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Research on folk culture in twentieth-century Britain has focused on elite and transgressive political episodes, but these were not its mainstream manifestations. This article re-evaluates the place of folk culture in twentieth-century Britain in the context of museums. It argues that in the modern heritage landscape folk culture was in an active dialogue with the modern democracy. This story begins with the vexed, and ultimately failed, campaign for a national English folk museum and is traced through the concurrent successes of local, regional, and Celtic 'first wave' folk museums across Britain from the 1920s to the 1960s. The educational activities of these museums are explored as emblematic of a 'conservative modernity', which gave opportunities to women but also restricted their capacity to do intellectual work. By the 1970s, a 'second wave' folk museology is identified, revealing how forms of folk culture successfully accommodated the rapid social change of the later twentieth century, particularly in deindustrializing regions. From this new, museums' perspective, folk culture appears far less marginal to twentieth-century British society. In museums folk culture interacted with mainstream concerns about education, regionalism, and commercialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes how children in 1930s' Britain narrated their everyday behavior, feelings and fantasies when asked to do so by their teachers. It is based upon a study of over one thousand essays that were written by children in 1937 and 1938, which were collected by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, as part of its Worktown Project. The argument is situated within the history of emotions and we interrogate the utility of recent conceptual frameworks for the better understanding of children's subjectivities. The essays show that children were able to juggle contradictory demands and expectations, learn emotional codes and match emotional style to spatial context when moving between school, home and leisure arenas. To some extent, then, children adapted and shaped their behavior to comply with specific emotional communities. However, we argue that this model offers only a partial account of children's emotional practices. In the second part of the article we suggest a move away from thinking about emotional communities or emotional styles as predominantly value-based and spatially defined (by the school, home, street--spaces which children inhabited and might have influenced but which were conceived and built by adults) and argue instead for increased attention to be paid to the material context and, particularly, the relationships that operated within and across these spaces. Ultimately, we argue, children's emotional experiences were less about "learning to feel" than feeling through practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to write the army transport mule, which has previously been neglected in the equine historiography of the conflict, into the story of the First World War. It does not aim to tell the entire story of the role of mules in the war, as this deserves fuller investigation. Instead, it focuses on how various British sources depicted the army transport mule and how the actual involvement and treatment of these animals on the Salonica Front accorded with these perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional 'successor' to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the entry of the USSR into the Second World War in June 1941, images of Soviet women proliferated in Britain. Official propaganda, parliamentary debate, and popular culture positioned self-sacrificing Soviet woman as models for British women’s behaviour in wartime: their wartime citizenship. The example of the Soviet woman also offered an opportunity for British to claim the full range rights of rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These ranged from arguments for better provision of childcare to, most controversially, the right to bear arms in the event of German invasion. These public protests came to nothing. Under pressure from the post-war repudiation of the gains women made during the war, the viability of pro-Soviet rhetoric was then fatally undermined by the advent of the Cold War. Nonetheless, women’s public and private admiration for their Soviet contemporaries aided the project of refashioning citizenship’s boundaries across the public and private spheres. Evidence from these contests also points to new ways of approaching questions about British political culture from the 1930s through to the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The vernacularization of voice-recording technology over the course of the past century means that we have largely forgotten what a strange and quasi-magical thing it is to preserve someone’s voice. This article, first delivered as the Ben Pimlott Memorial Lecture, traces the development of voice-recording technologies in the twentieth century from gramophone records to miniaturized mobile devices. It argues that the recording of the voice led to a renewed awareness of the voice as a trained instrument, as a marker of individual identity, and as a way of immortalizing speech and preserving an auditory remnant of people after their deaths. Recording technologies extended the range of voices that could be heard by taking the BBC and other voice capturers beyond the London-based live studios and what Lord Reith referred to as the anonymous ‘collective personality’ of the radio announcers; and it made people listen intently to voices as both expressions of the self and as vehicles for communicating with others. The voice recording technologies of the past century were essentially democratizing, allowing the ‘voice of the people’ to be heard in authentic everyday settings, albeit in fragmentary and imperfect ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the role of the John Hilton Bureau newspaper advice service, which ran under the auspices of the News of the World between 1942 and the late 1960s. The Bureau merits attention from historians on account of the light it can shed on how ordinary Britons accessed the law, legal and other types of advice before and after the Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949. It also provides insight into how relationships between the state and individual differed between the highly regulated wartime state and the supposedly affluent, consumerist welfare state that followed it. The article also argues that the John Hilton Bureau evolved from a service defined by the reputation of the eponymous Hilton, a Cambridge professor and radio personality, to one that saw itself as a crusading organisation standing up for the ‘little man’ against a bureaucratic welfare state and unscrupulous traders. Finally, the Bureau is a reminder that the post-war welfare state was not simply divided between the public and voluntary sectors, but also included an array of private sector interests. The Bureau’s position outside of the public and voluntary sectors enabled it to be a critical and challenging voice, untainted by a sense of charity, but its location within a profit-making organisation also made it vulnerable in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the turn toward the small companion animal that occurred in British veterinary medicine in the twentieth century. The change in species emphasis is usually attributed to post-war socioeconomic factors, however this explanation ignores the extensive small animal treatment that was occurring outwith the veterinary profession in the interwar period. The success of this unqualified practice caused the veterinary profession to rethink attitudes to small animals (dogs initially, later cats) upon the decline of horse practice. This paper argues that a shift toward seeing the small animal as a legitimate veterinary patient was necessary before the specialty could become mainstream in the post-war years, and that this occurred between the wars as a result of the activities of British animal welfare charities, especially the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public fears of widespread venereal disease led in 1913 to the appointment of The Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (RCVD). In 1916 its Final Report offered only a single cautious and somewhat imprecise summary statement about the likely prevalence of venereal diseases in England and Wales. Although the significance of contemporary attitudes to venereal disease has attracted a good deal of historiographic attention, no historian or demographer has since investigated this aspect of the Royal Commission's work. This article critically re-examines the most important quantitative evidence presented to the Royal Commission relating to the years immediately prior to the First World War. It utilises this evidence to produce new estimates of the probable prevalence of syphilis among adult males, both nationally and among certain geographical divisions and social groups in the national population; and also to offer a comment on the likely prevalence of gonorrhoea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides the first in-depth account of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–10). In a period of intensifying labour unrest, young female servants working in private homes attempted to organize their own trade unions. Short-lived and disrupted by the First World War, their efforts left little formal documentation and have never before been the subject of historical study. Their activities can, however, be traced in the pages of women’s movement periodicals and the correspondence columns of local and radical newspapers. The idea of organizing domestic servants as workers was an anathema to many in both the labour and the women’s movements. Nevertheless, the Domestic Workers’ Union provides a fascinating case study of how, in this moment of exceptional social unrest, elements of trade unionism and feminism converged to challenge entrenched gendered divisions between the public and the private, the workplace and the home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Race Relations Act of 1965 has been remembered by historians as one prong of a governmental strategy to deal with the impact of black and Asian post-war immigration to Britain, an attempt to improve inter-group relations at the same time as efforts were being made to restrict Commonwealth immigration. This iconic Act was the first to criminalize racial discrimination and outlaw the incitement of racial hatred. This article focuses on the creation and use of one part of this new law, Section Six, the incitement clause. It argues that early patterns of prosecution under this legislation reveal a government agenda which was not solely focused on the protection of black and Asian Britons but instead on longer-running issues relating to the tolerance of political violence. Far from simply outlawing racism, this article argues that the incitement clause ultimately enabled a re-articulation of racial discourse, tweaking the linguistic parameters of racist agitation while consciously allowing for its continuation. In doing so, it reflected a nation which was still unsure about the merits of multiculturalism, where it remained largely acceptable to argue that black and Asian Britons did not belong. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Twopenny libraries first appeared in North London in 1930 and quickly spread throughout urban Britain. Their innovation was to dispense with subscription fees and charge per loan. Unlike older commercial libraries such as Mudie’s, twopenny libraries served a working-class clientele. Some twopenny libraries were standalone businesses. Many more were sidelines to existing businesses such as tobacconists’ and newsagents’ shops. Library services could be profitable in their own right, but often their main value to their proprietors was to bring customers into the shop more regularly. Established players in the book trade initially responded to twopenny libraries with alarm, but the threat they posed was limited. Their market was not the same as those of booksellers. Some public librarians made arguments along these lines about the twopenny libraries’ impact on public libraries; certainly, the two types of institution coexisted. Twopenny libraries carried a lot of so-called light fiction, but they also lent working-class readers the ‘middlebrow’ bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s. The wider significance of the twopenny library lies in the way it problematizes the distinction commonly made between a middle-class public for new hardcover novels and a working-class readership of fiction that appeared in cheap papers and magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how British immigration control policy was carried out during the nineteen-seventies to filter immigration, while addressing the perceived problem of 'non-white' colonial migration. Recently released government documents suggest that the immigration control system should be viewed as a series of inter-connected institutions and actors that operated under the influence of a number of different, and often contradictory, factors. The result of these competing factors was an immigration control system that, relying on the paradoxical whims of the government and other sections of civil society, was restrictive and suspicious towards potential migrants, but at the same time constrained in its behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have regularly acknowledged the significance of religious faith to the eugenics movement in Britain and the USA. However, much of this scholarship suggests a polarised relationship of either conflict or consensus. Where Christian believers participated in the eugenics movement this has been represented as an abandonment of ‘orthodox’ theology, and the impression has been created that eugenics was a secularising force. In contrast, this article explores the impact of religious values on two eugenics organisations: the British Eugenics Education Society, and the American Eugenics Society. It is demonstrated that concerns over religion resulted in both these organisations modifying and tempering the public work that they undertook. This act of concealing and minimising the visibly controversial aspects of eugenics is offered as an addition to the debate over ‘mainline’ versus ‘reform’ eugenics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The mandate system was created as part of the overall machinery of the League of Nations in an attempt to 'promote world peace' in the aftermath of the First World War. The 'A' mandates, with which this article is concerned, were the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire that had been occupied and conquered by France and Britain by the end of the war. Was the mandate system in any sense an improvement on colonialism? To the extent that the period of foreign rule was rather short in comparison with other colonial regimes, one can perhaps say that it was. On the other hand, however high-minded its stated aims, the mandate system was a product of the imperial framework of its day, in which the white races were regarded as superior to the brown or black races. The supervisory instruments of the League (specifically the Permanent Mandates' Commission) were inadequate to deal with any shortcomings on the part of the mandatory, and there are a number of examples of situations where, for example, the legitimate interests of minorities were ignored to suit the wider interests of the powers. In general, the mandated states lacked institutional underpinning, and their immediate legacy was a string of weak states throughout the Arab world, where many of the institutions of civil society were destroyed in the course of military coups in the 1950s and 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British Empire's response to the Armenian genocide during the early 20th century. It examines the British government's desire to demonstrate that its imperial responsibilities included the enforcement of human rights, the nationalism among Muslims in Ottoman Turkey that British efforts fostered, and the convergence of human rights and geopolitics. The article also discusses the history of British defense of human rights in the Ottoman Empire.

Historians have castigated the British medical profession for endorsing forcible feeding during the suffragette hunger strike campaigns of 1909 to 1914. This article reconsiders the importance of medical opposition to forcible feeding by closely analysing its agendas and, importantly, by positing that the medico-ethical debates sparked in that period set the stage for ethical discourses that have recurrently resurfaced ever since. Although leading contemporary medical institutions and figures did indeed turn a blind eye to forcible feeding, the nature of medical opposition where it did arise, and the complex medico-ethical dilemmas posed by the procedure, demand fuller investigation, not least because they illuminate concerns still raised today. More specifically, I explore historical disagreement on forcible feeding as a therapeutic or coercive technique, the complex positioning of the prison doctor who performed the procedure and contestation over the extent to which the state ought to intervene in prison medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay uses the autobiographical and journalistic work of the confidence trickster Netley Lucas to explore the possibilities and problems of writing as an ex-crook in inter-war Britain. In so doing, it considers the intersections between emerging forms of mass culture, popular and scientific narratives of criminality, and increasingly heated debates about the social and institutional management of crime. This case study provides an opportunity to think critically about the extent to which inter-war criminology was the modernizing project it often claimed to be. In the hands of Lucas and others, different modes of writing about crime bled into one another. Older forms of criminal confession coexisted with ‘modern’ criminological knowledge as mutually constitutive ways of apprehending the social. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses public opinion concerning the public opinion and desire for Great Britain's National Health Service (NHS) prior to 1948. It examines political pressure and discussion concerning a nationalized hospital system for Great Britain, particularly among what the author identifies as British political elites in the British political party the Labour Party, medical experts, and special interest groups, including the Socialist Medical Association (SMA). The article discusses the history of public health in Great Britain, including access to public hospitals and medical care of the poor. It also discusses the British Ministry of Health, the formation of the British Emergency Hospital Service (EHS) and volunteer involvement concerning medical care.

The decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War saw Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race of unprecedented expense against the German empire. The spiralling cost of armaments proved politically problematic for a Liberal ministry ostensibly committed to ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform’. Outside the government, however, an organized navalist lobby agitated enthusiastically for ever greater levels of defence preparedness. Groups such as the Navy League have typically been regarded as bastions of the radical right. In fact, as this article demonstrates, Liberal engagement with and participation in the navalist lobby was far greater than historians have realized. Liberal MPs accounted for a significant portion of the Navy League’s support within Parliament, and Liberals held many leadership positions in the organization. These men were motivated by considerations of national defence, but they also identified their navalism as belonging to a coherent Liberal political tradition. The navy had long been associated with progressive political causes, above all with the maintenance of free trade, and was regarded as being free from the more regressive forms of militarism associated with standing armies. In this sense, navalism was not simply a phenomenon of the radical right; it also represented a distinctly Liberal form of militarism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses moral and sexual changes in Great Britain in the post-World War II era, examining the notion of a permissive society. It explores the influence of the state and the press and comments on the role of London, England in these transformations. The author also reflects on sexual scandals, particularly noting an affair between British war minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler, the supposed mistress of a Russian spy. An inquiry into sexual reform led by John Frederick Wolfenden, Baron Wolfenden, also known as Lord Wolfenden, is also considered.

The article discusses the role of voluntary organizations in British political and civic life in the early- and mid-twentieth century. It examines various types of organizations, including voluntary agencies and women's groups, particularly those campaigning for women's suffrage. The author comments on the book "Politics in Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System Since 1911," by Keith Middlemas, particularly considering Middlemas' writings about trade unions and employers’ associations.

This article describes one of the lesser known social surveys of the first half of the twentieth century in Britain and looks at its origins and its outcomes. Funded by the Rockefeller grant to Oxford University to enhance social studies there, the Oxford Survey published in two volumes in 1938 and 1940 engaged Oxford academics from agricultural economics, economics, statistics, and government, as well as Barnett House members involved in voluntary organizations, adult education, settlements, citizenship, and social work. It was a far-reaching study that aimed to analyse all aspects of public services, in the context of a thorough-going description of the geography, industry, and population statistics of the local area. It was also designed to have national relevance, because of the development of the motor industry in Cowley. The Oxford Survey differed from Booth and Rowntree’s exploration of the habits and circumstances of the urban poor. Instead, it had more affinity to surveys of industrial and regional planning and work coming from the Le Play school, in which the act of surveying communities was perceived as a way of enhancing citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses British policy towards Iraq during the period following the Second World War until the 1958 Iraqi revolution. Using British archival sources it demonstrates how Britain covertly tried to stem the rise of communist and nationalist anti-imperialist sentiments in Iraq through an insistence on employing ill-fitting anti-communist propaganda designed as a Cold War weapon with which to counter Soviet influence. Failing to appreciate the level of indigenous politicization, because of their own rigid ideas about the nature of the 'Iraqi mind', British officers were incapable of devising local responses to the growing threat of anti-imperialism, instead inadvertently handing over the initiative to Iraqi political groups to set the agenda. In this way Britain gradually lost the battle for hearts and minds in Iraq despite maintaining a huge propaganda apparatus in the country and the wider region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments upon various reports published within this special issue on the history of labor unions and foreign relations, including one by Elizabeth McKillen on labor during World War I, one by Geert Van Goethem on government policies regarding American and British labor movements during World War II, and one by Daniel Garcia on class relations within the U.S. armed forces at the end of World War II. Some of the subjects explored include the public opinion of the working-class in the U.S. regarding foreign policy, the study of international labor movements, and the inability of marginalised groups within the U.S. to influence political decision making.

British foreign policy in the 1930s is often considered utilizing the paradigm of appeasement. This, however, is an inadequate and retrospective tool, as it narrows the range of issues that can be dealt with and analyses them only as they can be considered to be pro- or anti-appeasement. Looking at the career of Sir Orme Sargent, one of the most important men in the Foreign Office during this period, it becomes clear that many of the major decisions of the period were taken in the light of whether they were consistent with the principles of the new international order established in 1919 rather than whether they contributed to the ‘appeasement’ of such countries as Germany, Italy and Japan. It also reveals that there were sharply different opinions in the Foreign Office about such matters, particular with regard to how to square France’s desire for security with Germany’s insistence on being treated as an equal, whether France’s network of alliances (particularly with Soviet Russia) damaged or enhanced Britain’s own security and whether the latter could be achieved by means of collective action within the precepts of the League of Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information about socialist Ellen Wilkinson, Great Britain's Minister of Education between 1945 and 1947, and states that her work in this role was somewhat ineffective, including her push for equal opportunity for all children. Reasons for this include her own successful background affecting her views, the Ministry retaining control over Wilkinson's actions, and that the Labour party was not clear about its own position on educational issues.