Mass Observation and Everyday Life

Mass Observation and Everyday Life
Author: N. Hubble
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2005-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230503144

The social-research organization Mass-Observation was founded in 1937. In this book, the true extent and significance of Mass-Observation's unique role in the formation of postwar Britain's idea of itself through the examination of everyday life across the long twentieth century. An excellent guide to Mass-Observation and the period generally, this scholarly work also provides surprising insights into the role social research has played in the development of policy and mass democracy.

The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain

The Biopolitics of Care in Second World War Britain
Author: Kimberly Mair
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2022-01-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350106933

During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighbourhoods. Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. These rumours, she argues, explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees and also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly 'animalistic', dirty, and destructive house guest. Mair also considers the explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work with animal caregivers whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could then be judged in the context of wartime hardship. Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits in the war years to an idealized template of the good citizen committed to the war and nation, with Mass-Observation enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit in the process.

Worktown

Worktown
Author: Humphrey Spender
Publisher:
Total Pages: 33
Release: 1977
Genre: England, Northern
ISBN: 9780950490816

Mass-Observation at the Movies

Mass-Observation at the Movies
Author: Jeffrey Richards
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-01-31
Genre: Motion picture audiences
ISBN: 9781138980556

"A selection of writings on film from the Mass-Observation archive"--Page 1.

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain
Author: Paul R. Deslandes
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 445
Release: 2021-12-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022680531X

A heavily illustrated history of two centuries of male beauty in British culture. Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, this book traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.”

The English in Love

The English in Love
Author: Claire Langhamer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-08-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199594430

The intimate history of love, marriage, and emotional revolution in twentieth century Britain

Our Hidden Lives

Our Hidden Lives
Author: Simon Garfield
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN:

'We Are At War' continues Garfield's successful formula of interweaving five ordinary lives from the Mass-Observation archive begun with 'Our Hidden Lives'. Beginning in the weeks before the war, and ending a year later with the Battle of Britain, the book tells the story of the war on the home front.

Wartime Women

Wartime Women
Author: Dorothy Sheridan
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1991
Genre: History
ISBN:

Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging

Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging
Author: Rachel Hurdley
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137312955

Assembling Mass Observation Archive material with historiographies of family, house and nation from ancient-Greece to present-day Europe, China and America, this book contributes to current debates on identity, belonging, memory and material culture by exploring how power works in the small spaces of home.

The Diaries of Nella Last

The Diaries of Nella Last
Author: Patricia Malcolmson
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 531
Release: 2012-09-27
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1847658466

The complete collection of the diaries of Nella Last 'I can never understand how the scribbles of such an ordinary person ... can possibly have value...' So wrote Nella Last in her diary on 2 September 1949. More than sixty years on, tens of thousands of people have read and enjoyed three volumes of her vivid and moving diaries, written during the Second World War and its aftermath as part of the Mass Observation project - and the basis for BAFTA-winning drama Housewife 49 starring Victoria Wood. The Diaries of Nella Last, brings together into a single volume the best of Nella's prolific outpourings, including a great deal of new, unpublished material from the war years. Capturing the everyday trials and horrors of wartime Britain and the nation's transition into peacetime and beyond, Nella's touching and often humorous narrative provides an invaluable historical portrait of what daily life was like for ordinary people in the 1940s and 1950s. Outwardly Nella's life was commonplace; but behind this mask were a penetrating mind and a lively pen. As David Kynaston said on Radio 4, Nella Last 'will come to be seen as one of the major twentieth century English diarists.'