Daily Lives Of Ordinary People Research Articles

Reading the Royal Romance: Or, Intimacy in a King's Cabinet

Social and cultural articulations of the body have lately constituted one of the liveliest areas of early-modern scholarship. Privacy, gender roles, separate spheres, domesticity, all have been the subjects of intense inquiry, which has thrown light on the assumptions and conventions that structured the experience of people in the past. Concerned as such inquiry has largely been with the daily lives of ordinary people, it has moved far - farther certainly than did the 'new social history' of a couple of decades ago - from the conventional staging-posts of political history. Few of the scholars involved would doubt that broad shifts in human values have occurred,1 though they have sometimes had difficulty in explaining them.2 The emergence of privacy, as ideology and as practice, is a case in point. Almost by definition, privacy's emergence has been imagined at some distance from historians' familiar, and public, high road of political change. Philippe Aries certainly confessed to a belated recognition of a political matrix in which the 'private' was held in dynamic tension with a more 'public' order that developed in the later seventeenth century; but his collaborators in the early-modern volume in the History of Private Life turned away from politics to a world of social and cultural practices. Their unconcern with contingency is underscored by their repeated shifts in focus between 'private life' - a life separate or removed from 'the public' - and 'private lives', that is, the lives of ordinary people.3 Such slippage betrays an underlying assumption that the history of privacy and of the middle class are intimately, indeed almost teleologically, linked. And not only the history of privacy: the most analytical of recent writings on the history of women and of manhood have focused firmly on the rise of the middle class as agent of change.4 Despite a plethora of recent studies of political culture, historians have been oddly reluctant to concede to politics a role in cultural transformation. It is tempting to see this as one more consequence of revisionism: as the domain of politics shrank to the short-term and contingent, it seemed to have little to do with longer-term shifts in outlook. Malcolm Gaskill has been something of a lone voice in calling for attention to 'the political dimension of mentalities'.5The political dimension of culture and mentality cannot, however, be mapped merely in terms of state-formation. Circumstance, politics, and the traumas of civil war and revolution also had their place. Indeed, at what seems a turning-point in the story - the emergence in England of an explicit debate over personal privacy - evidence points in what must seem a surprising direction, inviting us to reconsider the emphasis given to the middle class. Some of England's earliest articulations of a claim to privacy, and more particularly of privacy as the setting for intimacy and affectivity, involved not an urban pioneer of politeness but a king. Such a contention may seem paradoxical, since spectacle and early-modern monarchy are so often deemed inseparable; but as Ernst Kantorowicz recognised years ago, the social ambiguity of the human body - irreducibly physical and individual yet unavoidably implicated in the polity - centered on the person of the king.6 The politics of that ambiguity were of course explored and contested in the pamphlet warfare of the early 1640s, and brutally answered by the regicides. Its human meaning, exposed by the capture and publication of Charles I's correspondence in 1645, has not been sufficiently understood, and nor has its part in the history of privacy.The human dilemmas of intimacy scarcely come to mind as a major theme in England's mid-century troubles. The two prime combatants have become emblems of quite other values: the King, of style and dignity in all eventualities; Oliver Cromwell, of a strenuous appeal to interior truths. Neither posture left much space for the concealments of the affective life. …

Voices from the Twenties: Private Correspondence Intercepted by the OGPU

Lately the quest for first-hand access to historical documents and their independent evaluation has become one of the most important features of the study of Russian history. At the same time, there is a growing understanding that the layers of time conceal from us the history of events, ideas and people, all of which are mutually interconnected yet still distinct from one another. For this reason yet another distinguishing characteristic of recent historical research is the growing emphasis on documents illustrating the daily lives of ordinary people: memoirs, diaries and letters. These sources, in contrast to official documents, are largely free of political concerns or the bureaucratic tendency to please one's superiors. Daily is especially interesting since it reflects the concerns and meditations of ordinary people. Of course, even such letters-these snapshots of time-are extremely subjective. Indeed, popular moods at any given moment depend on many factors, including the personalities of the persons to whom these letters are addressed. But collectively they permit one to understand the concerns, thoughts and moods of the most diverse groups. Listening to this multivoiced Russia has become possible with the opening of previously restricted-access archives. In the files of the former Leningrad Party Archive (the St. Petersburg Central State Archive of Historical-Political Documents) I was able to examine letters which the Politkontrol' of the OGPU monitored for the purposes of political supervision and criminal investigation. The black office (chernyi kabinet)-special sections at post offices for monitoring correspondence, despite the formal existence of laws protecting the privacy of correspondence-represented a tradition going back to Catherine the Great, one which the Bolsheviks not only continued but even expanded upon. Unfortunately, there are materials only for two years, 1924 and 1925. It can be assumed that the Politkontrol' sent copies of intercepted materials in the strictest secrecy to the Leningrad provincial party committee (gubkom) during these same two years, given that the chairman of the Leningrad Soviet, G. E. Zinoviev, not only was a prominent party official who sat on the Politburo and presided over the Executive Committee of the Comintern but also delivered the political report to the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924. In any event, every month for these two years, one of the five copies of the Summaries of excerpts compiled by the organs of the OGPU from monitored correspondence was sent either to P. A. Zalutskii, Secretary of the Leningrad Gubkom, or to a certain Gusev,

Hanging Up On Mum Or Questions Of Everyday Life In The Writing Of History

[C]an there be a study of the trivia with which the daily life of ordinary people is interwoven which will reveal its interconnections with the different forms of economic, political, and cultural power?1

Studies in Power and Class in Africa

These thirteen original essays bring the concept of social class to the analysis of contemporary African politics. Each considers different aspects of a single theme: the 'authoritative allocation of values', or who gets what when, where, and why - and who gets left out. The book addresses problems of major concern in the daily lives of ordinary people, pointing out just how precarious life was for most Africans during and after the colonial period. The authors, who represent a highlight of political perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds, also highlight the importance of the state, religion, ideology, gender, ethnicity, language, and international relations in determining policy and in understanding society in general. Readership: political scientists, sociologists, and economists with a particular interest in Africa; Third World specialists.

A View from Latin America

A View from Latin America One might expect this essay to be very brief. Political history, as everyone knows, has come to be old-fashioned and outmoded. Especially in the United States, and to a substantial extent in Europe as well, attention has turned from authority figures and policy-makers to common people and popular masses. Explorations in economic history have continued to shed light on the origins and transformations of feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. Investigations of social history have opened up entirely new vistas of awareness and inquiry-with conspicuous emphasis on sex differences, sexuality, the family, and other areas of intimate, day-to-day existence. Interest in the mighty and powerful appears to be declining fast. The new concern is with the daily lives of ordinary people, a trend that offers a clear prognostication for political history in the I980s: there will not be much of it. This tendency comes from diverse origins. One is the identification of new issues and problem-areas, as in the case of women's history. Another is the discovery of hitherto unused records and sources. Still another factor is technology: computerization has made it possible to handle masses of data-and hence to ask questions-that seemed unthinkable only two decades ago. The development of econometrics has produced powerful tools for analyzing crucial aspects of economic change, and the application of demographic techniques to historical materials has offered novel insights into the dynamics of social transition. For all of these reasons, substantive and methodological, historians in Europe and America are concentrating energies on social and economic (rather than political) dimensions of the past. But the turn away from politics is more than a sign of disinterest. It is also an act of rejection-a stance that derives from

The Apocalypse of John

No theme in Western culture, with the possible exception of the Gospels, has so persistently and so continuously excited Western art and thought as the Apocalypse of John. It played a role not only in the creative expression of the artist and the intellectual fervor of the monk and churchman, but also in the daily life of ordinary people, for 1500 or more years. The revelation of the great catastrophe through which God in His anger, and in His final struggle with Satan, would destroy the world was a present reality to millions of men. Throughout the centuries, there have been recurrent scares of portending doom, and an eventual Last Judgment was taken for granted as a personal expectation by the vast majority of Europeans until a very recent period. The final weighing of good and bad acts is still a part of Christian religious doctrine and, in a more symbolic sense, is present in much of the Western attitude toward ethical behavior whatever the religious persuasion of the individual may be.