British Culture in the Age of Mass Production, 1920-1950
| Code | School | Level | Credits | Semesters |
| HIST3054 | History | 3 | 20 | Spring UK |
- Code
- HIST3054
- School
- History
- Level
- 3
- Credits
- 20
- Semesters
- Spring UK
Summary
The module explores the cultural transformations in Britain brought on by the shift to a Fordist economy (roughly covering the period 1920-50), and the contestations that resulted. It takes chronological and thematic approaches, and topics may include:
- New experiences of factory work and the rationalisation of diverse areas of everyday life;
- New forms of advertising and commodity culture, and the anxieties and opportunities these produced;
- The rise of the inter-war suburbs and the contested figure of the inter-war housewife
- New forms of industrial urban leisure (e.g. the cinema and dance hall) and their role in promoting social change;
- The rise of the expert across a range of fields to manage working-class behaviour;
- Post-WW2 reconstruction and the early years of the Welfare State
Target Students
Only available to level 3 or 4 single or joint honours History students and Liberal Arts students.
Classes
- One 2-hour seminar each week for 11 weeks
- One 1-hour lecture each week for 11 weeks
Assessment
- 50% Coursework 1: 1 x 3000 word essay
- 50% Coursework 2: 1x 3000 word source-based assessment
Assessed by end of spring semester
Educational Aims
This module aims to give students an in-depth understanding of how British people experienced and wrestled with new forms of mass culture in the period 1920-1950. By exploring a range of topics, they will not only interrogate many facets of everyday life, but trace through recurrent themes that were felt to dominate this cultural moment (e.g. Americanisation, cultural inauthenticity, mass democracy, habit, social mobility, performances of self, etc). Methodologically, students will not onlyengage with a range of primary sources (newspaper articles, magazines, adverts, architecture, films, gramophone records, etc) but will also search online and material archives themselves in order to seek out new sources as a means to comment on existing historiographical debates.Learning Outcomes
(a) Knowledge and Understanding of:
• British culture from 1920-1950, the social, economic and cultural transformations brought on by the shift to a Fordist economy and their impact on ordinary people's experience
• a selection of primary texts from the period, from a wide range of sources and in diverse media
• the body of secondary literature that addresses and interprets the period, and the variety of approaches and conclusions it has taken
• how this period shaped contemporary British culture.
(b) Intellectual skills:
• ability to source primary texts, analyse their significance for historians and to contextualise them within wider historical cultural formations
• ability to reflect on, assess and develop interpretations put forward by historians
• ability to construct coherent arguments about the subject matter.
(c) Professional and practical skills:
• analyse and synthesise information and arguments from a wide range of secondary and primary sources
• plan, research and write a sustained piece of historical research
• use IT to access sources and complete written assignments.
(d) Transferable skills:
• work effectively in collaboration with other students to research primary and secondary sources
• manage large and often incomplete bodies of information
• develop oral and written communication skills
• improve IT skills in word processing