‘Queen’s Day – TV’s Day’: the British monarchy and the media industries

In contemporary British history, Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 is typically imagined and narrated as the moment where television was anchored as a national cultural form. In addition, it is well documented by commentators and scholars that during preparation for the coronation, politicians and the palace had reservations that live television might fracture the carefully constructed mystique of monarchy. This article revisits the coronation to consider why and how television was perceived as a watershed moment for both monarchy and television, and what difference this has made to royal representations since. Using the work of Michael Warner, it argues that the mediated intimacies facilitated by television as a new cultural form encouraged viewers to enact participatory and active processes of spectatorship as royal ‘publics’, who are brought into being through being addressed. That is, it was the act of emphasising the centrality of television’s role in the coronation, and in reinforcing the apparent distance between monarchy and (popular) media, that these ‘meanings’ of the coronation were constructed in the public and historical imaginary.     

‘Postponing the Evil Day’: Sir Edward Grey and British Foreign Policy

ABSTRACT

Sir Edward Grey is remembered largely as Britain's Foreign Secretary when ‘the lights went out all over Europe’ in the summer of 1914. His record remains contested. From David Lloyd George's crafty deception in his wartime memoirs to more recent revisionist historians, writers have sought to blame Grey for the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on substantial research in private and official, British, and foreign archives, this paper will reconstruct Grey's career as Foreign Secretary with an emphasis on his objectives and the means which he employed to obtain them. Crucially, it places Grey's stewardship of British foreign policy within the broader international context, defined by the steep decline and subsequent renaissance of Russian power in the years between 1905 and 1912/13, with the aim of establishing the limitations of British power. More especially the shift in the international balance around 1913/14 shaped towards Russia, and away from Germany, shaped Grey's calculations during Europe's last summer. The July Crisis showed both the strengths and the limitations of Grey's diplomacy, this persistent and subtle pressing for mediation, but also his misreading of Austro-Hungarian policy.     

‘Playtime in the Borderlands’: Children's Representations of School,Gender and Bullying through Photographs and Interviews

Photography has been commonly used as a research tool in studies of childhood/children. However images of school children in official documentation are rarely taken or chosen by children and may not reflect their real experiences. This research considered the photographs taken by year six primary school children of their school and the images they chose to represent themselves. Subsequent interviews with children revealed attitudes to school, the importance of playground relationships in the construction of gender, leading to the concept of ‘borderlands’ inhabited by some boys who adopt non-hegemonic masculinities.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.     

Extending the ‘White Way’: municipal streetlighting and race, 1900–1930

While the illumination of streets by electric streetlights in Western cities is a given today, in the early part of the twentieth century it was a technology whose conspicuous consumption was a status symbol for both individuals and towns. Not long after its introduction, however, electric lighting in cities also became noticeable in its absence. This paper draws on municipal records to consider how ideologies of white supremacy and progress came together to produce the uneven deployment of streetlighting in the small town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, thus contributing to the city's segregation in the early part of the twentieth century. By tracing the development of hierarchical streetlighting systems, such as General Electric's White Way, I also show how the racialized deployment of streetlighting was aided by large electrical equipment manufacturers. In conclusion, I argue that these insights are crucial to understanding how technologies racialize space, but also how technologies such as streetlighting are central to the production of the spaces in which race is produced and racism takes place.     

‘Affirmative Signalling’: Dickens’s Railway Journalism and Victorian Risk Society

This essay explores Charles Dickens’s railway journalism of the 1850s and 1860s and its differences from his more well-known fictional accounts of the British railway network. While fictional works such as Dombey and Son and ‘The Signalman’ emphasize the catastrophic aspects of railway accidents, Dickens’s journalism in Household Words and All the Year Round examines the modern systematicity of the railway network, which by its nature as system, necessitated accidents on the lines. The essay incorporates theoretical readings of risk by Ulrich Beck and Paul Virilio into its critical assessment of Dickens’s railway journalism. Fundamentally, it aims to demonstrate that Dickens’s railway journalism illuminates the complexity of Victorian narratives of technological and bureaucratic industrial and transport systems by prioritizing the global dimensions of systematic accidents over the period’s tendencies to focus merely on local accidental events.     

Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys, 1880–1930

The reproduction of racism and class-based oppression are taught to children through various cultural media, including toys and games. Between 1880 and 1930, the popularity of racialized toys and banks were fear-based responses to the perceived encroachment by “foreign and exotic” migrations of African American, Chinese, Irish and Native Americans into the cultural landscape of white middle-class America. This article analyzes how artifacts associated with children, such as mechanical banks, clockwork figures, and other toys are part of a larger cultural structure that viewed race and class as inseparable, and that these objects were essential in the development of a learned habitus that exposed white middle class children in the Victorian era to a racially and class oriented world. We argue that these objects reflect both the times in which they were made, and illuminate the relationship between adults and a newfound emphasis on children and childhood, in which toys serves as symbolic mediators of culture.     

‘Unclaimed territory’: childhood and disordered space(s)

This paper explores adult discourses in literary references which revolve around the relationship between childhood and disordered space. This association is often constructed as a positive expression of the romantic innocence of childhood and nature, but it can also be construed as negative in cases where ‘little devils’ are let loose in hazardous urban settings. The complex dynamics of disorder relating to childhood are discussed in terms of the disorders both of nature and of injustice. The paper argues that childhood needs to be conceptualized less in terms of innocence and more in terms of otherness. Disordered spaces in these terms represent territories of becoming-other, where rhizomatic scrambling of adult-ordered striated space makes room for upwellings of the immanent othernesses of children.     

Organizing the ‘people’s community’: the NSDAP and the ‘ethnic Germans’ in Nazi-occupied territories

ABSTRACT

This article refers to recent scholarly debates on the term ‘people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschaft), which throughout the Third Reich remained rather vague and encompassed often contradictory purposes. It deals with the relations between the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and some of the ‘ethnic German’ (volksdeutsche) organizations to exemplify how German society should be transformed into a ‘people’s community’ after 1933. Thus, it is necessary to analyse the ‘people’s community’ not by asking whether or not its different purposes were realized, but by examining its functions in the Nazi regime. This functional analysis of the ‘people’s community’ focuses on the NSDAP and its relations with ‘ethnic German’ organizations after 1933, primarily in Nazi-occupied territories during the Second World War. First, the article describes the NSDAP’s efforts to align the ‘Germans abroad’ (Auslandsdeutsche) after the seizure of power and to organize the German Front (Deutsche Front) in the Saar territories in 1934/35—an experience serving as a blueprint for the relations between the NSDAP and ‘ethnic German’ organizations during the Second World War. Second, it evaluates the creation of the Ethnic German Community (Volksdeutsche Gemeinschaft) in the General Government and its efforts to organize ‘ethnic Germans’. Third, it interprets the foundation of the German People’s Community (Deutsche Volksgemeinschaft) in Lorraine and its ongoing attempts to establish a racial hierarchy of ‘ethnic Germans’ over the autochthonous French population. Fourth, it looks at the connection between the Germanization of Lower Styria and the launch of the Styrian Homeland Union (Steirischer Heimatbund) as an ‘ethnic German’ movement. The article argues that the NSDAP’s operational routines regarding both the German population and the ‘ethnic Germans’ living in the occupied territories shaped the ‘people’s community’.     

Defining and living out the interior: the ‘modern’ apartment and the ‘urban’ housewife in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s

This study investigates the interaction of women's gendered identities and performances in the modern middle strata with the new apartment, while complicating the boundary between the legitimizing discourses of modern architecture and ideas around femininity, during the 1950s and 1960s in Turkey. It conceptualizes domestic premises as the inhabitant's space, where gender roles are formed and performed. Drawing on research concerning the postwar construction of women's identities and diverse ideas of feminine space in a global context, I examine how the apartment was a place for women, who were conceptualized as Western and happy housewives amid Cold War geopolitics. The study ponders ways in which women negotiated/subverted conflicting expectations of the modern housewife. The apartment mediated powerful discourses on structures of patriarchy and identities, while simultaneously allowing women to define and live out the modern domicile as active agents. It embodied the intermediate space between the concepts of modern and traditional, Western and non-Western, urban and rural, and masculine and feminine.     

His Brother’s Keeper: Charles Livingstone and the ‘Failure’ of David Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition

David Livingstone’s Second Expedition to Africa (1858 to 1863) began with lavish promises and expectations and ended ignominiously, with official Britons castigating the once greatly esteemed explorer of Africa. To what extent did Charles Livingstone, an ordained Congregational minister and David’s American-trained younger brother, help to diminish the Expedition’s successes? Were David Livingstone’s promising exploring and scientific efforts compromised by his seemingly troubled, racist, brother? American-trained and an ordained minister, with a supposed ‘ascendancy’ over his elder brother, how did Charles’ prejudices and actions undermine his brother’s leadership and the accomplishments of the Zambezi project?     

Out of ‘Common Humanity’: Humanitarianism,Compassion and Efforts in Australia to Assist Jewish Refugees in the 1930s

In June 1935, Edith Roll, a thirteen-year-old from Vienna, wrote to her Australian pen-pal, Jean Doig, aged ten. This correspondence was tragically short-lived. Edith Roll’s family was swept up in the murder and destruction of Jews in Europe. The efforts of Jean’s parents – the respected country doctor, Keith Doig, and his wife, Louie – who attempted but failed to assist Edith and her family, her father, Jakob Roll, her mother Emilie and brother Fritz, are examined in this article. To disregard their efforts as tangential to the history of refugees because they were unsuccessful means we miss an opportunity to explore the historically situated notions of compassion and empathy that can be at the centre of these endeavours. Drawing on personal letters rather than the views of government officials, this article examines the Doig family efforts and what inspired them, arguing that these are a vital part of the complex story of refugee and migration history.     

‘Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide

The end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century was accompanied by a large-scale rearrangement of sensitive colonial records worldwide. A great number of these records were destroyed and a sizeable portion sent to Britain to be kept secret. This article advances studies of this policy, eventually code-named ‘Operation Legacy’, by reading the ‘migrated archives’ that have been newly discovered and declassified in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. It asks where the policy was decided, for what reason and how it was carried out. Sources suggest that the policy was not planned in the Colonial Office in London and delivered to the colonies in a hierarchical fashion, but, rather, significant elements of the policy were developed in the colonial governments overseas in response to each local context. The general idea was to save Britain’s honour and to protect its collaborators. However, the limitations in terms of time and manpower often prevented the officers from putting sufficient thought into the actual screening of the documents. At the same time, some officers demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions. The episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonisation is to be understood not only by reference to the highest levels of strategic planning but also in terms of how it worked at the lower levels, in the colonial administrations on the ground.     

‘Let’s find out’: the historian laureate and participatory heritage discovery

ABSTRACT

Developing modes of engagement in the construction of public heritage knowledge emphasize participatory media and active collaboration with citizens. The City of Edmonton created the first historian laureate position in Canada in 2010, and related programs are still rare. This article considers the interaction of narrative content with social and technological contexts of production, viewing the role of the historian laureate as amateur historian and professional storyteller. The historian laureate operates primarily in accessible contexts of leisure, mediated in part through digital technologies, and can respond relatively directly to community interests as a heritage coordinator rather than expert. Rather than representing oppositional or disruptive power to official heritage discourses, the project enables the production of ‘small heritages’ through a series of story episodes. These stories focus on events, people, places and artifacts that typically fall outside the meta-narratives and monuments of a city’s heritage landscape. The historian laureate, embodying or articulating local experience in ways amenable to leisure activity, demonstrates capacities to produce largely indeterminate, diverse and porous ideas of place and histories as part of a bottom-up social generation of knowledge.