Christmas And The British A Modern History

Author : Martin Johnes
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2016-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781474255394

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Christmas and the British: A Modern History by Martin Johnes Pdf

The modern Christmas was made by the Victorians and rooted in their belief in commerce, family and religion. Their rituals and traditions persist to the present day but the festival has also been changed by growing affluence, shifting family structures, greater expectations of happiness and material comfort, technological developments and falling religious belief. Christmas became a battleground for arguments over consumerism, holiday entitlements, social obligations, communal behaviour and the influence of church, state and media. Even in private, it encouraged reflection on social change and the march of time. Amongst those unhappy at the state of the world or their own lives, Christmas could induce much cynicism and even loathing but for a quieter majority it was a happy time, a moment of a joy in a sometimes difficult world that made the festival more than just an integral feature of the calendar: Christmas was one of British culture's emotional high points. Moreover, it was also a testimony to the enduring importance of family, shared values and a common culture in the UK. Martin Johnes shows how Christmas and its traditions have been lived, adapted and thought about in Britain since 1914. Christmas and the British is about the festival's social, cultural and economic functions, and its often forgotten status as both the most unusual and important day of the year

Author : Mark Connelly
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 1999-12-03
Category : History
ISBN : UOM:39015047539989

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Christmas by Mark Connelly Pdf

Mark Connelly presents a study of the themes which have contributed to the modern Christmas as an icon of cultural and social history.

Author : Clive D. Field
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2019-10-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780192588579

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Periodizing Secularization by Clive D. Field Pdf

Moving beyond the (now somewhat tired) debates about secularization as paradigm, theory, or master narrative, Periodizing Secularization focuses upon the empirical evidence for secularization, viewed in its descriptive sense as the waning social influence of religion, in Britain. Particular emphasis is attached to the two key performance indicators of religious allegiance and churchgoing, each subsuming several sub-indicators, between 1880 and 1945, including the first substantive account of secularization during the fin de siècle. A wide range of primary sources is deployed, many of them relatively or entirely unknown, and with due regard to their methodological and interpretative challenges. On the back of them, a cross-cutting statistical measure of 'active church adherence' is devised, which clearly shows how secularization has been a reality and a gradual, not revolutionary, process. The most likely causes of secularization were an incremental demise of a Sabbatarian culture (coupled with the associated emergence of new leisure opportunities and transport links) and of religious socialization (in the church, at home, and in the school). The analysis is also extended backwards, to include a summary of developments during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and laterally, to incorporate a preliminary evaluation of a six-dimensional model of 'diffusive religion', demonstrating that these alternative performance indicators have hitherto failed to prove that secularization has not occurred. The book is designed as a prequel to the author's previous volumes on the chronology of British secularization - Britain's Last Religious Revival? (2015) and Secularization in the Long 1960s (2017). Together, they offer a holistic picture of religious transformation in Britain during the key secularizing century of 1880-1980.

Author : Nadja Durbach
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2020-03-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108483834

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Many Mouths by Nadja Durbach Pdf

A compelling study of two centuries of British government food programs and the cultural, political and economic factors that shaped them.

Author : Mark Connelly
Publisher : I.B. Tauris
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2012-11-30
Category : History
ISBN : 1780763611

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Christmas by Mark Connelly Pdf

This book provides an original perspective on the West's most enduring social and cultural institution. The author covers all the vital themes contributing to the modern Christmas: its Anglo-German origins and the idea of the bourgeois Christmas expressing family virtues; the need for a touchstone with the past in an age of rapid expansion and thus the myth of Merrie England; and the revival of English music: in short, all the elements making up the modern Christmas.

Author : World Book Encyclopedia, inc
Publisher : World Book .com
Page : 86 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Christmas
ISBN : 071660874X

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Christmas in Britain by World Book Encyclopedia, inc Pdf

Each 80-page Christmas Around the World Book includes full narratives explaining the customs of the region covered, photography and illustrations, spe cial sections of native songs, recipes, and fun-to-do crafts.

Author : Anna Selby
Publisher : Remember When
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2008-11-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781783408535

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The Victorian Christmas by Anna Selby Pdf

The author of Food Through the Ages presents a festive overview of Dickens-era Christmas traditions—from decorations and songs to games and recipes. Anna Selby discusses how the Victorians invented many of the Christmas traditions we enjoy today from Christmas trees and cards to carols and Father Christmas himself. Dickens and Prince Albert shaped how many people view the British Christmas, an idea explored in the opening chapter. There is an emphasis on Victorian food, including authentic wassailing recipes and an easy introduction to planning traditional Christmas foods and traditional decorations. It offers readers a chance to enjoy a traditional Christmas, one centered around the home, family, and simple decorations made from nature, a far cry from the materialistic Christmases we have today. This lovely book reminds us all just how enjoyable Christmas really is and shows us how to recreate our favorite traditions and recapture the magic of Christmas.

Author : Stephen Hamrick
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2020-02-18
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9783030339586

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Shakespeare and Sexuality in the Comedy of Morecambe & Wise by Stephen Hamrick Pdf

Contextualizing the duo’s work within British comedy, Shakespeare criticism, the history of sexuality, and their own historical moment, this book offers the first sustained analysis of the 20th Century’s most successful double-act. Over the course of a forty-four-year career (1940-1984), Eric Morecambe & Ernie Wise appropriated snippets of verse, scenes, and other elements from seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays more than one-hundred-and-fifty times. Fashioning a kinder, more inclusive world, they deployed a vast array of elements connected to Shakespeare, his life, and institutions. Rejecting claims that they offer only nostalgic escapism, Hamrick analyses their work within contemporary contexts, including their engagement with many forms and genres, including Variety, the heritage industry, journalism, and more. ‘The Boys’ deploy Shakespeare to work through issues of class, sexuality, and violence. Lesbianism, drag, gay marriage, and a queer aesthetics emerge, helping to normalize homosexuality and complicate masculinity in the ‘permissive’ 1960s.

Author : Judith Flanders
Publisher : Thomas Dunne Books
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2017-10-24
Category : History
ISBN : 9781250118356

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Christmas by Judith Flanders Pdf

A critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author explores the Christmas holiday, from the original festival through present day traditions. Christmas has always been a magical time. Or has it? Thirty years after the first recorded Christmas, the Pope was already warning that too many people were spending the day, not in worship, but in partying and eating to excess. By 1616, the playwright Ben Jonson was nostalgically remembering Christmas in the old days, certain that it had been better then. Other elements of Christmas are much newer – who would have thought gift-wrap is a novelty of the twentieth century? That the first holiday parade was neither at Macy’s, nor even in the USA? Some things, however, never change. The first known gag holiday gift book, The Boghouse Miscellany, was advertised in the 1760s ‘for gay Gallants, and good companions’, while in 1805, the leaders of the Lewis and Clark expedition exchanged – what else? – presents of underwear and socks. Christmas is all things to all people: a religious festival, a family celebration, a period of eating and drinking. In Christmas: A Biography, bestselling author and acclaimed social historian Judith Flanders casts a sharp eye on myths, legends and history, deftly moving from the origins of the holiday in the Roman empire, through Christmas trees in central Europe, to what might be the first appearance of Santa Claus – in Switzerland – to draw a picture of the season as it has never been seen before.

Author : Maria Hubert
Publisher : The History Press
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2011-09-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780752471068

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Great British Christmas by Maria Hubert Pdf

A delightful history of how Christmas has been celebrated in Britain over the past 2,000 years. From the legend of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone one Christmas day, to when the Puritan Parliament tried to 'ban' Christmas, through to Charles Dickens's vivid recollections of his boyhood celebrations, and his delight in the present of a jumping frog. Amongst the wealth of stories and personal reminiscences this book also teaches us how the traditions we now hold so dear came into being, including Mrs Beeton's recipe for the original Christmas cake (made with a horn of mead), the birth of Christmas carolling, the first ever Christmas tree to be brought to England from Germany by Prince Albert and the origins of the Christmas cracker. This is simply the perfect book with which to celebrate Christmas and all the traditions that surround it.

Author : Penne L. Restad
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 1996-12-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780195355093

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Christmas in America by Penne L. Restad Pdf

The manger or Macy's? Americans might well wonder which is the real shrine of Christmas, as they take part each year in a mix of churchgoing, shopping, and family togetherness. But the history of Christmas cannot be summed up so easily as the commercialization of a sacred day. As Penne Restad reveals in this marvelous new book, it has always been an ambiguous meld of sacred thoughts and worldly actions-- as well as a fascinating reflection of our changing society. In Christmas in America, Restad brilliantly captures the rise and transformation of our most universal national holiday. In colonial times, it was celebrated either as an utterly solemn or a wildly social event--if it was celebrated at all. Virginians hunted, danced, and feasted. City dwellers flooded the streets in raucous demonstrations. Puritan New Englanders denounced the whole affair. Restad shows that as times changed, Christmas changed--and grew in popularity. In the early 1800s, New York served as an epicenter of the newly emerging holiday, drawing on its roots as a Dutch colony (St. Nicholas was particularly popular in the Netherlands, even after the Reformation), and aided by such men as Washington Irving. In 1822, another New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore penned a poem now known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," virtually inventing the modern Santa Claus. Well-to-do townspeople displayed a German novelty, the decorated fir tree, in their parlors; an enterprising printer discovered the money to be made from Christmas cards; and a hodgepodge of year-end celebrations began to coalesce around December 25 and the figure of Santa. The homecoming significance of the holiday increased with the Civil War, and by the end of the nineteenth century a full- fledged national holiday had materialized, forged out of borrowed and invented custom alike, and driven by a passion for gift-giving. In the twentieth century, Christmas seeped into every niche of our conscious and unconscious lives to become a festival of epic proportions. Indeed, Restad carries the story through to our own time, unwrapping the messages hidden inside countless movies, books, and television shows, revealing the inescapable presence--and ambiguous meaning--of Christmas in contemporary culture. Filled with colorful detail and shining insight, Christmas in America reveals not only much about the emergence of the holiday, but also what our celebrations tell us about ourselves. From drunken revelry along colonial curbstones to family rituals around the tree, from Thomas Nast drawing the semiofficial portrait of St. Nick to the making of the film Home Alone, Restad's sparkling account offers much to amuse and ponder.

Author : John M. Golby,A. William Purdue
Publisher : Sutton Pub Limited
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2000
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0750921366

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The Making of the Modern Christmas by John M. Golby,A. William Purdue Pdf

The author reveals how the Victorians enlarged celebrations into something like the Christmas season of today, with singing, dancing, plum pudding, decorated trees, street caroling, Christmas cards and Santa Claus. The book also covers the history of Christmas through the 20th century, discussing the two world wars, the influence of television and film, the Queen's speech and the increasing commercialization of the season. The many illustrations include famous examples such as Roosevelt and Churchill leaving the White House for Christmas service in 1941 and the Christmas tree at Windsor.

Author : George N. Clark
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:990258115

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The New Cambridge Modern History by George N. Clark Pdf

Author : M. Johnson
Publisher : Springer
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2013-01-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781137274137

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Militarism and the British Left, 1902-1914 by M. Johnson Pdf

Militarism has traditionally been regarded as a phenomenon of the political right. As this book demonstrates, however, various groups on the political left in Britain during the years before the Great War were able to accommodate, and even assimilate, militaristic ideas, sentiments, and policies to a remarkable degree.

Author : John Hudson
Publisher : The History Press
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2014-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780750960380

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Christmas 1914 by John Hudson Pdf

By December 1914, it had become clear to even the most optimistic observer that the war would not be over by Christmas. That month brought the first enemy inflicted deaths on the home front, when German warships bombarded three north-east coastal towns; meanwhile, the recently invented aeroplane was being put to fearsome use in raids over the south east. In Europe, Mons, the Marne and Ypres had given a taste of the devastating power of modern warfare – a reality to which troops in the trenches on both sides tried to turn a blind eye in the famous Christmas truce. This book uses contemporary newspapers and magazines, diaries and other records to present a comprehensive image of this extraordinary Christmas, both at home and abroad.