Twentieth-century British History Research Articles

A social history of tennis in Britain

Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2015- from the British Society for Sports History. From its advent in the mid-late nineteenth century as a garden-party pastime to its development into a highly commercialised and professionalised high-performance sport, the history of tennis in Britain reflects important themes in Britain’s social history. In the first comprehensive and critical account of the history of tennis in Britain, Robert Lake explains how the game’s historical roots have shaped its contemporary structure, and how the history of tennis can tell us much about the history of wider British society. Since its emergence as a spare-time diversion for landed elites, the dominant culture in British tennis has been one of amateurism and exclusion, with tennis sitting alongside cricket and golf as a vehicle for the reproduction of middle-class values throughout wider British society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, the Lawn Tennis Association has been accused of a failure to promote inclusion or widen participation, despite steadfast efforts to develop talent and improve coaching practices and structures. Robert Lake examines these themes in the context of the global development of tennis and important processes of commercialisation and professional and social development that have shaped both tennis and wider society. The social history of tennis in Britain is a microcosm of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British social history: sustained class power and class conflict; struggles for female emancipation and racial integration; the decline of empire; and, Britain’s shifting relationship with America, continental Europe, and Commonwealth nations. This book is important and fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of sport or British social history.

'Perfectly Parliamentary'? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the Inter-war Years

'Perfectly Parliamentary'? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the Inter-war Years

British Culture at Mid-Century: Wartime Writing and Intermodernism

British Culture at Mid-Century:Wartime Writing and Intermodernism Patrick Bixby Bluemel, Kristin A. , ed. Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 264pp. $95.00. Deer, Patrick . Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 320 pp. $125.00. Miller, Kristine . British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People's War. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 240 pp. $85.00. Mid-twentieth-century British culture has long been underappreciated and under-analyzed. Falling into the chronological and taxonomical gap between modernism and postmodernism, the writers of the 1930s and 40s have received only scant critical attention compared to the canonical figures of high modernism or the generation that appeared on the scene after the Second World War and the end of the British Empire. The three studies considered here participate in a broader effort to fill in the blank spaces of literary scholarship by turning our attention to a singular moment in British cultural history, when the creative energies of modernism were being rerouted into alternative modes of cultural production, especially those emerging in response to wartime experience. In this effort, the volumes join other significant recent studies, including Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island, Marina McKay's Modernism and World War II, and Bluemel's own George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics, to map the [End Page 258] central terrain of twentieth-century British cultural history in all its variety and complexity. Despite the emergence of an immensely powerful mass media and culture industry dedicated to unifying the British people around the war effort, the period witnessed the rise of other forms of expression that contested widely held notions about national identity and the nature of war. Together, the present studies vividly demonstrate that rather than presenting a lull in creative activity, the years of heightened political tension, global warfare, and imperial decline coincide with a remarkable cultural boom. It is not surprising, given the tumult of the war years, that each volume also gives ample attention to the historical forces that attended this cultural boom, viewing literature alongside propaganda filmmaking, sociological investigation, military strategy, war crimes prosecution, and a host of other contextual matters. In doing so, they cover a broad field of cultural production and open that field to further scholarly exploration, opposing the conventional critical wisdom that the war initiated a cultural decline that continued through the end of the 1940s. Kristine Miller's British Literature of the Blitz, for instance, sets out to challenge prevailing historical accounts of the so-called People's War, which have assumed that a coherent nationalist ideology united the British home front during the Nazi bombing campaign. In this revisionist project, Miller contributes to a new wave of historical scholarship that has begun to recognize the diversity of responses to the Blitz and the important influence of class relations and gender roles on those responses. She finds evidence of this diversity not only in literary representations of wartime experience, ranging from the innovative texts of Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to the genre fiction of Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham, but also in popular film and personal testimony. In fact, Miller concludes her study with an entire chapter on the Blitz-era cinema, addressing movies such as The Gentle Sex, Millions Like Us, and In Which We Serve, because their popularity demonstrated "the wartime British public's willingness to pay for films that were willing to question and experiment with the ideology of the People's War" (162). Throughout the study, the diaries and questionnaires of the Mass Observation project, gathered from thousands of British civilians beginning in the late thirties and now archived at the University of Sussex's Special Collections, prove an invaluable resource for this brand of cultural history, as indeed they do for each of the studies considered here. Miller's volume, in particular, makes ample use of the materials in order to demonstrate the range of responses to a radically new kind of civilian experience, commencing an important scholarly effort by giving a number of testimonies "the literary critical attention they deserve" (4). Another important resource for all three studies is the writing of...

Roundtable: Twentieth-century British History in North America

Roundtable: Twentieth-century British History in North America

MATHEW THOMSON. Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. vi, 330. $110.00

Historical writing on twentieth-century Britain has long privileged supposedly more “tangible” social, cultural, and political history over the mental and philosophical world of values, character, ideas, and psychology. It is from the perspective of this major existing historiographical imbalance that Mathew Thomson's highly illuminating book should be especially welcomed, because it is one of the very first to think big (and broadly) in asserting psychology's relevance to twentieth-century British history as a whole. Thus, while offering much to historians of academic psychology, the book's primary purpose and achievement is to provide valuable reading for all modern British historians by demonstrating how psychological ideas interacted with thinking and practice across British society and politics between 1900 and the mid-1970s. The book's three parts each house several chapters, the first part charting the range of early century psychological movements existing beyond the frequently noted Freudianism, the second psychology's role within education, industry, advertising, and medicine, and the third its interplay from the 1940s onward with war, social democracy, “permissiveness,” and feminism. Throughout, Thomson's analysis is subtle and multilayered. His treatment of feminists' responses to psychology from the early 1970s is an example, as he shows how the belief that psychology was an establishment force oppressing women through diagnoses of mental illness that ignored social causes of female unhappiness co-existed with a belief that therapy and talking could be powerful vehicles for feminist consciousness-raising.

‘The biggest, and … one of the most advanced, enterprises in the country’: The Royal Mail Archive and the Contemporary Historian

The riches of The Royal Mail Archive are many and cover a huge variety of subjects. Yet they remain under-used in particular by the contemporary historian. As an institution that touched many aspects of national life, the story of the Post Office is inextricably linked to key events in twentieth century British history. This article touches on a number of these links. It goes on to highlight numerous examples of material in The Royal Mail Archive that the contemporary historian could deploy to enhance their research.

Ben Pimlott

Ben Pimlott Get access Twentieth Century British History, Volume 17, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 445–450, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwl039 Published: 01 January 2006

History: Puzzle and people or prescription and prophecy?

In 1971 Elie Kedourie had been working on Middle Eastern history for two decades. He then defined the 'key' to The Chatham House Version, which he had just published, as the 'wish to rescue history from prescription and prophecy'. For him accounts of the past shaped by the desire to prescribe policy or to forecast the future, according to some vision or prearranged pattern, 'failed as history'.' It is questionable whether his definition is enough to encompass all his later work. His mind and interests ranged so widely that they have defied simplistic and sometimes hostile explanations that have been advanced for his underlying motives. Nevertheless, he had the knack of expressing, slightly ironically, large and complicated issues in a succinct and arresting phrase. Kedourie's formula is perhaps as sound and consistent as any that has been offered to explain, in a single sentence, his approaches to both history and political thought. His work in both fields helped form his conception of relationships between historians and politicians. To consider his attitude to such relationships it is appropriate to recall, first, some elements in his academic work which essentially contributed to it. His fundamental view of history is certainly consistent with the insistence of many contemporary and earlier historians that history is about what happened and why, not about how events and the lives of men followed some prescribed pattern or course. About a decade after Kedourie was born, H.A.L. Fisher distanced himself from prescribers of patterns in some reflections on writing his History of Europe (1935):

The Papers of Sir Isaiah Berlin at the Bodleian Library

The Papers of Sir Isaiah Berlin at the Bodleian Library Get access Michael Hughes Michael Hughes Bodleian Library, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 16, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 193–205, https://doi.org/10.1093/tweceb/hwi026 Published: 01 January 2005

Churchill and Britain's 'Financial Dunkirk'

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Twentieth Century British History following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version (Vol.15 (4), 2004 pp. 329-360) is available online at: http://tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/4/329

Splendidly Victorian: Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British History in Honour of Walter L. Arnstein

Splendidly Victorian: Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British History in Honour of Walter L. Arnstein

Splendidly Victorian: Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British History in Honour of Walter L. Arnstein (review)

Splendidly Victorian: Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British History in Honour of Walter L. Arnstein (review)

Late Modern

Books reviewed:Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the PresentJane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England 1760–1850: Troublesome SubjectsGordon Corrigan, Wellington: A Military LifeGeorge K. Behlmer and Fred M. Leventhal (ed.), Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British CultureMichael H. Shirley and Todd E. A. Larson (ed.), Splendidly Victorian: Essays in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century British History in Honour of Walter L. ArnsteinMartin Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing Mid‐Victorian BritainRobert Sloan, William Smith O’ Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems. The Geography of Victorian ReligionE. J. T. Collins (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume 7: 1850–1914Trevor Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854–1856Edwin Jaggard (ed.), Liberalism in West Cornwall: The 1868 Election Papers of A. Pendarves Vivian, M.P.Bruce L. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish QuestionJohn K. Walton, BlackpoolArchie Hunter, A Life of Sir John Eldon Gorst: Disraeli’s Awkward DiscipleMary Lynn Stewart, For Health and Beauty: Physical Culture for Frenchwomen, 1880s–1930sRudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artefacts of German Memory, 1870–1990Alastair Thompson, Left Liberals, the State, and Popular Politics in Wilhelmine GermanyAnnika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World WarJohn Mosier, The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War OneAndrew Britton, Monetary Regimes of the Twentieth CenturyDavid Kynaston, The City of London. Volume 3, Illusions of Gold 1914–1945Enda Delaney, Demography, State and Society: Irish Migration to Britain, 1921–1971Kay Chadwick (ed.), Catholicism, Politics and Society in Twentieth‐Century FranceClaire Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–60Andrew Shennan, The Fall of France, 1940Ian Dear and M. R. D. Foot (ed.), The Oxford Companion to World War IIMalcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular MemoryMartin Conway and José Gotovitch (ed.), Europe in Exile, 1940–45: European Exile Communities in BritainKlaus Larres and Ann Lane (ed.), The Cold WarHanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany 1949–1968Peter B. Johnson, Reuter Reporter among the Communists, 1958–59

Military Training in the British Army, 1940-1944: From Dunkirk to D-Day

Immensely detailed yet comprehensible and logical, Military Training in the British Army is a thought provoking study. It will be of particular interest to military historians who focus on operations and to service professionals. - Twentieth Century British History

Subject to Empire: Married Women and the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act

The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens (BNSA) Act stated that “the wife of a British subject shall be deemed to be a British subject, and the wife of an alien shall be deemed to be an alien.” By this reenactment of an 1870 law, a British woman who married an alien became an alien herself, losing the rights and privileges accorded to British nationality. During the 1920s and 1930s, British feminists from around the Empire worked to change this regulation, but only in 1948 were women in the United Kingdom granted the right to their own nationality regardless of their marital status. The House of Commons largely supported the feminists' efforts to reform the laws so that women would not automatically lose their nationality on marriage. Members of Parliament introduced several bills to equalize the nationality laws that were read without division. The Government, however, consistently blocked the bills, citing the imperial nature of the nationality laws and Dominion disagreement with the change. This contest over nationality has been a neglected topic in the study of twentieth-century British history. Legal historians have, by and large, only described changes in the laws regarding married women's national status. While some historians of the women's movement in the British Isles have noted the equal nationality campaign, most have not realized how it can contribute to our understanding of interwar Britain and British feminism. Pat Thane, however, has seen in this topic an example of the way the Empire has influenced British culture.

Keynes, the Labour Movement, and 'How to Pay for the War'

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Twentieth Century British History following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Twentieth Century British History (1999) 10(3): 255-281 is available online at: http://tcbh.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/3/255.full.pdf+html.

Science For the Farmer? Agricultural Research in England 1909-36

Journal Article Science For the Farmer? Agricultural Research in England 1909–36 Get access KEITH VERNON KEITH VERNON University of Central Lancashire Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 310–333, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/8.3.310 Published: 01 January 1997

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access ’England Arise!’ The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain. By Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson, and Nick Tiratsoo. Manchester University Press, 1995. 244 pp. £35.00 hbk. £12.99 pbk. F.M. LEVENTHAL F.M. LEVENTHAL Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 8, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 414–417, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/8.3.414 Published: 01 January 1997

The determinist fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s

From the end of the 1970s, the marxist approach to history, which had flourished in Britain and elsewhere for over two decades, entered a period of abrupt and terminal decline. Signs of this crisis were visible in many different areas. Politically, the growth of feminism posed questions about experience which could not be explained in class terms. The doubts of feminist critics about the status and content of inherited historical narratives were now reinforced by work in literary theory and history. Similarly, with the growth of dissident protests from Eastern Europe and the advent of the Green movement, Radicals and liberals were increasingly repelled by the marxist dismissal of justice and rights, ecologists were increasingly repelled by the marxist emphasis upon the conquest of nature. At the theoretical level, the failure of Althusser's attempt to re-theorise marxism on the basis of structuralism and psychoanalysis had left marxism in a worse position than he had found it. For his writings had highlighted the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of re-designing a marxist theory which could address current political and social preoccupations in the language of the contemporary human sciences. The alternative, and far more textually scrupulous, attempt by Gerry Cohen to reconstruct a coherent theory of history from Marx's famous 'Preface' to his Critique of Political Economy of 1859 also despite itself dramatised the large, if not unbridgeable gulf which separated the 1970s from the metaphysical assumptions which had shaped Marx's approach in the middle of the nineteenth century. Growing awareness of the starkness of the unresolved philosophical problems faced by marxism was further reinforced by the detailed empirical findings of historians. In the case of nineteenth and twentieth century British labour history, for example, it

Sport and Identity: The Case of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 1890-1939

Journal Article Sport and Identity: The Case of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, 1890–1939 Get access DAVE RUSSELL DAVE RUSSELL University of Central Lancashire Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Twentieth Century British History, Volume 7, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 206–230, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/7.2.206 Published: 01 January 1996