David Underdown’s Revel,Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660

Abstract

This article examines the strategies and tactics of surveillance that were used by Manchester City Police in relation to anxieties about gender, sexuality, juvenile delinquency and drugs misuse in post-war England. In the early 1960s the members-only ‘coffee beat club’ became a target of police activity, resulting in a series of raids, minor prosecutions and the intensification of the licensing laws. Commenting on the relationship between police culture and youth culture, including the leisure practices of adolescent girls, this article argues that the targeting of the ‘coffee beat club’ became a motif for the defence of an older imagined social order.     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.     

Pigeon Racing And Working-Class Culture in Britain,C. 1870–1950

ABSTRACT

Pigeon racing was immensely popular amongst male industrial workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article offers an overview of the history of pigeon racing in this period before moving on to explore the sport's multiple meanings for those who took part. Pigeon racing offered not only the thrills and excitement of racing but also the more sedate and intellectual rewards of breeding and rearing the birds. The pigeon loft was a masculine enclave and a retreat from the pressures of domestic life for some, although for others it was an opportunity to share time with their family. As such, pigeon racing demonstrates the complexities of working-class masculinity. Pigeon keeping was also expensive, time consuming and required space. The article thus concludes by arguing that despite the agency workers were able to exercise over their leisure, they were still restricted by wider material constraints.     

Of Fighters and Frames: Femen’s Corporeality Between the Old,the New,the Yellow and the Blue

In this essay, we examine corporeality, its discursive framings and the salience of cultural contexts in the interpretation of embodied protest rhetoric on an example of originally Ukrainian and by now international feminist group Femen. We analyse the embodied rhetoric of Femen’s activism from various angles, with a special focus on the pivotal role of cultural locations in the interpretation of Femen’s embodied activism, in particular, and corporeal resistance, in general. With our findings, we hope to extend the existent knowledge on corporeal framing and politicalization of the body as a culture-specific site of resistance and social change.     

The Cultural Construction of the Girl “Teen”: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Feminine Adolescence Portrayed in Popular Culture

The social category of “teen” has become ubiquitous in Western English-speaking popular culture. Also, with the global success of cultural products from the United States of America, such as music, movies and television programs featuring teens, the word “teen” is being employed in other cultures and languages. However, a comparison of the girl teen—often portrayed as a vulnerable stage of human development—with other cultural representations of developing womanhood (the Japanese shoujo and the French jeune fille en fleur) shows the representation of the “teen” to be a construction of its cultural context and questions its universal applicability.     

The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and Young Women’s Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society

Many medical texts of the European Middle Ages included advice to young women on breast reduction. These recipes and techniques have not often been discussed by medieval historians, whose interest in meanings of women’s breasts has concentrated mostly on religious or nutritive associations. Highlighting late medieval English texts and culture, this article summarises medical advice on repressing breast growth, notes some ancient and earlier medieval precedents and argues the recipes responded not only to aesthetic preferences but also to beliefs that bust size and texture signified sexual experience. Arguing that breasts were legible flesh, in which an observer could read a young woman’s honour, it contends that breast suppression not only met idealised beauty standards but also protected sexual reputations.     

Progressivism and the History of the Public House, 1850–1950

ABSTRACT

In a recent article, Alistair Mutch suggests that twin concepts – ‘control’ and ‘interpretation’ – explain the evolution of the public house over a century of dramatic changes between 1850 and 1950. This article argues that these concepts are confusing, ambiguous and misleading. It was not regulatory pressures, the temperance movement, local politicians, pressure groups or magistrates that most shaped the history of drinking premises, but developments outside the brewing industry, most notably Progressivism. Emerging in the late nineteenth century, Progressives set out to reform drinkers and drink premises, first in the trust house movement, and then in the Liquor Traffic Central Control Board during the First World War. Appropriating their ideas and philosophy immediately following the war, England's foremost brewers launched the public house improvement movement, the most far-reaching attempt to transform the nature of public drinking in the twentieth century.     

The Globalization of Multicultural Education in Social Science Textbooks: Cross-national Analyses, 1950–2010

In this study the authors analyze 548 secondary social science textbooks to examine the extent to which multiculturalism-related content appears over time and around the world. Findings suggest significant global increases in textbook depictions of minority rights and groups experiencing discrimination over time and in many regions.