“I say high, you say low”: the Beatles and cultural hierarchies in sixties and seventies Britain

“I say high, you say low”: the Beatles and cultural hierarchies in sixties and seventies Britai

Immigration and opinion polls in postwar Britain

Introduction: How did white people in Britain respond to the first decades of mass non-white migration? Evidence from opinion polls reveals the dire state of ‘race relations’ in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

Historiography from below: how undergraduates remember learning history at school

What do our students make of the history that we teach them? As part of an introductory module on historiography, Marcus Collins asked his undergraduate students to analyse the history that they had been taught at school and college using historiographic concepts. The results make for interesting reading. What do students make of national political history? Are there advantages in studying the same topics at GCSE and AS/A2? Collins’ analysis provides fresh insight into many topics that are currently debated. We have a lot to learn from our students and ex-students

Interpreting the Beatles

Interpreting the Beatle

The fall of the English gentleman: the national character in decline, c.1918-1970

The figure of the gentleman and his allied qualities of amateurism, sportsmanship and self-control dominated public discussions of Englishness in the half century after the Great War. From 1918 to the mid nineteen-fifties, gentlemanliness enjoyed strong, although by no means unanimous, support among commentators on national character. Subsequently, however, the reputation of the gentleman suffered irreparable damage at the hands of a post-war generation seeking scapegoats for the country’s perceived economic, geopolitical and moral decline. This article seeks to explain when and why gentlemanliness lost its reputation as the exemplar of Englishness, and the consequent effects on national culture and identity

What have historians been arguing about... youth culture?

For such a boldly iconoclastic work, the Key Stage 3 textbook A New Focus on ... British Social History, c.1920–2000 (2023) provides a disarmingly conventional account of youth in the 1960s as ‘mostly better educated and informed than their parents had been at their age [and able] … to find work and to earn good money … Many young adults were keen and confident to challenge what they saw as the mistakes of the older generations.’ It echoes the 1967 Latey Report on the age of majority: Young people today, as the old never tire of remarking, are not what they were. They are largely literate and educated; they are far better off financially and far more independent of their parents; they are taught to think and enquire for themselves and mostly do so; and their experience of life is wider. Yet while popular accounts of baby boomers are strikingly consistent from the sixties to the present, academics have become less convinced that there was much that was novel, cohesive, distinctive or radical about post-war British youth...</p

“Gays in Your Living Room”: LGBTQ+ television, homophobia, and the birth of Channel 4 in 1980s Britain

This article examines the conflicting attitudes towards homosexuality and public-service broadcasting among British program-makers, pressure groups, newspapers, politicians, and viewers in the 1980s through the prism of Channel 4’s One in Five (1983), billed as “the first programme ever to begin to show what it means to be positively gay.” It pairs a close reading of the broadcast with wide-ranging research in the archives of broadcasters, LGBTQ+ organizations, Parliament, and the press to show why minority programming formed a major arena of contestation over the representation and rights of lesbian and gay people in late twentieth-century Britain. Straight opposition to One in Five captured the strength and characteristics of homophobia in the 1980s, while the program’s divisive effect on queer audiences illuminated divisions within the LGBTQ+ community at the cusp of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The program was dogged by difficulties in creating a cohesive queer identity capable of accommodating differences in gender and ethnicity, region and nation, lifestyle, class, sexual practices, and political orientation. The inception, production, and reception of One in Five simultaneously highlight the particularities of sexual politics in Thatcherite Britain and ongoing dilemmas about the processes and merits of achieving inclusion, diversity, and equality for marginalized groups.</p

The Beatles’ politics

This article argues that the Beatles were instrumental in bringing together the hitherto divergent and mutually uncomprehending realms of politics and pop. Though not innovative political theorists, the Beatles were inventive political strategists who rehearsed virtually every technique subsequently used by politicised musicians. They practised consciousness-raising, lobbying, patronage, abstentionism and civil disobedience. They founded utopian institutions and considered the relative merits of anarchy, democracy and revolutionary socialism. The multitude of political strategies adopted by the Beatles testified to their difficulties in finding one congruent with their outlook and temperament. Furthermore, the anti-authoritarianism which formed the one consistent aspect of their political worldview was simplistic and their solutions were correspondingly unrealistic. They nevertheless did much to legitimise pop music as a means of political expression, to devise organisational structures to support such political activity and to politicise those who produced and consumed pop

We can work it out: popular and academic writing on The Beatles

This article surveys the evolution of popular and academic research on The Beatles from the 1960s to the present. The section on popular writing identifies and critiques four strands of popular writing on The Beatles: hagiographical and sensationalist biographies, rock criticism and chronicling. The section on academic writing argues that traditionalist academics initially opposed the very idea of scholarship on The Beatles and that contemporary British historians still question the band’s significance as part of their wider revisionist critique of the 1960s as a major turning-point in modern British history. The article concludes by suggesting how academics might profitably pursue a less biographical approach and a more rigorous form of source analysis than that generally found in popular works

Pride and prejudice: West Indian men in mid twentieth-century Britain

Pride and prejudice: West Indian men in mid twentieth-century Britai