Matthew Hilton

Professor of Social History Matthew Hilton

The Search for a Historical Movement

Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain

John H. Arnold

Jan Rüger

What does it mean - and what might it yet come to mean - to write 'history' in the twenty-first century? History After Hobsbawm brings together leading historians from across the globe to ask what being an historian should mean in their particular fields of study. Taking their cue from one of the previous century's greatest historians, Eric Hobsbawm, and his interests across many periods and places, the essays approach their subjects with an underlying sense of what role an historian might seek to play, and attempt to help twenty-first-century society understand 'how we got here'. They present new work in their sub-fields but also point to how their specialisms are developing, how they might further grow in the future, and how different areas of focus might speak to the larger challenges of history - both for the discipline itself and for its relationship to other fields of academic inquiry. Like Hobsbawn, the authors in this collection know that history matters. They speak to both the past and the present and, in so doing, introduce some of the most exciting new lines of research in a broad array of subjects from the medieval period to the present.

Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century

History after Hobsbawm

James McKay

Jean-François Mouhot

Nicholas Crowson

Offers a challenging new interpretation of politics in contemporary Britain through an examination of non-governmental organisations. Demonstrate how politics and political activism has changed over the last half century.

How NGOs Shaped Modern Britain

The Politics of Expertise

Martin Daunton

Objects and commodities have frequently been studied to assess their position within consumer - or material - culture, but all too rarely have scholars examined the politics that lie behind that culture. This book fills the gap and explores the political and state structures that have shaped the consumer and the nature of his or her consumption. From medieval sumptuary laws to recent debates in governments about consumer protection, consumption has always been seen as a highly political act that must be regulated, directed or organized according to the political agendas of various groups. An internationally renowned group of experts looks at the emergence of the rational consuming individual in modern economic thought, the moral and ideological values consumers have attached to their relationships with commodities, and how the practices and theories of consumer citizenship have developed alongside and within the expanding state. How does consumer identity become available to people and how do they use it? How is consumption negotiated in a dictatorship? Are material politics about state politics, consumer politics, or the relationship between these and consumer practices?From the specifics of the politics of consumption in the French Revolution - what was the status of rum? How complicated did a vinegar recipe have to be before the resultant product qualified as 'luxury'? - to the highly contentious twentieth-century debates over American political economy, this original book traces the relationships among political cultures, consumers and citizenship from the eighteenth century to the present.

Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America

The Politics of Consumption

Nick Crowson

Aiming to furnish the reader with the historical data to engage with the debates surrounding the Cameron government's 'Big Society' and civil society, this book gives the reader a greater and more informed historical consciousness of how the NGO sector has grown and influenced.

Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector Since 1945

A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain

A concise history of smoking in British popular culture from the early nineteenth century to the present day.. Provides the historical backdrop to the current debates about the politics of tobacco and health, demonstrating that both pro- and anti-smokers have consistently failed to understand the position of smoking within popular culture.. Important themes explored include: the importance of consumption to constructions of masculinity and femininity, the role of the state in the official regulation of the 'minor vices', the morality of consumption and the position of scientific knowledge within popular culture.. Traces the production, promotion and consumption of tobacco as well as outlining the arguments that have variously opposed this ever-controversial drug.. Genuinely interdisciplinary, combining elements of social, cultural and economic history whilst contributing to debates in sociology and cultural studies, the anthropology of material culture, design history, medical history and public health policy.

Perfect Pleasures

Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800-2000

Stuart Hall

David Batchelor

Kieran Connell

mac (Arts centre) Staff

To mark the 50th anniversary of the institutional origin and now the global discipline of Cultural Studies, this publication and the exhibition it accompanies explores the continuing and persistent influence of Birmingham's now defunct Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies on artist's practicing today.Representing the relevance of the Centre's vast body of work, this publication examines the key areas of study - class, gender, race and style - through the work of contemporary artists including Trevor Appleson, Mahtab Hussein, Sarah Maple, Sarah Silverwood and Nick Waplington. In addition, it includes a series of never-before-seen works in Britain by alumni students David Batchelor and Janet Mendelsohn.A foreword by former Director of the Centre, the acclaimed theorist Stuart Hall, is published here posthumously. In it he states: 'The artists featured in this collection are not working in 'cultural studies' - not formally at any rate. Like all good artists, however, they are engaged with the political and cultural contexts of their time. A great deal has changed since we began our experiment [at the Centre] five decades ago but as the work of these artists demonstrate, the kind of questions that we were interested in remain pertinent.'Published on the occasion of the exhibition 50 Years On: The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at mac birmingham, 10 May - 29 June 2014.

The Centre for Contemporary Culture Studies

50 Years On

Val Williams

Jonathan Watkins

Janet Mendelsohn

This book is re-printing and will be available in April 2016. This book accompanies the largest exhibition to date of photographs by American academic and documentary filmmaker Janet Mendelsohn.Part of a 'photo-essay' Mendelsohn made as a student at the U

Varna Road

Explores how the political, social and cultural contexts of the early 21st century influenced the object and method of doing cultural studies. It uses the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies as a lens for thinking about the future of cultural studies as a field of inquiry.

History, Practice and Politics

Cultural Studies 50 Years On

Earthy fiction with a scientific flavor peopled by age twenty somethings from the author of Heavy Waters. A tale of robots, reptiles and rezistants in thirty twelve minute chunks.

Matthew Hilton

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