Modern British History

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, the fragmentary remains of a huge prehistoric ungulate were unearthed in scientific expeditions in India, Turkestan and Mongolia. Following channels of formal and informal empire, these were transported to collections in Britain, Russia and the United States. While striking and of immense size, the bones proved extremely difficult to interpret. Alternately naming the creature Paraceratherium, Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, paleontologists Clive Forster-Cooper, Alexei Borissiak and Henry Fairfield Osborn struggled over the reconstruction of this gigantic fossil mammal. However, despite these problems, shared work on the creature served as a focus for collaboration and exchange rather than rivalry between these three scientific communities. Not only did the initial interpretation and analysis depend on pre-existing connections between British and American paleontological institutions, but the need for comparative material, recognition and contacts brought British and American scholars into communication and exchange with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This article examines these processes. It first uses these excavations as a comparative case-study of different manifestations of colonial science in this period, examining how scholars in the Britain, the Russian Empire and the United States used formal and informal colonial links to Asia to pursue new research. It then moves to examine how the common problem of reconstructing this giant animal drew metropolitan scientific communities together, at least for a time. The construction of the Baluchitherium and Indricotherium illustrates the drives to expand research both imperially and internationally in the early-twentieth century, but also the continual problems in resources, institutionalization, transport and communication that could run up against scientific work.

The Peking Man fossils discovered at Zhoukoudian in north-east China in the 1920s and 1930s were some of the most extensive palaeoanthropological finds of the twentieth century. This article examines their publicization and discussion in Britain, where they were engaged with by some of the world's leading authorities in human evolution, and a media and public highly interested in human-origins research. This international link – simultaneously promoted by scientists in China and in Britain itself – reflected wider debates on international networks; the role of science in the modern world; and changing definitions of race, progress and human nature. This article illustrates how human-origins research was an important means of binding these areas together and presenting scientific work as simultaneously authoritative and credible, but also evoking mystery and adventurousness. Examining this illustrates important features of contemporary views of both science and human development, showing not only the complexities of contemporary regard for the international and public dynamics of scientific research, but wider concerns over human nature, which oscillated between optimistic notions of unity and progress and pessimistic ones of essential differences and misdirected development.

Until recent years, historians of twentieth-century Britain have made relatively little use of the popular press as a source. This has started to change, encouraged by the process of digitisation, but substantial gaps remain in our understanding of the impact of the press. This article examines how popular national newspapers have been used in political narratives, and in discussions of social and cultural change. The article argues that not only have entrenched stereotypes prevented historians from properly understanding the nature of popular newspapers, they have also led to them misinterpreting broader developments in British politics, society and culture.

This article examines the coverage of nuclear weaponry in the two most popular newspapers in Britain, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, in the period from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although both papers supported British possession of the bomb, claiming that it was essential for the maintenance of great power status, their reporting was more complex and critical than the existing scholarship has tended to assume. This article argues that sceptical voices in the press often disrupted official narratives and that journalists emphasized the potential dangers involved in the nuclear arms race.

This book uses the popular press to explore the attitudes and identities of inter-war Britain, and in particular the reshaping of femininity and masculinity. It provides a fresh insight into a period when women and men were coming to terms with rapid social change. It argues that most editors and journalists assumed that society – and gender relations – had been irrevocably changed by the shattering experience of the Great War, and that the main task ahead was to understand and come to terms with, rather than condemn, ‘modernity’.

This book provides the first detailed historical study of the modern popular press’s coverage of sex and private life, from the start of the mass newspaper reading boom in 1918 to the triumph of the Sun’s sexualised journalism in 1978. By examining the production, content, and reception of these newspapers, the book provides valuable new insights into the sexual culture of modern Britain, in particular highlighting the 1950s as a key decade of change.

This article argues for the importance of urban public place in exploring how contemporary national identity is constructed. I take Trafalgar Square as my case study, exploring how Britishness was reinvented in two events that took place there in 2005: the celebrations for London's successful Olympic host city bid and the commemorative vigil for the victims of the 7 July London bombings. I contend that during these events, Trafalgar Square contributed to the discourse of national identity in three distinct ways: firstly, as a podium for the promulgation of official messages about the two events; secondly, as a tableau that demonstrated the ‘diversity in unity’ that official messages emphasised; and finally as a physical frame that accessed a version of British history to contextualise the events. More generally, the use of the square helped illuminate some important tensions at the heart of contemporary national identity in Britain, such as the question of multiculturalism and the role of London in the national imagination.