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Social Patriotism and the British Working Class: Appearance and Disappearance of a Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Geoffrey Field
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Purchase

Extract

The study of patriotism and national identity, once left to the likes of Sir Arthur Bryant, has been rediscovered by the mainstream of British historians. One source of this change is the growing influence of anthropology and literary theory on the discipline, encouraging closer attention to ritual, myth, and language. Another is a renewed focus on the modern state and the mechanisms by which it “intervenes” in civil society.

Type
Tradition and the Working Class
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1992

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References

Notes

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4. By “social patriotism,” I mean an inwardly focused patriotism, one that is oriented toward domestic social reform and implies some kind of new and improved Britain.

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33. Broomfield, “South Wales during the Second World War.” For references to public opinion about labor stoppages, see PRO:INF 1/282 (November 1943); PRO:WO/15772 (November 1943–January 1944). On servicemen's views, see Eighth Army News, March 14, 1944. See also, Parkin, D.J., “Contested Sources of Identity: Nation, Class and Gender in Second World War Britain,” Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1988Google Scholar.

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41. Addison, P., “By-Elections of the Second World War,” in By-Elections in British Politics, ed. Cook, C. and Ramsden, J. (London, 1973);Google ScholarSibley, R., “The Swing to Labour during the Second World War: When and Why?,” Labour History Review 55 (1990)Google Scholar.

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43. The most comprehensive critique of Addison's view of the Coalition is Jefferys, K.. The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics, 1940–45 (Manchester, 1991);Google Scholaridem, British Politics and Social Policy during the Second World War,” Historical Journal 30 (March 1987).Google Scholar See also, Webster, C., “Conflict and Consensus: Explaining the British Health Service,” Twentieth Century British History 1 (1990);CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedLowe, , “Second World War, Consensus and the Foundation of the Welfare State.” Recent overviews of the consensus debate are Kavanagh, S. and Morris, P., eds., Consensus Politics from Attlee to Thatcher (Oxford, 1989);Google ScholarDutton, D., British Politics since 1945: The Rise and Fall of Consensus (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

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49. On the dock strike of 1949, see Weiler, P., British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford, 1988).Google Scholar Also see, Smith, J.D., “The Struggle for Control of the Airwaves: The Attlee Governments, the BBC and Industrial Unrest, 1945–51,” in Post-war Britain, 1945–1964: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Gorst, A., Johnman, L., and Lucas, W.S. (London, 1989)Google Scholar.

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51. In addition to Crofts, see Nakamura, N., “Women, Work and War: Industrial Mobilisation and Demobilisation: Coventry and Bolton, 1940–1946”, Ph. D. diss., University of Warwick, 1984;Google ScholarRiley, D., War in the Nursery (London, 1983). Though generally supportive of the government, Mary Greive, editor of Woman, warned that “The housewife… has carried the heaviest end of the war and post-war living. Unless widescale and efficient means are taken to relieve her of some of the burdens of homemaking, appeals to take on full time work—however genuine their urgency—will only infuriate and antagonise her… Appeals to women's patriotism are not enough” (29 March, 1947)Google Scholar.

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