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Let's spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It shows how the underlying sexual charge of rock ‘n'roll – and pop music more generally – was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour. Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The essays locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: with a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the ‘teenager'; existing, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.

Taking us from the beginning of our story to the present day, A Cold Spell examines how ice has shaped our thoughts, actions and societies – and what it means for us that it is rapidly disappearing from our planet'A warm-hearted tale of the bizarre, something to cuddle up with in the bleak midwinter... Astonishing'THE TIMES'Bracingly original... As the earth warms threateningly, there could hardly be a more pertinent time for a story like this'MICHAEL PALIN'A book of limitless fascinations'OLIVIA LAING'Brightly written, nimbly researched and really quite delightful'LITERARY REVIEWIce has confounded, delighted and fascinated us since the first sparks of art and culture in Europe and it now underpins the modern world. Without ice, we would not feed ourselves or heal our sick as we do, and our towns and cities, countryside and oceans would look very different. Science would not have progressed along the avenues it did and our galleries and libraries would be missing many masterpieces.A Cold Spell uses this vital link to understanding our past to tell a surprising story of obsession, invention and adventure – how we have lived and dreamed, celebrated and traded, innovated, loved and fought over thousands of years. It brings together a sacrificial Incan mummy, Winston Churchill's secret plans for unusual aircraft carriers, strange bones that shook Victorian beliefs about the world and a macabre journey into the depths of the human body. It is an original and unique way of looking at something that is literally all around us, whose loss confronts us daily in the news, but whose impact on our lives has never been fully explored.'[An] extraordinary, complete and utter history of the human experience of the cold stuff'JOHN LEWIS-STEMPEL, COUNTRY LIFE'A thought-provoking chronicle of humanity... Leonard consistently frames ice in surprising and insightful ways, and in doing so lends it a magical quality'GEOGRAPHICAL

The medicalisation of alcohol use has become a prominent discourse that guides policy makers and impacts public perceptions of alcohol and drinking. This book maps the historical and cultural dimensions of the phenomenon. Emphasising medical attitudes and theories regarding alcohol and the changing perception of alcohol consumption in psychiatry and mental health, it explores the shift from the use of alcohol in clinical treatment and as part of dietary regimens to the emergence of alcoholism as a disease category that requires medical intervention and is considered a threat to public health.

This open access book maps a crucial but neglected chapter in the history of psychiatry: how was melancholia transformed in the nineteenth century from traditional melancholy madness into a modern biomedical mood disorder, paving the way for the emergence of clinical depression as a psychiatric illness in the twentieth century? At a time when the prevalence of mood disorders and antidepressant consumption are at an all-time high, the need for a comprehensive historical understanding of how modern depressive illness came into being has never been more urgent. This book addresses a significant gap in existing scholarly literature on melancholia, depression, and mood disorders by offering a contextualised and critical perspective on the history of melancholia in the first decades of psychiatry, from the 1830s until the turn of the twentieth century.

This handbook explores a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses to modern conflict, from Mons in the First World War to Kabul in the twenty-first century. With over thirty chapters from an international range of contributors, ranging from the UK to the US and Australia, and working across history, art, literature, and media, it offers a significant interdisciplinary contribution to the study of modern war, and our artistic and cultural responses to it. The handbook is divided into three parts. The first part explores how communities and individuals responded to loss and grief by using art and culture to assimilate the experience as an act of survival and resilience. The second part explores how conflict exerts a powerful influence on the expression and formation of both individual, group, racial, cultural and national identities and the role played by art, literature, and education in this process. The third part moves beyond the actual experience of conflict and its connection with issues of identity to explore how individuals and society have made use of art and culture to commemorate the war. In this way, it offers a unique breadth of vision and perspective, to explore how conflicts have been both represented and remembered since the early twentieth century.

This open access book surveys drinking in Britain between the Licensing Act of 1869 and the wartime regulations imposed on alcohol production and consumption after 1914. This was a period marked by the expansion of the drink industry and by increasingly restrictive licensing laws. Politics and commerce co-existed with moral and medical concerns about drunkenness and combined, these factors pushed alcohol consumers into the public spotlight. Through an analysis of public and private records, medical texts and sociological studies, the book investigates the reasons why Victorians and Edwardians consumed alcohol in the ways that they did and explores the ideas about alcohol that circulated in the period. This book shows that they had many reasons for purchasing and consuming alcoholic substances and these were driven by broader social, cultural, medical and commercial factors. Although drunkenness may have been the most visible consequence of alcohol consumption, it was not the only type of drinking behaviour. Alcohol played an important social role in the everyday lives of Victorians and Edwardians where its consumption held many different meanings.

What has brought about the transformation of the British film industry over the last few decades, to the beginnings of what is arguably a new golden era? In the mid-1980s the industry was in a parlous state. The number of films produced in the UK was tiny. Cinema attendance had dipped to an all-time low, cinema buildings were in a state of disrepair and home video had yet to flourish. Since then, while many business challenges - especially for independent producers and distributors - remain, the industry overall has developed beyond recognition. In recent years, as British films have won Oscars, Cannes Palms and Venice Golden Lions, releases such as Love Actually, Billy Elliot, Skyfall, Paddington and the Harry Potter series have found enormous commercial as well as critical success. The UK industry has encouraged, and benefitted from, a huge amount of inward investment, much of it from the Hollywood studios, but also from the National Lottery via the UK Film Council and BFI. This book portrays the visionaries and officials who were at the helm as a digital media revolution began to reshape the industry. Through vivid accounts based on first-hand interviews of what was happening behind the scenes, film commentator and critic Geoffrey Macnab provides in-depth analysis of how and why the British film industry has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.

Works of travel have been the subject of increasingly sophisticated studies in recent years. This book undermines the conviction with which nineteenth-century British writers talked about darkest Africa. It places the works of travel within the rapidly developing dynamic of Victorian imperialism. Images of Abyssinia and the means of communicating those images changed in response to social developments in Britain. As bourgeois values became increasingly important in the nineteenth century and technology advanced, the distance between the consumer and the product were justified by the scorn of African ways of eating. The book argues that the ambiguities and ambivalence of the travellers are revealed in their relation to a range of objects and commodities mentioned in narratives. For instance, beads occupy the dual role of currency and commodity. The book deals with Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, and attempts to prove that racial representations are in large part determined by the cultural conditions of the traveller's society. By looking at Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it argues that the text is best read as what it purports to be: a kind of travel narrative. Only when it is seen as such and is regarded in the context of the fin de siecle can one begin to appreciate both the extent and the limitations of Conrad's innovativeness.

Global Convict Labour offers a global history of convict labour across many of the regimes of punishment that have appeared from Antiquity to the present, including transportation, prisons, workhouses and labour camps. The editors'essay surveys the available literature, and sets the theoretical basis to approach the issue. The fifteen chapters explore the genealogies of convict labour and its relationships with coloniality and governmentality.The volume re-establishes convict labour firmly within labour history, as one of the entangled, multiple labour relations that have punctuated human history. Similarly, it places convictism back within migration history at large, bridging the gap between the growing literature on convict transportation and research on slavery and other forms of free and bonded migration.Contributors are: Carlos Aguirre, David Arnold, Marc Buggeln, Timothy Coates, Christian G. De Vito, Mary Gibson, Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga, Stacey Hynd, Padraic Kenney, Alex Lichtenstein, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Alice Rio, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Jean-Lucien Sanchez, Pieter Spierenburg, Stephan Steiner, Laurens E. Tacoma, Heather Ann Thompson, Lynne Viola.

A comprehensive history of the evolution of the ghost in the west, examining the behavior of the subject in the stories we tell each other.A New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceNo matter how rationally we order our lives, few of us are completely immune to the suggestion of the uncanny and the fear of the dark. What explains sightings of ghosts? Why do they fascinate us? What exactly do those who have been haunted see? What did they believe? And what proof is there?Taking us through the key hauntings that have obsessed the world, from the true events that inspired Henry James's classic The Turn of the Screw right up to the present day, Roger Clarke unfolds a story of class conflict, charlatans, and true believers. The cast list includes royalty and prime ministers, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Harry Houdini, and Adolf Hitler. The chapters cover everything from religious beliefs to modern developments in neuroscience, the medicine of ghosts, and the technology of ghosthunting. There are haunted WWI submarines, houses so blighted by phantoms they are demolished, a seventeenth-century Ghost Hunter General, and the emergence of the Victorian flash mob, where hundreds would stand outside rumored sites all night waiting to catch sight of a dead face at a window.Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, Ghosts: A Natural History takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe.Praise for Ghosts: A Natural History“Clarke tells this [the story that inspired Henry James's The Turn of the Screw] and many other gloriously weird stories with real verve, and also a kind of narrative authority that tends to constrain the skeptical voice within... [An] erudite and richly entertaining book.” —New York Times Book Review“A fascinating social history... exceptionally well written and researched.” —Starburst Magazine“Ghost-hunting gets a gentlemanly makeover in this meticulous history of hauntings.Clarke indulges his lifelong interest in the paranormal in this well-documented look at ghost stories and the people who have told them throughout history.” —Kirkus Reviews

In Großbritannien errichteten und finanzierten die Verwaltungen der Armenfürsorge seit dem mittleren 19. Jahrhundert große psychiatrische Institutionen. Die Geschichte der Patientinnen und Patienten dieser Anstalten ist für den schottischen Fall bisher weitgehend vernachlässigt worden. Jens Gründler verfolgt in seinem Buch die Lebenswege von Insassen und deren Familien vor, während und nach der stationären Aufnahme in eine Anstalt der Glasgower Armenfürsorge, um den Einfluss dieser Akteure auf das System der Armenpsychiatrie nachzuzeichnen. Dafür greift er auf Kranken- und Armenakten der Betroffenen zurück und kann so nachweisen, dass die Funktion und Nutzung der Einrichtungen in der Praxis weniger von Medizinern und Bürokraten, sondern maßgeblich von den Angehörigen der Erkrankten geprägt wurde.

This is the first book-length study of the ideological foundations of British imperialism in the twentieth century. Drawing on the thinking of imperial activists, publicists, ideologues, and travelers such as Lionel Curtis, John Buchan, Arnold White, Richard Jebb and Thomas Sedgwick, this book offers a comparative history of how the idea of imperial citizenship took hold in early twentieth-century Britain, and how it helped foster the articulation of a broader British world. It reveals how imperial citizenship as a form of imperial identity was challenged by voices in both Britain and the empire, and how it influenced later imperial developments such as the immigration to Britain of ‘imperial citizens'from the colonies after the Second World War. A work of political, intellectual and cultural history, the book re-incorporates the histories of the settlement colonies into imperial history, and suggests the importance of comparative history in understanding the imperial endeavour. It will be of interest to students of imperialism, British political and intellectual history, and of the various former dominions.

'A scout must always be prepared at any moment to do his duty, and to face danger in order to help his fellow-men.'A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and imperial and urban myth, of borrowed tips on health and hygiene, and object lessons in woodcraft, Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and'self-instructor'of the Boy Scout Movement. One of the all-time bestsellers in the English-speaking world, this primer of'yarns and pictures'constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend, padded with lengthy quotations from adventure fiction and Baden-Powell's own autobiography, and seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration, concerns about masculinity and self-restraint, invasion paranoia. Elleke Boehmer's edition of Scouting for Boys reprints the original text and illustrations, and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists, capitalists and environmentalists alike.