Historians and the centenary commemorations

Perhaps because I am a Professor of Contemporary History I find that I am most curious about what exactly interests people now about World War 1? That is, people who are not professional historians. Or are many people indeed interested or just being told by the government, the press and television that they should be interested? It is hard to know, although there clearly is much popular interest in history in Britain, as suggested by the popularity of TV history series and historical novels; ..

Special Section Introduction: Mass Observation as Method

Since Mass Observation's foundation in 1937, the organisation has played witness to the great and the small events of everyday life during the last eight decades, recording people's opinions, beliefs and experiences, and making them available for researchers to develop new interpretations of British social life. Although the data produced is often messy and unwieldy and apparently contradicts many sociological assumptions about methodological rigour, the Archive is uniquely placed to offer detailed and exceptionally rich accounts of the fibre of everyday life and to reveal the deep complexities of family, personal and intimate life. As Mike Savage notes in Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940, 'Mass-Observation is the most studied, and arguably the most important, social research institution of the mid-twentieth century' (Savage 2010: 57). He situates this significance in it providing the focus for the emergence of a new intellectual class in late 1930s Britain of people who identified with a social scientific outlook. Until that point in time, the main point of entry into intellectual circles for newly educated classes was through literary culture, which was often implicitly elitist and hierarchical in its attitude to wider society

70 is the new 60: We need to stop characterising the growth of older people in the UK in alarmist ways

Pat Thane argues that there is a danger of stressing the costs of the ageing population too much and the positive inputs of older people to economy and society too little. In reality many older people are far from being burdens on the young; rather, they contribute substantially to their families and society