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Edwardian Britain (edwardian + britain)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

The provincial social survey in Edwardian Britain

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 187 2002
Mark Freeman
This article examines three social surveys carried out in English provincial towns after Seebohm Rowntree's study of York and before A. L. Bowley's sample surveys of five towns. The authors emphasized specific local circumstances and suggested local voluntary and municipal remedies for the social problems they described. Their focus was on the community, and although informed by the discourses of ,national efficiency' that also lay behind Rowntree's researches, the solutions to the problems of juvenile life and casual labour that compromised national efficiency were to be found in local endeavour. Poverty was viewed in the context of its impact on the community rather than on the individual. [source]

Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity , Edited by Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth

HISTORY, Issue 317 2010
RICHARD TOYE
No abstract is available for this article. [source]

Politics for Better or Worse: Political Nonconformity, the Gambling Dilemma and the North of England Newspaper Company, 1903,1914

HISTORY, Issue 286 2002
Paul Gliddon
Edwardian Britain saw a revival of political activity by nonconformists, who campaigned fervently for the Liberal Party. This resurgence included the purchase of newspapers by nonconformists in the Liberal cause. Many of these nonconformists held strong moral beliefs, and scholars have suggested that there was a tension between such ideals and political practicalities, a tension that caused nonconformists to become disillusioned with political activity and to withdraw from it. However, since such arguments tend to be generalized, this article analyses one example of nonconformists' difficulties, namely those experienced by Liberals who acquired several newspapers in Darlington in 1903. These Liberal nonconformists tried in vain to run The Northern Echo, a paper of note (or notoriety, depending on one's politics), without the betting content they so deplored. This article argues that the episode does demonstrate a tension between high ideals and political practicalities, though the nonconformist response here was a pragmatic and even a mixed one that ensured the survival of a strong Liberal press in north-east England for the next fifty years. It also suggests that, although there was a significant demand for betting content among newspaper audiences, none the less that demand was of a lesser extent than historians have so far supposed. [source]

Een-Gonyama Gonyama!: Zulu Origins of the Boy Scout Movement and the Africanisation of Imperial Britain

PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, Issue 1 2008
TIMOTHY PARSONS
British imperialists in the late 19th century denigrated non-western cultures in rationalising the partition of Africa, but they also had to assimilate African values and traditions to make the imperial system work. The partisans of empire also romanticised non-western cultures to convince the British public to support the imperial enterprise. In doing so, they introduced significant African and Asian elements into British popular culture, thereby refuting the assumption that the empire had little influence on the historical development of metropolitan Britain. Robert Baden-Powell conceived of the Boy Scout movement as a cure for the social instability and potential military weakness of Edwardian Britain. Influenced profoundly by his service as a colonial military officer, Africa loomed large in Baden-Powell's imagination. He was particularly taken with the Zulu. King Cetshwayo's crushing defeat of the British army at Isandhlawana in 1879 fixed their reputation as a ,martial tribe' in the imagination of the British public. Baden-Powell romanticised the Zulus' discipline, and courage, and adapted many of their cultural institutions to scouting. Baden-Powell's appropriation and reinterpretation of African culture illustrates the influence of subject peoples of the empire on metropolitan British politics and society. Scouting's romanticised trappings of African culture captured the imagination of tens of thousands of Edwardian boys and helped make Baden-Powell's organisation the premier uniformed youth movement in Britain. Although confident that they were superior to their African subjects, British politicians, educators, and social reformers agreed with Baden-Powell that ,tribal' Africans preserved many of the manly virtues that had been wiped by the industrial age. [source]