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Precarious Professionals uncovers the inequalities and insecurities which lay at the heart of professional life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The book challenges conventional categories in the history of work, exploring instead the everyday labour of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the traditional professions. Situating new historical perspectives on gender at the forefront of their research, the contributors explore how professional cultures could not only define themselves against, but often flourished outside of, the confines of patriarchal codes and structures.Putting the lives of precarious professionals in dialogue with master narratives in modern ...
How did ideas of masculinity shape the British legal profession and the wider expectations of the white-collar professional? Brotherhood of Barristers examines the cultural history of the Inns of Court – four legal societies whose rituals of symbolic brotherhood took place in their supposedly ancient halls. These societies invented traditions to create a sense of belonging among members – or, conversely, to marginalize those who did not fit the profession's ideals. Ren Pepitone examines the legal profession's efforts to maintain an exclusive, masculine culture in the face of sweeping social changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Utilizing established sources such as institutional records alongside diaries, guidebooks, and newspapers, this book looks afresh at the gendered operations of Victorian professional life. Brotherhood of Barristers incorporates a diverse array of historical actors, from the bar's most high-flying to struggling law students, disbarred barristers, political radicals, and women's rights campaigners.
This book traces the transformation of history from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern academic discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how this change inspired Victorians to reconsider what it meant to be a historian. This reconceptualization of the ‘historian’ lies at the heart of this book as it explores how historians strove to forge themselves a collective scholarly persona that reflected and legitimised their new disciplinary status and gave them authority to speak on behalf of the past. The author argues that historians used the persona as a replacement for missing institutional structures, and converted book parts to a sphere where they could...
This book reviews the formative years of the United Nations (UN) under its first Secretary-General Trygve Lie. This welcome appraisal shows how the foundations for an expanded secretary-general role were laid during this period, and that Lie’s contribution was greater than has later been acknowledged. The interplay of crisis decision-making, institutional constraints and the individuals involved thus built the foundations for the UN organization we know today. Addressing important wider questions of IGO creation, governance and autonomy, this is an incisive account of how the UN moved from paper to practice under Lie.
The story of the revolutionary transformation of the British educational system in the second half of the 20th century from a rigid hierarchy for a minority, to a fundamental right of all citizens, one of the most valued and enduring features of the welfare state - and the crisis of the meritocracy that this has entailed.
The Times hailed Richard Burdon Haldane as ‘one of the most powerful … intellects’ British statesmanship had ever seen. His brother John, a great physiologist, invented the first gas masks used in World War One. Their sister Elizabeth was among the first women to become a senior public servant. Their mother Mary, friend and advisor to top politicians and churchmen, nurtured these exceptional minds. Mary’s grandchildren swapped her traditional roots for radical socialism, but continued the brilliant family legacy. Naomi Mitchison was a doyenne of Scottish literature; one Nobel prizewinner called her brother, the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, ‘the cleverest man I ever knew’. Like the Darwins and Keyneses, this clan of thinkers lived in rapidly changing times, and helped to remake the world around them. Drawing on extensive family interviews and previously unseen private papers, Serious Mindsdetails scandal, tragedy and achievement within a dynasty that shaped modern Britain–from the welfare state, education system and military, to our understanding of energy, the human body, and the origins of life itself.
Nowhere in Europe are people more likely to enjoy a regular flutter in stocks and shares than in Britain. Whether we consider the millions of online stockbroking accounts or the billions spent on spread betting - it is a national pastime in today's Britain to play the markets. How did this distinctively British obsession with investment and speculation come about? Playing the Market tells this story by exploring the history of financial capitalism in Britain during the twentieth century from below. It explains how and why everyday British people increasingly invested, speculated, and gambled in stocks and shares from the outbreak of World War I, over the postwar decades and the Thatcher year...
An examination of the development, role, and influence of the British decorative art dealers who invented an Anglo-Gallic style for elite interiors. In this volume Diana Davis demonstrates how London dealers invented a new and visually splendid decorative style that combined the contrasting tastes of two nations. Departing from the conventional narrative that depicts dealers as purveyors of antiquarianism, Davis repositions them as innovators who were key to transforming old art objects from ancien régime France into cherished “antiques” and, equally, as creators of new and modified French-inspired furniture, bronze work, and porcelain. The resulting old, new, and reconfigured objects m...
Traces the development of the ideology of modern Scottish nationalism from the 1960s to the independence referendum in 2014.