Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain

Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain
Author: Gabriel Moshenska
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2019-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351345508

How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day.

Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain

Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain
Author: Gabriel Moshenska
Publisher:
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-10-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781013292804

Modern warfare is a unique cultural phenomenon. While many conflicts in history have produced dramatic shifts in human behaviour, the industrialized nature of modern war possesses a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of our behaviours, from the total economic mobilization of a nation state to the unbearable pain of individual loss. Fundamentally, war is the transformation of matter through the agency of destruction, and the character of modern technological warfare is such that it simultaneously creates and destroys more than any previous kind of conflict. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Modern Conflict and the Senses

Modern Conflict and the Senses
Author: Nicholas J. Saunders
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317402537

Modern Conflict and the Senses investigates the sensual worlds created by modern war, focusing on the sensorial responses embodied in and provoked by the materiality of conflict and its aftermath. The volume positions the industrialized nature of twentieth-century war as a unique cultural phenomenon, in possession of a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of human behaviour, from total economic mobilization to the unbearable sadness of individual loss. Adopting a coherent and integrated hybrid approach to the complexities of modern conflict, the book considers issues of memory, identity, and emotion through wartime experiences of tangible sensations and bodily requirements. This comprehensive and interdisciplinary collection draws upon archaeology, anthropology, military and cultural history, art history, cultural geography, and museum and heritage studies in order to revitalize our understandings of the role of the senses in conflict.

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace
Author: Laura McAtackney
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 732
Release: 2023-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000957780

The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998. This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.

British Humour and the Second World War

British Humour and the Second World War
Author: Juliette Pattinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2023-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350199478

This book skilfully combines cutting-edge historical research by leading and emerging researchers in the field to investigate the utilization of British humour during the Second World War as well as its legacy in British popular culture. Juliette Pattinson and Linsey Robb bring together case studies that address a variety of situations in which humour was generated, including wartime jokes, films, radio, cartoons and private drawings, as well as post-war recollections, museum exhibitions and television comedy. By adopting an original interpretative framework of various wartime and post-war sites, this books opens up the possibility for a more variegated, richer analysis of Britain's wartime experience and its place thereafter in the cultural imagination. Through the lens of humour, this book promises to add critical nuance to our understanding of the functioning of British wartime society. Covering sources such as The British Cartoon Archive, BBC World War II People's War Archive and The Ministry of Information, and including analysis of the lasting role of comedy in Britain's memories and depictions of the war, the result is a rich addition to existing literature of use to students and scholars studying the cultural history of war.

Conflict Landscapes

Conflict Landscapes
Author: Nicholas J. Saunders
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-06-24
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000391280

Conflict Landscapes explores the long under-acknowledged and under-investigated aspects of where and how modern conflict landscapes interact and conjoin with pre-twentieth-century places, activities, and beliefs, as well as with individuals and groups. Investigating and understanding the often unpredictable power and legacies of landscapes that have seen (and often still viscerally embody) the consequences of mass death and destruction, the book shows, through these landscapes, the power of destruction to preserve, refocus, and often reconfigure the past. Responding to the complexity of modern conflict, the book offers a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach, which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain. Dealing with issues such as memory, identity, emotion, and wellbeing, the chapters tease out the human experience of modern conflict and its relationship to landscape. Conflict Landscapes will appeal to a wide range of disciplines involved in studying conflict, such as archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, art history, cultural history, cultural geography, military history, and heritage and museum studies.

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World
Author: Paul Graves-Brown
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 852
Release: 2013-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191663948

It has been clear for many years that the ways in which archaeology is practised have been a direct product of a particular set of social, cultural, and historical circumstances - archaeology is always carried out in the present. More recently, however, many have begun to consider how archaeological techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself: how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present. This Handbook is the first comprehensive survey of an exciting and rapidly expanding sub-field and provides an authoritative overview of the newly emerging focus on the archaeology of the present and recent past. In addition to detailed archaeological case studies, it includes essays by scholars working on the relationships of different disciplines to the archaeology of the contemporary world, including anthropology, psychology, philosophy, historical geography, science and technology studies, communications and media, ethnoarchaeology, forensic archaeology, sociology, film, performance, and contemporary art. This volume seeks to explore the boundaries of an emerging sub-discipline, to develop a tool-kit of concepts and methods which are applicable to this new field, and to suggest important future trajectories for research. It makes a significant intervention by drawing together scholars working on a broad range of themes, approaches, methods, and case studies from diverse contexts in different parts of the world, which have not previously been considered collectively.

Reanimating Industrial Spaces

Reanimating Industrial Spaces
Author: Hilary Orange
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-06-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1315421151

Reanimating Industrial Spaces explores the relationships between people and the places of former industry through approaches that incorporate and critique memory-work. The chapters in this volume consider four broad questions: What is the relationship between industrial heritage and memory? How is memory involved in the process of place-making in regards to industrial spaces? What are the strengths and pitfalls of conducting memory-work? What can be learned from cross-disciplinary perspectives and methods? The contributors have created a set of diverse case studies (including iron-smelting in Uganda, Puerto Rican sugar mills and concrete factories in Albania) which examine differing socio-economic contexts and approaches to industrial spaces both in the past and in contemporary society. A range of memory-work is also illustrated: from ethnography, oral history, digital technologies, excavation, and archival and documentary research.

Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World

Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World
Author: Simon Sleight
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137489413

Age was a critical factor in shaping imperial experience, yet it has not received any sustained scholarly attention. This pioneering interdisciplinary collection is the first to investigate the lives of children and young people and the construction of modes of childhood and youth within the British world.

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage
Author: Kate Darian-Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-12-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136168702

Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage explores how the everyday experiences of children, and their imaginative and creative worlds, are collected, interpreted and displayed in museums and on monuments, and represented through objects and cultural lore. Young people constitute up to half the population of any given society, but their lives are inescapably influenced by the expectations and decisions of adults. As a result, children’s distinct experiences are frequently subsumed within the broader histories and heritage of their families and communities. And while adults inevitably play a prominent role in children’s lives, children are also active creators of their own cultures. As this volume so vividly demonstrate, the cultural heritage of children is rich and varied, and highly revealing of past and present attitudes to children and their work, play, creativity, and human rights. The essays in this book span the experiences of children from classical Rome to the present moment, and examine the diverse social and historical contexts underlying the public representations of childhood in Britain, Europe, North America, Australia, North Africa and Japan. Case studies examine the heritage of schools and domestic spaces; the objects and games of play; the commemoration of child Holocaust survivors; memorials to Indigenous child-removal under colonial regimes; children as collectors of objects and as authors of juvenilia; curatorial practices at museums of childhood; and the role of children as visitors to historical sites. Until now, the cultural heritage of children and the representations of childhood have been largely absent from scholarly discussions of museology, heritage places and material culture. This volume rectifies that gap, bringing together international experts in children’s histories and heritage. Aimed at a wide readership of students, academics, and museum and heritage professionals, Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage authoritatively defines the key issues in this exciting new field.