You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
At Home in the Institution examines space and material culture in asylums, lodging houses and schools in Victorian and Edwardian England, and explores the powerful influence of domesticity on all three institutional types.
During the 19th century the home, as both a cultural construct and a set of lived practices, became more powerful in the Western world than ever before. The West saw an unprecedented period of imperial expansion, industrialisation and commercialization that transformed both where and how people made their homes. Scientific advances and increasing mass production also changed homes materially, bringing in domestic technologies and new goods.This volume explores how homes and homemaking were imagined and practiced across the globe in the 19th century. For instance, not only did the acquisition of empires lead to the establishment of Western European homes in new terrains, but it also buttresse...
Material Relations tells the story of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class families by exploring the domestic spaces they inhabited and the material goods they prized. By opening the doors of the house, the book sheds new light on aspects of family life including love, marriage, sex, childhood, and death. Historians have argued that as the nineteenth century waned, domestic spaces became increasingly private. Material Relations challenges this, contending that domestic space created a complex series of family intimacies. Drawing upon novels, advice manuals, and magazines, alongside sources for everyday use such as diaries, autobiographies, sale catalogs and inventories, wills and photographs, this fascinating book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of modern history, English literature, cultural studies, social geography, history of art, and history of design.
A history of pets and their companions in Britain from the Victorians to today. Pet Revolution tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries. As pets have entered our homes and joined our families, they have radically changed our world. Historians Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange show how the pet economy exploded—increasing the availability of pet foods, medicines, and shops—and reshaped our modern lives in the process. A history of pets and their human companions, this book reimagines the “pet revolution” as one among many other revolutions—industrial, agricultural, and political—that made possible contemporary life.
A pioneering study of children's social care in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, A Home From Home? presents new information and develops conceptual thinking about the history of children's care by investigating the centrality of key ideas about home, family, and nurture that shaped welfare provision. Departing from narratives of reform and discipline which have dominated scholarship, and drawing on material culture and social history approaches, as well as the extensive archives of the Waifs and Strays Society, Claudia Soares provides a new type of study of social care by offering a 'bottom-up' study of children's welfare, and studying the significance of specific types of ...
Tracing the history of four English case studies, this book explores how, from outward appearance to interior furnishings, the material worlds of reform institutions for ‘fallen’ women reflected their moral purpose and shaped the lived experience of their inmates. Variously known as asylums, refuges, magdalens, penitentiaries, Houses or Homes of Mercy, the goal of such institutions was the moral ‘rehabilitation’ of unmarried but sexually experienced ‘fallen’ women. Largely from the working-classes, such women – some of whom had been sex workers – were represented in contradictory terms. Morally tainted and a potential threat to respectable family life, they were also worthy o...
This book examines the life-cycle of Victorian working-class marriage through a study of the hitherto hidden marital bed. Using coroners’ inquests to gain intimate access to the working-class home and its inhabitants, this book explores their marital, quasi-marital, and post-marital beds to reveal the material, domestic, and emotional experience of working-class marriage during everyday life and at times of crisis. Drawing on the recent approach of utilising domestic objects to explore interpersonal relationships, the marital bed not only provides a rereading of the experiences of the working-class wife but also brings the much maligned or simply overlooked working-class husband into the picture. Moreover, it also extends our understanding of the various marriage-like arrangements existing throughout this class. Moving through the marital life-cycle, this book provides a greater understanding of marriages from the outset, during childbirth, at times of strife and marital breakdown, and upon the death of a spouse.
This introduction to contemporary historical theory and practice shows how issues of identity have shaped how we write history. Stefan Berger charts how a new self-reflexivity about what is involved in the process of writing history entered the historical profession and the part that historians have played in debates about the past and its meaningfulness for the present. He introduces key trends in the theory of history such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, constructivism, narrativism and the linguistic turn and reveals, in turn, the ways in which they have transformed how historians have written history over the last four decades. The book ranges widely from more traditional forms of history writing, such as political, social, economic, labour and cultural history, to the emergence of more recent fields, including gender history, historical anthropology, the history of memory, visual history, the history of material culture, and comparative, transnational and global history.
The crisis of contemporary public space is a question of interest to all architects. The economic, social and cultural crisis, in particular affecting the entire European continent, is clearly and originally reflected in the public spaces of our cities, more and more of which are now considered “heritage”. Public space and the public realm, due to their original facets, are once again a theme of interest for architects, but also for philosophers, sociologist and anthropologists (J. Habermas, D. Innerarity, Z. Bauman, M. Augé), as complex “spaces” to be decomposed. Hence, a few questions: Does the analysis of public space and an approach to design, in a reality that considers a different concept of “public” than that of the pat century comport a new way of looking? A new urban-architectural nomenclature? An interdisciplinary approach to design? The general situation described in this publication, in various authors from different disciplinary backgrounds, clearly expresses the tangible need to provide (or provide once again) positive responses to different questions before proceeding with the design – or analysis – of contemporary public space.
Across the twentieth century, the families of people who died in war and disaster were left to make sense of their sudden loss and navigate newfound grief. This book focuses the families of people who died in the First World War and in mining disasters in the early twentieth-century. These bereaved families were often denied access to bodies and choice over burial rights, all while dealing with the increased bureaucracy of death.Families created domestic memorials, which took on additional meaning because of this lack of memorial agency elsewhere. Although the ways that these families were bereaved each took place in different circumstances, the ways that families grieved were recognizable t...