Laura Carter's Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918–1979 is about the transformation in how history was taught and learned in Britain, and with it how ordinary people encountered and understood historical knowledge, during the course of what Carter calls the “educational century” (2–4). For compelling reasons that Carter carefully unplaits and then rebraids, ordinary children and their ordinary parents were offered resources like books, radio broadcasts, museum exhibits, and school curricula that focused on the way people like them had lived in earlier centuries. Using a fresh approach to both materials and methodologies, she teases out scarce evidence to demonstrate that exposure to these resources profoundly affected people's experience and consciousness.
Carter then explains how such media encouraged both school children and adults to construct their identities as citizens of a democracy. This social and historiographical transformation was going on simultaneously with exciting changes in the academic world associated with Marxist and feminist social history, but the two movements existed on parallel tracks, scarcely touching each other. Historians, until now, have either disregarded or misinterpreted the events and institutions that Carter documents, and the museum curators, publishers, broadcasters, and educators did not engage much with the theorizing about power dynamics coming from the universities. The crucial point is, in Carter's words, that “popular history does not ‘trickle down’ into any culture or society from academics. It plays by its own rules” (237). Future historiographical accounts of the period are going to have to make room for her more capacious approach—a “popular” social history whose popularity is defined in terms of widespread understanding and deep roots in the culture, rather than a dismissive attitude to books that sell better than those written by university-based researchers.
The academic social history of the mid-twentieth century has already been challenged by postcolonial approaches that situate apparently insular struggles over class and gender in the larger global context of race and empire. Carter's book is part of that challenge. When the time came for the unraveling of the history of everyday life in the 1970s, the reason was the undoing—by immigration from former colonies—of the cohesive culture of mid-century Britain. But from 1918 to the end of the 1960s, a popular social history based on compelling accounts of everyday practices worked as a key building block of that cohesive culture. As Carter demonstrates, it worked in education, where children of modest ability stayed in school longer and needed appropriate curricula. It worked in the publishing industry, where diaries and memoirs by writers from Samuel Pepys to Flora Thompson, as well as illustrated books about the past, found an eager readership. It worked in radio, where Rhoda Power's broadcasts embodied the BBC's mandate to produce programming for citizens at leisure. It worked in museums, particularly the new folk museums. It worked as cultural policy, especially at the London County Council, where it provided suitable content for extramural education. And in all these venues it was women—teachers, journalists, museum staff, civil servants—who were essential to making and using a way of thinking about the past to develop citizens for the present and the future.
The argument for an “educational century” is a complex one based on the democratization of knowledge in general, and of historical knowledge in particular. This began with schooling. When the school leaving age was raised, new curricular materials and pedagogical approaches had to be found for a cohort of working-class students to whom history had seldom before been offered. The history of everyday life infused those materials and approaches. It was local, it was personal, and it could apply to women as well as to men. And it could sidestep troubling questions of imperial conquest or regional disparities within the United Kingdom.
Carter uses a wide range of source materials and methodologies. The opening chapter on the publishing of popular social history books draws on book history to account for the publication and reception of significant works like Charles Quennell and Marjorie Quennell's History of Everyday Things in England (1918). Subsequent chapters make impressive use of the archives of institutions like the BBC and municipal governments as well as the records of private museums and record offices. The History in Education Project archive and the records of the Historical Association provide access to the experience of teachers, and an appendix details ten interviews with history teachers who taught in comprehensive schools during the 1970s.
Carter engages, gently but insistently, in historiographical argument so that the readers might find themselves noticing that one shibboleth and then another has quietly been upturned or set aside in favor of a fresh interpretation for scholarly consideration. I have already noted one of these—undermining the impact of academic social history on popular historical understanding. Another is the approach to educational history based on analyzing the discourse of textbooks. Similarly, Carter acknowledges new studies on broadcasting that complicate a purely elitist analysis of the BBC project but points up the need to connect that scholarship with the popular understanding of Britain in the past. In the chapter on folk museums she provides a revisionist reading of the contested history of folk that sidesteps the elitist, national, and imperial implications of the concept in favor of stressing the democratic message of such institutions.
What is radical about Carter's study is that her approach to history begins in the historical self-awareness (both individual and collective) of readers and citizens, rather than with any particular theory, events, or narrative. She looks at the institutions of mass education and popular culture and shows how the agents of those institutions conceptualized and mediated the histories of everyday life. The difference is profound, and so is the book that explicates it.
