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Review: Medicine, Morality and Political Culture: Legislation on Venereal Disease in Five Northern European Countries, c.1870-1995

July 20, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment

Having written a whole chapter on Venereal Disease propaganda in the Second World War (and a journal article that I need to put forward), this looks interesting:

Catching venereal disease is different from catching a cold. It’s nastier, more intimate, raises suspicions, and makes you wonder why you were so stupid not to have safe sex, or why you had sex at all. Not surprisingly, the loaded meaning of VD has haunted European society for ages. Who infected whom was not simply a medical but also – at least for the past 150 years – a political question. An oversimplified but nevertheless true answer to this question has been, until fairly recently, that women infect men. The roots of this view are found in 19th-century approaches to combating VD by controlling prostitution, most often through a system of licensed brothels and compulsory medical checkups and treatment. “Syphilis” (or what was diagnosed as such) was seen as a gendered sickness, transmitted by “loose” women from the lower classes whose civil liberties were trampled by lock-up hospitals, police control and forced examinations, all in order to protect male sexual needs.

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Filed Under History Tagged With Britain, Venereal Disease

Pride of Place @timeshighered

July 24, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

The British landscape and representations of it in art give rise to a happy patriotic glow in many people. Fred Inglis shares that fervour

Is it still possible to claim oneself, in polite academic company, to be a patriot? Both the present and the previous prime ministers have gestured, a bit apologetically but I think sincerely, towards such a frame of mind for themselves and even for their parties. Everyone is at pains to dissociate themselves, of course, from the more horrible forms of chauvinism as displayed by the British National Party, but a mild form of non-aggressive nationalism is common in Scotland and Wales, much qualified in the North by the failures and disgrace of the national banks. Explicit and boisterous patriotism is pretty well confined to sport, as witness all those cars flying the cross of St George during the recent Fifa World Cup.

Patriotism is not, absolutely not, a configuration of emotions and thoughts to be measured by attitude survey. It is too submarine and inarticulate in Britain to command a sufficient rhetoric for colloquial expression. Even at high-water moments of history – 1914, 1940 – patriotic language tended, as George Orwell pointed out 70 years ago, to commemorate defeats and to be undercut by the truculent bawdy of the marching songs as well as by brutal scepticism.

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Filed Under History, Images, Nostalgia Tagged With Britain, National Identity, Pride

Grant, Mariel Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-War Britain Oxford: Clarendon, 1994

June 16, 2010 By drbexl Leave a Comment

This work is converted from Grant’s PhD thesis, and is obviously largely concerned with the inter-war propaganda, although the starting point taken was the initial ‘failure’ of the Ministry of Information at the beginning of the war. She feels that most other works have concentrated too much upon the negativity which surrounded propaganda after its use in the First World War, and upon staffing problems, with little or no consideration of peacetime propaganda which affected wartime propaganda.

The work considers inter-war developments, such as the development of publicity bureaux in many government departments, which caused problems in the formation of the Ministry of Information as they did not want to give up their independence to a centralised publicity bureau in the war. By 1937, there were seventeen publicity departments, which shows a rise in the acceptance of the idea of publicity as “legitimate function” of government departments, even if it was not fully accepted by the Second World War.

She considers propaganda developments in other countries, and debates about propaganda in the period in order to understand how, why and to what degree propaganda became an acceptable activity of government.

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Filed Under Book Review Tagged With Book Review, Britain, propaganda

Freeman, R.A. Britain at War 1990

June 15, 2010 By drbexl Leave a Comment

To describe this book as a ‘scrapbook’ is oversimplifying it rather a lot! There is a lot of good quality text also within this work, although the information is not referenced! The book IS aimed at the younger reader, or those with a general interest, and is well illustrated with many well-known (and not so well known) black and white photographs.

The book deals with life on the Home Front during the Second World War, maintaining a chronological layout as far as possible, but much of the ‘Home Front’ wartime life was ‘ongoing’ and therefore there are thematic chapters devoted to rationing, salvage, to life on the land, entertainment, all the while promoting the ‘Blitz spirit’.

A good book for schools!

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Filed Under Book Review Tagged With Book Review, Britain, propaganda, second world war

Seduction or Instruction?: First World War Posters in Britain and Europe

February 22, 2010 By drbexl 1 Comment

Jim Aulich & John Hewitt (2007)

“This book makes a critical and historical analysis of the public information poster and its graphic derivatives in Britain and Europe during the First World War. Governments need public support in time of war. The First World War was the first international conflict to see the launch of major publicity campaigns designed to maintain public support for national needs and government policies. What we now know as spin has its origins in the phenomenon. Then, as now, the press, photography and film played an important role, but in the early 20th century there was no radio, television or internet and the most publicly visible advertising medium was the poster. Considering the museological and memorialising imperatives behind the formation of the war publicity collection at the Imperial War Museum, this fascinating book goes on to provide a constitutional and iconographical analyses of the British Government recruiting, War Loan and charity campaigns; the effect of the inroads of the poster into important public and symbolic spaces; a comparative analysis of European poster design and the visual contribution of the poster through style and iconography to languages of ‘imagined communities’ and the construction of the individual subject. The book will of interest to design historians, historians and readers involved with the study of communication arts, publicity, advertising and visual culture at every level.”

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Filed Under Book Review, First World War Tagged With Britain, Europe, First World War, James Aulich, posters, propaganda