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My Scotland, Our Britain: A Future Worth Sharingis a highly personal account of Gordon Brown's Scotland, the nation he was born in, and our Britain, the multinational state that the Scots, English, Welsh and Northern Irish have created and share. Laying bare his family's ancestry over 300 years of the Union and explaining how it shaped his background, Brown charts what it was like growing up in Scotland in the 1950s and 1960s, and explains the influence of religion, education and Scotland's unique industrial structure on the shaping of his and Scotland's identity. He sets out the dramatic economic, social and cultural changes of the past fifty years and the vastly different prospects his chi...
A case study of the relationship between arts and cultural policy and nationalism, Scotland, CEMA and the Arts Council, 1919-1967: Background, Politics and Visual Art Policy examines the overlooked significance of Scotland in the development of British arts policy and institutions. This study is broadly relevant in an era of political devolution, which continues to pose questions for the constituent nations of Britain and their sense of self- and collective identities. Euan McArthur provides a clear account of the background to and evolution of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) in Scotland up to the formation of the Sc...
For most people, surfing is associated with Hawaii, California, and Australia – with sun, sand, and scantily-clad bodies. However, after the Second World War, surfing also found a more unlikely home: the north coast of Scotland. In the 1960s and 1970s, the first people to surf the Pentland Firth’s world-class waves braved brutal weather conditions, poor (or no) wetsuits, and baffled locals. Equally as unlikely as surfing’s presence on the north coast was its first permanent community, founded amongst workers at a nuclear research facility with a notoriously poor safety record. This book discusses the existence and evolution of surfing in the region, from the 1960s to the present day. It does not, however, focus just on surfing: it also acts as a history of the region itself, and examines the possibilities and limits of surfing, sport, and activities like them being used as a means of reinventing communities. This book is therefore a valuable tool for historians, sport practitioners, and economic policymakers alike: what can surfing tell us about the modern Highlands and Islands, and indeed contemporary Scotland?
Glengarry, Upper Canada's first major Scottish settlement, was established in 1784 by Highlanders from Inverness-shire. Worsening economic conditions in Scotland, coupled with a growing awareness of Upper Canada’s opportunities, led to a growing tide of emigration that eventually engulfed all of Scotland and gave the province its many Scottish settlements. Pride in their culture gave Scots a strong sense of identity and self-worth. These factors contributed to their success and left Upper Canada with firmly rooted Scottish traditions. Individual settlements have been well observed, but the overall picture has never been pieced together. Why did Upper Canada have such appeal to Scots? What ...
Graeme Morton shows that identity, like industry, is a key element in explaining the period 1832-1914. Ourselves and Others is about 'us and them', the dialectic of national identity formation.
This collection of twelve essays represents an important contribution to the understanding of child welfare and social action in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They challenge many assumptions about the history of childhood and child welfare policy and cover a variety of themes including the physical and sexual abuse of children, forced child migration and role of the welfare state.
An account of poor relief in Guernsey from the Reformation to the twenty-first century, incorporating a detailed case-study of the St Peter Port workhouse and an outline of the development of Guernsey's modern social security system.
In the summer of 2008, the twelfth in a series of biennial conferences on the Literature of Region and Nation was held at Aberdeen University in the North-East of Scotland. Over fifty scholars, representing no fewer than twenty different countries, convened for the occasion; and twenty-two of the papers presented are included in this volume. As at previous conferences in the series, the papers range widely in approach, in subject-matter and in geographical coverage: readers of this book will find explorations of literature from all five continents. The papers are arranged thematically: the central concepts of region and nation are examined in the first section; and subsequent sets of papers go on to consider literary and pictorial representations of places and peoples, literature of diaspora and exile (a keynote topic of the conference), the use of language (particularly non-standard languages) in literary texts, and artistic interactions between cultures. All the papers have been peer-reviewed, and some extensively revised. The collection demonstrates the vitality of scholarship in the field of regional literary studies.
ch studies.
This volume explores the experience of everyday life in Scotland over two centuries characterised by political, religious and intellectual change and ferment. It shows how the extraordinary impinged on the ordinary and reveals people's anxieties, joys, comforts, passions, hopes and fears. It also aims to provide a measure of how the impact of change varied from place to place.The authors draw on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including the material survivals of daily life in town and country, and on the history of government, religion, ideas, painting, literature, and architecture. As B. S. Gregory has put it, everyday history is 'an endeavour that seeks to identify and integrate everything - all relevant material, social, political, and cultural data - that permits the fullest possible reconstruction of ordinary life experiences in all their varied complexity, as they are formed and transformed.'