Jeffrey Richards is a regular radio and television commentator on popular culture. Covers the period from Ealing Studios to Dad's Army. A great read. ;
This new edition of Journeyman, Ewan MacColl's vivid and entertaining autobiography, has been re-edited from the original manuscript, and includes a new introduction by Peggy Seeger, for whom he wrote the unforgettable 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'. MacColl, a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and broadcaster, begins this fascinating account with his working class Salford childhood, traces the founding and life of Theatre Workshop, one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies, then moves on to his work with folksingers, the Radio Ballads and his ascent into old age. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were among the main leaders of the UK folksong revival. Journeyman documents their struggle to secure the integrity of that revival as the popular media appropriated and re-created traditional music for commercial gain. An entertaining and thought-provoking slice of British history, it will appeal to those interested in the histories of folk music, theatre, radio, left-wing politics and the Manchester area. ;
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This new edition of Journeyman, Ewan MacColl's vivid and entertaining autobiography, has been re-edited from the original manuscript, and includes a new introduction by Peggy Seeger, for whom he wrote the unforgettable 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face'. MacColl, a singer, songwriter, actor, playwright and broadcaster, begins this fascinating account with his working class Salford childhood, traces the founding and life of Theatre Workshop, one of Britain's most innovative theatre companies, then moves on to his work with folksingers, the Radio Ballads and his ascent into old age. Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger were among the main leaders of the UK folksong revival. Journeyman documents their struggle to secure the integrity of that revival as the popular media appropriated and re-created traditional music for commercial gain. An entertaining and thought-provoking slice of British history, it will appeal to those interested in the histories of folk music, theatre, radio, left-wing politics and the Manchester area. ;
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Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book is the first study that focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programs, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The BBC and national identity in Britain offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organization of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid "dual identities" characteristic of contemporary Britain. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of nationalism and national identity, British imperialism, mass media and media history, and the "four nations" approach to British history.
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Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book is the first study that focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programs, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The BBC and national identity in Britain offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organization of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid "dual identities" characteristic of contemporary Britain. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of nationalism and national identity, British imperialism, mass media and media history, and the "four nations" approach to British history.
Trusted Partner
Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book is the first study that focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programs, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The BBC and national identity in Britain offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organization of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid "dual identities" characteristic of contemporary Britain. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of nationalism and national identity, British imperialism, mass media and media history, and the "four nations" approach to British history.
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Writers have previously placed the action of kissing into categories: kisses of love, affection, peace, respect and friendship. Each of the essays in this fascinating book take a single kind of kiss and uses it as an index to the past. For rather than offering a simple history of the kiss, this book is about the kiss in history. In this collection, an eminent group of cultural historians have explored this subject using an exceptionally wide range of evidence. They explore the kiss through sources as diverse as canonical religious texts, popular prints, court depositions, periodicals, diaries and poetry. In casting the net so wide, these authors demonstrate how cultural history has been shaped by a broad concept of culture, encompassing more than simply the canons of art and literature, and integrating apparently 'historical' and 'non-historical' sources. Furthermore, this collections shows that by analyzing the kiss and its position - embedded as it is as part of our culture - history can use small gestures to take us to big issues concerning ourselves and others, the past and the present. With an afterword by Sir Keith Thomas, this book will be fascinating reading for cultural historians working on a wide range of different societies and periods.
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Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book is the first study that focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programs, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The BBC and national identity in Britain offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organization of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid "dual identities" characteristic of contemporary Britain.
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The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece, is a brilliant but maddening book. Benjamin's Arcades: an unGuided Tour looks for the method behind the madness, carefully reconstructing the intellectual and political context of the work and unpacking its numerous analogies, metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by three literary scholars and one historian, this text is both a reading companion and a vigorous interpretation of one of the most important humanistic texts of the twentieth century. Benjamin's Arcades is composed of 16 entries and a specially designed 'convoluted' index. Some of the entries confront Benjamin with a different reading of his own historical sources (Blanqui, Marx, Giedion), others look intensively at key themes, obsessions, and images (the gambler, commodity fetishism, the Angel of History, magic). Throughout there is discussion of the relationship of Benjamin's work to current and past debate on topics such as modernity, Judaism, fascism, and psychoanalysis. Benjamin's Arcades opens up Benjamin's texts to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and will be an essential text for those seeking to better understand this extraordinary work. ;
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Investigating areas as diverse as travel literature, fiction, dialect, the stage, radio, and television, feature film, music and sport, this fascinating book assesses the attitudes and portrayal of the North of England within the national culture and how this has impacted upon attitudes to the region and its place within notions of 'Englishness'. ;
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Songs of Protest, Songs of Love shows how songs can bring back voices from the past in a new way. The focus of the book is on rural Britain in a time of crisis. As the traditional rights of peasants were being jettisoned to enforce a new system of enclosure, rural labourers chanted out their concerns in songs of protest. These songs became increasingly strident and popular after the 1770s as rural life became even more precarious with fluctuating grain prices and uncertain employment opportunities. Many ballads in the eighteenth century were love songs. But these are also rich in social meaning. Many of these love songs celebrated the free and easy sexuality of rural workers, especially milkmaids and ploughmen, which was contrasted with the tepid and flaccid sex life attributed to urban aristocrats. The book will be of interest to scholars, advanced students and readers with an interest in cultural history and popular ballads. ;
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This fascinating work challenges many of the accepted facts about the concentration camps run by the British during the South African War. The author demonstrates that much of what we have traditionally understood about these camps originates the testimony which was solicited, selected and published by key women activists within Boer proto-nationalist circles. Using detailed archival evidence, she shows that much of the history of the camps results from a deliberate imposition of 'post/memory' - a process by which what was 'remembered' was shaped and reshaped to support the development of a racialised nationalist framework. Many of the camps' occupants died from successive epidemics of measles, typhoid, enteritis and pneumonia rather than deliberate ill-treatment, yet the book shows how mourning for those who died was overridden by state commemorative activities concerned with promoting pan-Boer nationalist aspirations. The innovative and groundbreaking approach of the author invites the reader to step into and explore with her the commemorative sites passed by nationalist land acts, which still powerfully mark the South African landscape. ;
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The public culture of the Victorian middle class looks at the creation of a distinctive 'high' culture in the industrial cities of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century and its incipient decline from the 1880s. The history of urban bourgeois culture has been relatively unexplored and under-theorised compared to popular culture. This volume therefore represents a significant contribution both to the study of middle-class cultural forms and to an understanding of the relationship between culture and power. In particular, it argues for the importance of ritualised modes of social behaviour in understanding the construction of authority in the nineteenth-century city. As well as many original arguments, the book provides a clear and useful overview of the public cultures of Victorian 'respectability'. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of social history, cultural history, urban history, cultural studies, urban studies and the sociology of culture. ;
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Music hall reflected the lifestyles and preoccupations of working people in a way that only television in the modern era has done since. While London dominated the wider British music hall, Glasgow was the centre of a vigorous Scottish performing culture developed in a Presbyterian society with a very different experience of industrial urbanisation. This book explores all aspects of the Scottish music hall industry, from the lives and professional culture of performers and impresarios to the place of music hall in Scottish life. It explores issues of national identity in terms of Scottish audiences' responses to the promotion of imperial themes in songs and performing material, and in the version of Scottish identity projected by Lauder and other kilted acts at home and abroad. ;
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Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the twentieth century, this book is the first study that focuses in a comprehensive way on how the BBC, through its radio programs, tried to represent what it meant to be British. The BBC and national identity in Britain offers a revision of histories of regional broadcasting in Britain that interpret it as a form of cultural imperialism. The regional organization of the BBC, and the news and creative programming designed specifically for regional listeners, reinforced the cultural and historical distinctiveness of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The BBC anticipated, and perhaps encouraged, the development of the hybrid "dual identities" characteristic of contemporary Britain. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of nationalism and national identity, British imperialism, mass media and media history, and the "four nations" approach to British history. ;
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Investigates the dynamic relationship between experiences of profound social and cultural disruption, and human memory. Critical comparisons are made across a wide variety of catastrophic experiences and memories; not just of war, but also of massacre, genocide, rebellion, famine, partition, shipwreck and fire. The book is an accessible showcase for a wide range of methodological approaches to the study of memory, including literary studies, cultural studies, participant-observation and historical studies, and uses a variety of oral, visual and written sources. Offers a diverse chronological and geographical range of catastrophic cases, from seventeenth-century England to the recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, from Ireland to the Indian sub-continent, from Mexico to wartime Leningrad. Well-written and accessible - a fascinating read. ;
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Basilicata is a region of southern Italy that was the setting for ethnographic research during the 1950s by Ernesto De Martino, Friedrich Friedmann, Edward C. Banfield, amongst others. Sixty years on, many of the practices canonised in these classic studies live on in reconfigured ways, in which heritage, identity politics and mediatisation play important roles. Sonic ethnography applies to this contemporary frame the most recent perspectives on the anthropology of sound and photographic research, to explore situations as different as the soundscape of tree rituals, the management of sound, the role of the church in annual festivals, the afterlife of ethnographic research in heritage politics and recorded media among migrant communities. The book brings to light how in Basilicata sound plays a central role in the performance of local identities. The volume also contributes innovative insights on doing ethnography in sound and photography.
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Basilicata is a region of southern Italy that was the setting for ethnographic research during the 1950s by Ernesto De Martino, Friedrich Friedmann, Edward C. Banfield, amongst others. Sixty years on, many of the practices canonised in these classic studies live on in reconfigured ways, in which heritage, identity politics and mediatisation play important roles. Sonic ethnography applies to this contemporary frame the most recent perspectives on the anthropology of sound and photographic research, to explore situations as different as the soundscape of tree rituals, the management of sound, the role of the church in annual festivals, the afterlife of ethnographic research in heritage politics and recorded media among migrant communities. The book brings to light how in Basilicata sound plays a central role in the performance of local identities. The volume also contributes innovative insights on doing ethnography in sound and photography.
Trusted Partner
Basilicata is a region of southern Italy that was the setting for ethnographic research during the 1950s by Ernesto De Martino, Friedrich Friedmann, Edward C. Banfield, amongst others. Sixty years on, many of the practices canonised in these classic studies live on in reconfigured ways, in which heritage, identity politics and mediatisation play important roles. Sonic ethnography applies to this contemporary frame the most recent perspectives on the anthropology of sound and photographic research, to explore situations as different as the soundscape of tree rituals, the management of sound, the role of the church in annual festivals, the afterlife of ethnographic research in heritage politics and recorded media among migrant communities. The book brings to light how in Basilicata sound plays a central role in the performance of local identities. The volume also contributes innovative insights on doing ethnography in sound and photography.
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Available for the first time in English translation, this collection of songs is a powerful memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. In June 1945, before the full devastation of the Holocaust had emerged, a team of researchers embarked on a remarkable project. While documenting the experiences of Jewish refugees, they began to collect songs composed and sung in the Nazi camps and ghettos. The resulting book, Mima'amakim (Out of the depths), was published in a short run of 500 copies. Today, only a handful survive. Out of the depths: The first collection of Holocaust songs presents the contents of this extraordinary document for a new generation of readers. Based on a copy of Mima'amakim discovered in 2013, it contains not only the songs' melodies and lyrics, the latter in a new translation by Joseph Toltz, but also short biographies of the composers, drawn from painstaking original research. Introductory essays provide historical and musicological background, deepening our knowledge of this terrible event and the creative means by which the Jewish people responded to and endured it. Described by the original editor, Yehuda Eismann, as a 'memorial stone for Polish Jewry', the songbook is a timeless document of a people's despair, hope and strength.
