Workers’/Affordable Housing and the Development of Construction Systems

Whether motivated by commercial or social forces, the provision of housing for the working/labouring classes has required a balance between providing housing of a satisfactory standard and the cost which, while generating a rent affordable to the people for whom the houses were intended, gave a reasonable return on the investment made by the developer. This paper gives an introduction to the history of this branch of the building industry and describes by way of surviving building examples the ways in which the industry sought to reduce costs of both labour and materials. Focusing on the first half of the 20th century, the article discusses surviving examples of affordable construction designs, from the Cheap Cottages Exhibition at Letchworth Garden City in 1905 and the experimental system build housing in the 1920s and 1930s which often used concrete to immediate post-Second World War mass house-building designs.     

Industrial Warriors: South Korea’s First Generation of Industrial Workers in Post-Developmental Korea

This study analyses the skills upgrading programmes of South Korea’s first generation of skilled workers, focusing on their political and social trajectories from bulwarks of the developmental regimes up until 1987, to a “labour aristocracy” of regular workers employed mainly in large companies in heavy industries in South Korea. The term “labour aristocracy” highlights how the “regular workers”, employed mostly in monopolistic large enterprises in heavy industries, have better wages, job security and other social benefits than “non-regular workers” and other regular workers employed in small and medium companies. It argues that these “Industrial Warriors” were the product of the Korean developmental state’s creation of an egalitarian social contract, and that the political and social trajectories since then must be seen in its totality. This is necessary because it manifests the profound change in Korea’s political economy from state-grassroots synergistic developmentalism to neoliberal industrial capitalism, wherein having a regular job has become a substantial asset in an era of non-regular employment. This study contributes to the literature on the political economy and to sociological discussion of the Korean developmental state that continues to this day and is far from over.     

The Origin,Development and Decline of Back-to-Back Houses in Leeds, 1787–1937

This paper traces the development of back-to-back house building in Leeds. It first outlines the origin of the house type, before examining the urban layout, building form and social aspects of back-to-back courts in the first half of the 19th century, and the role of speculative developers, building societies and sanitary reformers. The focus then turns to the bills, acts and by-laws of the later 19th and early 20th century, and the determination of the people of Leeds to retain their preferred house type. Together, these brought improvements to the design and facilities, culminating in a house type that was far superior to that which was condemned by the back-to-back critics, and arguably had overcome all of the criticisms by the time construction of back-to-backs was prohibited in 1909.     

Forging Manhood and Nationhood Together: American Sailors’ Accounts of their Exploits,Sufferings, and Resistance in the Antebellum United States

This essay will focus on sailor narratives, published between 1815 and 1860, to explore how the authors remembered their seafaring experiences during the first half of the nineteenth century. I am particularly interested in discussing how notions of national identity, patriotism, and manliness shaped these memoirists’ interpretation of their experiences during the War of 1812. I pay particular attention to how sailor authors dealt with the following topics: their impressment and incarceration as prisoners of war, their participation in naval battles, and their experiences with punishment, especially flogging, on the high seas. The essay views antebellum sailor narratives as part of a democratization of literature that popularized the stories of ordinary men and women in antebellum America (slaves, soldiers, artisans, and other working‐class people). It also explores how works of seafaring adventure by such popular writers as James Fenimore Cooper provided a market for memoirs by career sailors. The essay utilizes various kinds of sources to document the stories sailors told in their antebellum narratives. These include: pension, impressment, and prisoner‐of‐war records, ships’ muster books, and other institutional sources. It also builds on the historiography of antebellum seafaring life, especially works by Paul Gilje, Marcus Rediker, Margaret Creighton, and other scholars. The essay also utilizes works by both literary and historical scholars as well as cognitive psychologists to examine the legitimacy of using autobiographies as historical documents.     

Tibetan livelihoods and the ‘Great Development of the West’:Modernization,pastoral resources,and the ‘urban future’ of the grasslands

1.Introduction Rural livelihoods in Tibet2 have,during the last fifteen years,undergone fast and profound processes of economic transformation and state-led modernization,both in the TAR and the Eastern parts of the Tibetan plateau.Local life styles have changed at a pace rarely seen in an area where people subsisted,until the late 1990s,almost entirely on nomadic mobile livestock production.New local socio-economic structures with peculiar characteristics have emerged.They include the decline of traditional livestock-based (mobile) pastoralism;the emergence of a ‘post-pastoral’ economy based on the extraction of medicinal fungi for Chinese and international markets;and the emergence,often from below,of new arrangements governing rangeland access and usage.     

Folklore’s Timeless Past,Ireland’s Present Past,and the Perception of Rural Houses in Early Historic Ireland

This study examines how the archaeology of historic Ireland has been interpreted. Two approaches to the history and archaeology of Ireland are identified. The first, the timeless past, has its roots in a neo-Lamarckian view of the past. This perspective was particularly developed in the work of geographer and ethnographer, Estyn Evans. The second view, associated in particular with a nationalist approach to Ireland’s past, looked to the west of the country where it was believed the culture had been preserved largely unchanged and in its purest form. The continuing impact of these frameworks upon the interpretation of rural settlement in the period 1200–1700 is examined. It is argued that historians and archaeologists alike have underestimated the quality of buildings.     

Sports,Politics and Ethnicity in the North. Workers’ Sport in Western Finnmark in the Late 1930s

Abstract

Internationally, ethnicity in sports has become an independent field of research amongst sports historians focusing on phenomena such as colonialism, immigration and indigenous populations. Studies demonstrate that sports have simultaneously been able to assimilate different groups, promoting majority concepts of identity and majority values, and enable groups to fashion their own singular ethnic identities in contrast to those of majority societies. In Norwegian historical research, sport and ethnicity has been given only scarce attention. Norwegian sports historians have mainly seen Norway as an ethnically homogenous society where sport has played an essential part in creating a unifying national identity. A major concern for Norwegian sports history research has been the political split in Norwegian sports in the 1930s. Research on this event has mainly been occupied with the relationship between the Workers’ Sports Association (AIF) and the “bourgeois” National Sports Federation (NLI), and by AIF's significance as a political movement. Less attention, however, has been given to its cultural impact. This article investigates the establishment and function of AIF in the multi-ethnic area of West Finnmark, a geographically and politically peripheral region of Northern Norway, at the end of the 1930s. The town of Alta, the main focus of attention, was in the 1930s a small fiord community with an ethnically mixed population of indigenous Sámi, Kvens and Norwegians, sharp political divisions and a vibrant sporting milieu. Although the political division of Alta's sports establishment displays many of the traits that characterize similar events in the country at large, the ethnic factor brought another, important, dimension to it. This highly politicized period in Finnmark sports underlines the importance of sports as an arena for the construction and reinforcement of not only political identity, but also for the production of ethnic and local identities.