1st Edition

Doing Working-Class History Research, Heritage, and Engagement

346 Pages
by Routledge

346 Pages
by Routledge

346 Pages
by Routledge

Economic and political uncertainty has brought the language of class – especially discussion of the working class – to a broad audience across scholarship and social debate. This introductory volume shows how the history of the working class has, is, and can be researched, written, and represented. The book is structured in three parts: perspective, context, and application. Each offers an... Read more

Introduction: A Time for Working-Class Histories
Oliver Betts, Laura Harrison, and Laura Christine Price

Part 1: Working-class History in Perspective

1. Disability in Working Class History
Ben Curtis

2. Parasites Unite: Sensory History, the Possibilities of Transgression, and the Perceptual Manifesto of the Proletariat
Andrew Kettler

3. ‘What are those ones with the hammers?’: Teaching Working-class History in Secondary Schools
Laura Christine Price

4. ‘Everyone has a tale to tell’: Family History, Family Historians, and Working-class Histories
Laura Harrison

5. Museums and Heritage Sites as Sources for Working-class History
Oliver Betts

6. Reading against the Grain: Non-plebian Sources in Working-class History
Oliver Betts

7. Accessible Bibliography
Laura Christine Price

Part 2: Working-class History in Context

8. The Daily Citizen: Class v consumerism in the Early Labour Press
Christopher Shoop-Worrall

9. Gender Politics of Class: Exploring the Connections and Collaboration between the Irish Labour Movement and the Irish Women’s Franchise League in Dublin, 1908–1916
Erin Geraghty

10. Bootstraps and Bras: Maidenform, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and the Creation of a New Export-Led Economy in Puerto Rico
Natasha Synycia

11. Patriotism and the English Working Class, c. 1902–1929
David Swift

12. Medical Care for Working-class Children in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century
Claire Phillips

13. ‘I have told her that it was neglected, and asked her why’: Working–class Women and Discourses of ‘Bad Motherhood’ in England and Wales, 1870–1939
Daniel J.R. Grey

14. Unorganised Workers: Wool Textile Workers and Class Identities in Twentieth-century Yorkshire
Laura Christine Price

15. ‘Where the Brass Band is Beloved’, Brass Bands and Working-class Cultural Identity: Inventing a Musical Metonym in the Southern Pennines, c.1840–1914
Stephen Etheridge

16. Street Life: The Leisure Spaces and Places of Working-class Youth in Britain, c. 1870–1960
Laura Harrison

17. Coal Miners in the Industrialisation and Deindustrialisation of France and Germany: A Comparative Synthesis of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr
Brian Shaev

Part 3: Working-class History in Application

18. Representations of Working-class Lives at Criminal Justice Heritage Sites
Dan Johnson and Rose Wallis

19. How Broadside Ballads Followed Us into This Century
Jennifer Reid

20. ‘We tell our own stories’: Bussing Out, a Creative Installation about Working-class Children in Bradford
Shabina Aslam

21. ‘The Past We Inherit, the Future We Build’: The Praxis of Working-class History
Rhian E. Jones

Biography

Oliver Betts is Research Lead at the National Railway Museum in York. He specialises in the history of technology and class, exploring how working-class worlds across the Anglophone world were reshaped by technologies. He has published on workers, communities, and industry in history and museums.

Laura Harrison is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of the West of England. She specialises in histories of youth and youth culture and is the author of Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class, and Urban Space in Britain, c.1870–1939 (2022).

Laura Christine Price is a historian, teacher, and writer. Her PhD thesis, completed at the University of York, explored wool textile workers’ relationships to trade unionism. She is an independent researcher and teaches at a secondary school in West Yorkshire.