James Hinton. Seven Lives from Mass Observation: Britain in the Late Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 190. $40.00 (cloth) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The ‘Intrusion’ of Personal Feelings: Biographical Dilemmas
2014
The notion that history is a morality tale has long ceased to be fashionable. The idea was most uncompromisingly articulated in Lord Acton's famous dictum, 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men'. In contrast to Acton's moral absolutism are the notions of impartiality and value-free history implied in Leopold von Ranke's aphorism 'wie es eigentlich gewesen' - to tell the past as it essentially was. As a biographer with a specialism in 'telling academic lives', I have often found myself self-consciously steering a course between the polarities of morality and impartiality. Specifically, how does one react to the behaviour of one's subjects?
Private Lives, Public Histories: The Diary in Twentieth- Century Britain
This article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentiethcentury Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.
International Labor and Working-Class History, 1997
The phenomenon of Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, and the critical scrutiny to which it has been subjected in Germany have come to the attention of the anglophone historical audience in the last few years. This collection of six theoretical pieces on the methodology along with two case studies by its premier practitioners makes as a whole a compelling case for the idea that the issues raised by Alltagsgeschichte are not simply "German" concerns. As the essays by Alf Liidtke, Hans Medick, and Wolfgang Kaschuba (as well as the brief introduction by series editor Geoff Eley) make clear, Alltagsgeschichte raises fundamental questions about the project of writing history in the late twentieth century. Challenging particularly social history (and above all "social science history," still prominent in this country, and dominant in Germany), these pieces, originally published in Germany in 1989, interrogate the achievements of recent historiography from both a scholarly and political perspective. These Alltagshistoriker (historians of everyday life) identify the insidiously imperialistic nature of much social history, colonizing not only the objects of historical study but historical understanding itself. Contributors to this volume call for "distance," ironic insofar as they themselves have (largely inappropriately in the case of these authors) been accused of sympathizing with and romanticizing their subjects (usually the German working class). Liidtke, Medick, Kaschuba, and Lutz Niethammer argue for considering how those they study see themselves-as historical subjects as well as objects. At the same time, they demand that historians problematize "distance": that they consciously and with "humility" turn their interpretative capacities back on themselves, recognizing their personal stakes, their relationship to those under study, the effects of their work, and seeking a "systematic decentering of analysis and interpretation" (Liidtke, 15). Relatedly, Liidtke and Medick observe the "antidemocratic" dangers of a complacent social science history which seems to validate only a single, objective, totalizing historical truth, determined by narrowly circumscribed "scientific" methods. To the Alltagshistoriker, "doing history" must always be recognized as a process of reconstruction. This is a provocative indictment of recent historiography, offering new perspectives to ongoing American debates on objectivity, historical "truth," the multiplicity of perspectives and voices, and the roles of "experience" and "agency." Operating parallel to some American academic critiques, these Alltagshistoriker broadly challenge the modernist ideal: the emancipatory and democratic potential of the dominant western systems of knowledge. (This coincidence of discussions is no surprise; German social science historians have after all borrowed heavily from American sociolog
Sociological reading of diary fragments 1940- 1945[1
How could people in a civilised society like the Netherlands go on living, with the horror of the Second World War around them? This is the focal question of our research, on diaries written during the German occupation of the Netherlands, by people who are neither perpetrators nor persecuted. We are especially interested in processes of identification and dis-identification, in the associated mechanism of compartmentalisation, physically and psychologically, and in the management of emotions. We use these concepts for a sociological reading of five diary fragments.
Church and parish records, in Early Modern Emotions, ed. Susan Broomhall
Church and parish records have long been recognized as sources that provide vital insights into the history of crime and justice in the early modern period. Their importance to the study of family history and demography is also widely lauded as they allow access to records of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths. But more than providing insights into the ecclesiastical justice system or supplying demographic data, I would argue that these records also allow insight into the emotional worlds of early modern men and women. More so than the criminal courts, church courts heard cases of intimate conflicts, often between family members or neighbours in close village communities. Their focus on sin and morality rather than criminality means that depositions from church courts tell us how early modern people felt about issues of morality, sexuality and sin, and how they reacted emotionally to people in their community who were believed to have transgressed these boundaries. Church courts were a crucial means of justice across Western Europe and, in most judicial areas whose records have been studied, marital and sexual issues accounted for the main business of the lower church courts. 1 This entry focuses on cases of marital and sexual relationships and offers some suggestions as to how we can access both individual and communal emotions within these records. There are two main ways that church records allow insight into early modern mentalities. The first is at a personal level, in that individual testimonies can allow insight into how people felt about their neighbours, how they dealt with conflict and what emotions these conflicts generated. These testimonies demonstrate what types of emotions were acceptable and in what circumstances, as well as the reaction to those who did not conform to expected modes of emotional behaviour. The second concerns how these same records allow us to build an image of the type of 'emotional community' (thus coined by Barbara H. Rosenwein) that these deponents were living in.