affluence: new consumer goods; shifting social and cultural values; changes in popular expectations of policy; shifting popular political behaviour; changing attitudes of politicians towards the electorate; and the representation of affluence in popular culture and advertising. By focusing on the widespread cultural consequences of increasing levels of consumerism, emphasizing growth over decline and recognizing the rising standards of living enjoyed by most Britons, a new and intriguing window is opened on the complexities of this 'golden age'. Contrasting growing consumer expectations and demands against the anxieties of politicians and economists, this book offers all students of the period a new perspective from which to view post-imperial Britain and to question many conventional historical assumptions.

Post-war Britain

Post-war Britain
Author: Alan Sked
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Imports
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1979
Genre: Great Britain
ISBN: 9780064963220

The Irish in Post-War Britain

The Irish in Post-War Britain
Author: Enda Delaney
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2007-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191534889

Exploring the neglected history of Britain's largest migrant population, this is a major new study of the Irish in Britain after 1945. The Irish in Post-War Britain reconstructs, with both empathy and imagination, the histories of the lost generation who left independent Ireland in huge numbers to settle in Britain from the 1940s until the 1960s. Drawing on a wide range of previously neglected materials, Enda Delaney illustrates the complex process of negotiation and renegotiation that was involved in adapting and adjusting to life in Britain. Less visible than other newcomers, it is widely assumed that the Irish assimilated with relative ease shortly after arrival. The Irish in Post-war Britain challenges this view, and shows that the Irish often perceived themselves to be outsiders, located on the margins of their adopted home. Many contemporaries frequently lumped the Irish together as all being essentially the same, but Delaney argues that the experiences of Britain's Irish population after the Second World War were much more diverse than previously assumed, and shaped by social class, geography, and gender, as well as nationality. The book's original approach demonstrates that any understanding of a migrant group must take account of both elements of the society that they had left, as well as the social landscape of their new country. Proximity ensured that even though these people had left Ireland, home as an imagined sense of place was never far away in the minds of those who had settled in Britain.

Family Britain, 1951-1957

Family Britain, 1951-1957
Author: David Kynaston
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 785
Release: 2009-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1408803496

Family Britain continues David Kynaston's groundbreaking series Tales of a New Jerusalem, telling as never before the story of Britain from VE Day in 1945 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. 'The book is a marvel ... the level of detail is precise and fascinating' Sunday Telegraph 'A wonderfully illuminating picture of the way we were' The Times As in Austerity Britain, an astonishing array of vivid, intimate and unselfconscious voices drive the narrative. The keen-eyed Nella Last shops assiduously at Barrow Market as austerity and rationing gradually give way to relative abundance; housewife Judy Haines, relishing the detail of suburban life, brings up her children in Chingford; the self-absorbed civil servant Henry St John perfects the art of grumbling. These and many other voices give a rich, unsentimental picture of everyday life in the 1950s. We also encounter well-known figures on the way, such as Doris Lessing (joining and later leaving the Communist Party), John Arlott (sticking up on Any Questions? for the rights of homosexuals) and Tiger's Roy of the Rovers (making his goal-scoring debut for Melchester). All this is part of a colourful, unfolding tapestry, in which the great national events - the Tories returning to power, the death of George VI, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the Suez Crisis - jostle alongside everything that gave Britain in the 1950s its distinctive flavour: Butlin's holiday camps, Kenwood food mixers, Hancock's Half-Hour, Ekco television sets, Davy Crockett, skiffle and teddy boys. Deeply researched, David Kynaston's Family Britain offers an unrivalled take on a largely cohesive, ordered, still very hierarchical society gratefully starting to move away from the painful hardships of the 1940s towards domestic ease and affluence.

Life in Post-War Britain

Life in Post-War Britain
Author: Anton Rippon
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2023-08-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1399064797

On New Year’s Day 1946, the people of Britain desperately wanted to look forward to a new and better life. The Second World War had ended four months earlier with the formal surrender of Imperial Japan. The war in Europe had been over for eight months. But, upon announcing to Parliament the German surrender, Winston Churchill had told the nation: “Let us not forget the toils and efforts that lie ahead.” In 1946, Clement Attlee, leader of the newly elected Labour Government, underlined Churchill’s words, warning the nation that victory over Nazi Germany and Japan had heralded not a future of plenty – but one of greater austerity. The huge debt left by the war had crippled the British economy. Those who fought in the Great War had been promised a land fit for heroes. That had not happened. After another world war, people now expected a better life than the poverty and hardship that had characterised much of the 1920s and 1930s, and Attlee pledged to end society’s five “Giant Evils” – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease – and to provide for the people “from the cradle to the grave”. It was going to be far from easy. Life in Post-War Britain: "Toils and Efforts Ahead" tells what it was like to live in Britain as the nation battled to recover while still facing many hardships, including food rationing that, ironically, was to become more severe than that in wartime. This was a unique time in British history and Life in Post-War Britain: “Toils and Efforts Ahead” captures the mood of the nation, examining all the great events of the post-war years and the effect that they had on the everyday life of the people who had won a war but who now faced an uncertain peace both at home and abroad.

The Life Project

The Life Project
Author: Helen Pearson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2016-02-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0141976624

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 ORWELL PRIZE The remarkable story of a unique series of studies that have touched the lives of almost everyone in Britain today On 3rd March 1946 a survey began that is, today, the longest-running study of human development in the world, growing to encompass six generations of children, 150,000 individuals and some of the best-studied people on the planet. The simple act of observing human life has changed the way we are born, schooled, parent and die, irrevocably altering our understanding of inequality and health. This is the tale of these studies; the scientists who created and sustain them, the remarkable discoveries that have come from them. The envy of scientists around the world, they are one of Britain's best-kept secrets.