Lawrence Black
Biographic Data
| ID | 3766295 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lawrence Black |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lawrence |
| FAMILY NAME | Black |
| SIGNATURE | BLACK L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9321-2667 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 22 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Round Table
The election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on 5 July 2024 after fourteen years of Conservative (mis)rule may represent an important turning point in British political history. At any rate, this was how the new Prime Minister represented his party’s ‘landslide’ victory. Starmer made two short speeches that day, the first to supporters outside London’s Tate Modern art gallery, the second to the wider public outside 10 Downing Street. Similar i…
The Persuasion Industries
The Persuasion Industries: The Making of Modern Britain." Contemporary British History, 35(1), pp. 163–164
Blue Labour or the Political History Blues
This article discusses the state of labour history and political history in Britain. Despite a continuing and sizeable output, it argues the former is very close to deserving an obituary, not unconnected to something of a methodolological malaise in the latter. Political history is not unhealthy, but out of fashion. Paradoxically, debate about history within the Labour party has been rife. Not only in its recent "crisis," but in the Blue Labour P…
The market imperfections of business, shoppers and consumerism
Esther Peterson's long career in the consumer movement, White House and private sector, discloses much about organized consumerism, its politics and popular reception in the U.S.A. in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies. It also demonstrates the abiding influence of the National Consumers' League (N.C.L.), founded in 1899, on her understanding of markets, business, shoppers and strategies for reform. This article traces the relationship between P…
Left Out
In a famous 1940 essay, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, George Orwell critically explored the tropes of boys’ (and some girls’) magazines and storylines. While damning of the conventions of the mainstream, Orwell opined that the slim left-wing contribution to this genre consisted of either ‘dreary up-lift’ or was ‘under Communist influence’ and thus ‘in either case no normal boy would look at it’. Kimberley Reynolds’s study disputes not only Orwell’s squib, bu…
Cultural Studies 50 Years On
There is something of Mao’s (apocryphal) verdict on the 1789 French Revolution to Connell and Hilton’s collection of essays, interviews and memoirs to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), that it is ‘too early to say’ what its impact has been or will be. Founded in 1964, it was directed successively by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, before becoming the Department for Cul…
Social Opulence and Private Restraint
Consumption is a field in which social and political historians have segued very productively in the past twenty years or so. If social historians have tended to amplify how consumption has redrawn political landscapes, then political historians have rather neglected the everyday nitty-gritty and social history of consuming practices. Noel Thompson, a historian of political economy, does not attend to that gap, or intend to—rather, he adds the hi…
An Enlightening Decade? New Histories of 1970s’ Britain
The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an a…
Credit and Community
Credit and Community: Working-Class Debt in the UK since 1880. By Sean O'Connell." Cultural and Social History, 8(1), pp. 115–116
Redefining British political culture
A history of 1950s and 1960s British political culture, exploring ideas, movements and identities bordering social and political change: consumer organisations; campaigns about TV, morality and culture; Young Conservatism; and how political parties used media like TV and was represented in popular culture"--Provided by publisher
The Winter of Discontent in British Politics
Hay's argument that the ‘winter of discontent’ was essentially a manufactured crisis was discussed at the British Academy on the thirtieth anniversary of the 22 January 1979 public sector ‘day of action’. In the edited transcript of that discussion which we publish here, three contemporary actors offer some support for, but also clear rejoinders to Hay. David Lea applauds the credit Hay gives to the efforts of the unions to make pay policy work i…
The Lost World of Young Conservatism
The Young Conservatives were primarily a social club, hosting dances, beauty contests, car rallies and winning endorsements from sports stars. They made a virtue of this apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, middle-class membership, and with rhetoric of service and citizenship embedded themselves in local civil society. This article reflects on why this associational culture has been neglected by political and social historians. In the approac…
Making Britain a Gayer and More Cultivated Country’
Interrogating the Wilson administration's cultural agenda seems key given the seismic shifts assumed to characterise British society and particularly cultural life in the 1960s. Yet historians have given this little attention. Exploring Jennie Lee's tenure as Arts Minister this article discloses cultural besides financial tensions over the status and definition of the arts, both within government and between government, a vibrant artistic communi…
Revaluing Wilson
Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control
‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it.…
In Practice
The Bitterest Enemies of Communism
This article explores how Labour revisionists like Denis Healey, Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland viewed the Cold War. It evokes the world of Labour during the Cold War and offers a political anatomy of revisionism. In explaining why revisionists felt there were legitimate reasons for Labour to be committed to the Cold War, it assesses Atlanticism and American influences and the involvement of revisionists in shadowy bodies like the Bilderberg Gr…
Still at the Penny-Farthing Stage in a Jet-Propelled Era’
The Lost World of Young Conservatism
The Young Conservatives were primarily a social club, hosting dances, beauty contests, car rallies and winning endorsements from sports stars. They made a virtue of this apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, middle-class membership, and with rhetoric of service and citizenship embedded themselves in local civil society. This article reflects on why this associational culture has been neglected by political and social historians. In the approac…
The Winter of Discontent in British Politics
Hay's argument that the ‘winter of discontent’ was essentially a manufactured crisis was discussed at the British Academy on the thirtieth anniversary of the 22 January 1979 public sector ‘day of action’. In the edited transcript of that discussion which we publish here, three contemporary actors offer some support for, but also clear rejoinders to Hay. David Lea applauds the credit Hay gives to the efforts of the unions to make pay policy work i…
Making Britain a Gayer and More Cultivated Country’
Interrogating the Wilson administration's cultural agenda seems key given the seismic shifts assumed to characterise British society and particularly cultural life in the 1960s. Yet historians have given this little attention. Exploring Jennie Lee's tenure as Arts Minister this article discloses cultural besides financial tensions over the status and definition of the arts, both within government and between government, a vibrant artistic communi…
Round Table
The election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on 5 July 2024 after fourteen years of Conservative (mis)rule may represent an important turning point in British political history. At any rate, this was how the new Prime Minister represented his party’s ‘landslide’ victory. Starmer made two short speeches that day, the first to supporters outside London’s Tate Modern art gallery, the second to the wider public outside 10 Downing Street. Similar i…
An Enlightening Decade? New Histories of 1970s’ Britain
The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an a…
The Bitterest Enemies of Communism
This article explores how Labour revisionists like Denis Healey, Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland viewed the Cold War. It evokes the world of Labour during the Cold War and offers a political anatomy of revisionism. In explaining why revisionists felt there were legitimate reasons for Labour to be committed to the Cold War, it assesses Atlanticism and American influences and the involvement of revisionists in shadowy bodies like the Bilderberg Gr…
Still at the Penny-Farthing Stage in a Jet-Propelled Era’
The Bitterest Enemies of Communism
This article explores how Labour revisionists like Denis Healey, Hugh Gaitskell and Tony Crosland viewed the Cold War. It evokes the world of Labour during the Cold War and offers a political anatomy of revisionism. In explaining why revisionists felt there were legitimate reasons for Labour to be committed to the Cold War, it assesses Atlanticism and American influences and the involvement of revisionists in shadowy bodies like the Bilderberg Gr…
In Practice
Revaluing Wilson
Whose finger on the button? british television and the politics of cultural control
‘The study of television’, John Corner suggests, ‘has suffered from a lack of historical studies’. This was ‘a particular problem in Britain’, where studies of television were prone to ‘privileging questions of policy and organisation’ rather than obtaining a sense of the power of television as a medium, assessing its cultural content and reception by viewers or the status and meaning of the medium, the television set and activity of watching it.…
Making Britain a Gayer and More Cultivated Country’
Interrogating the Wilson administration's cultural agenda seems key given the seismic shifts assumed to characterise British society and particularly cultural life in the 1960s. Yet historians have given this little attention. Exploring Jennie Lee's tenure as Arts Minister this article discloses cultural besides financial tensions over the status and definition of the arts, both within government and between government, a vibrant artistic communi…
The Lost World of Young Conservatism
The Young Conservatives were primarily a social club, hosting dances, beauty contests, car rallies and winning endorsements from sports stars. They made a virtue of this apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, middle-class membership, and with rhetoric of service and citizenship embedded themselves in local civil society. This article reflects on why this associational culture has been neglected by political and social historians. In the approac…
The Winter of Discontent in British Politics
Hay's argument that the ‘winter of discontent’ was essentially a manufactured crisis was discussed at the British Academy on the thirtieth anniversary of the 22 January 1979 public sector ‘day of action’. In the edited transcript of that discussion which we publish here, three contemporary actors offer some support for, but also clear rejoinders to Hay. David Lea applauds the credit Hay gives to the efforts of the unions to make pay policy work i…
Redefining British political culture
A history of 1950s and 1960s British political culture, exploring ideas, movements and identities bordering social and political change: consumer organisations; campaigns about TV, morality and culture; Young Conservatism; and how political parties used media like TV and was represented in popular culture"--Provided by publisher
Credit and Community
Credit and Community: Working-Class Debt in the UK since 1880. By Sean O'Connell." Cultural and Social History, 8(1), pp. 115–116
An Enlightening Decade? New Histories of 1970s’ Britain
The 1970s have made something of a comeback recently–in terms of interest, if not always reputation. This is partly because it was an unfashionable, “lost” decade, possessed of a depressing image in the shadows of its immediate neighbors and because the present economic crisis has made its difficulties relevant and brought them closer. The decade is ripe for revisionism, as well as for seeking lessons. And what ultimately emerges is not just an a…
Cultural Studies 50 Years On
There is something of Mao’s (apocryphal) verdict on the 1789 French Revolution to Connell and Hilton’s collection of essays, interviews and memoirs to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), that it is ‘too early to say’ what its impact has been or will be. Founded in 1964, it was directed successively by Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson, before becoming the Department for Cul…
Social Opulence and Private Restraint
Consumption is a field in which social and political historians have segued very productively in the past twenty years or so. If social historians have tended to amplify how consumption has redrawn political landscapes, then political historians have rather neglected the everyday nitty-gritty and social history of consuming practices. Noel Thompson, a historian of political economy, does not attend to that gap, or intend to—rather, he adds the hi…
Left Out
In a famous 1940 essay, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, George Orwell critically explored the tropes of boys’ (and some girls’) magazines and storylines. While damning of the conventions of the mainstream, Orwell opined that the slim left-wing contribution to this genre consisted of either ‘dreary up-lift’ or was ‘under Communist influence’ and thus ‘in either case no normal boy would look at it’. Kimberley Reynolds’s study disputes not only Orwell’s squib, bu…
Blue Labour or the Political History Blues
This article discusses the state of labour history and political history in Britain. Despite a continuing and sizeable output, it argues the former is very close to deserving an obituary, not unconnected to something of a methodolological malaise in the latter. Political history is not unhealthy, but out of fashion. Paradoxically, debate about history within the Labour party has been rife. Not only in its recent "crisis," but in the Blue Labour P…
The market imperfections of business, shoppers and consumerism
Esther Peterson's long career in the consumer movement, White House and private sector, discloses much about organized consumerism, its politics and popular reception in the U.S.A. in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies. It also demonstrates the abiding influence of the National Consumers' League (N.C.L.), founded in 1899, on her understanding of markets, business, shoppers and strategies for reform. This article traces the relationship between P…
The Persuasion Industries
The Persuasion Industries: The Making of Modern Britain." Contemporary British History, 35(1), pp. 163–164
Round Table
The election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on 5 July 2024 after fourteen years of Conservative (mis)rule may represent an important turning point in British political history. At any rate, this was how the new Prime Minister represented his party’s ‘landslide’ victory. Starmer made two short speeches that day, the first to supporters outside London’s Tate Modern art gallery, the second to the wider public outside 10 Downing Street. Similar i…
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · History (7 works) · Political and Economic history of UK and US (7 works) · History (6 works) · Political economy (6 works) · Art (5 works)