Wendy Webster

Biographic Data

ID3766678
NAMEWendy Webster
GIVEN NAMESWendy
FAMILY NAMEWebster
SIGNATUREWEBSTER W
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Lancashire
ORCID0000-0001-7926-4954
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS34
TOTAL CITATIONS57
WORKS AS AUTHOR34
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1873
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX3

  • Unravelling Britishness

    Open AccessWendy WebsterARTICLETransactions of the Royal…2023

    This piece follows Stuart Ward's Untied Kingdom as it traverses a collapsing British Empire and an increasingly disunited United Kingdom to tell the complex history of Britishness in retreat across the world, mainly between 1945 and the early twenty-first century. It reviews some of the shifting meanings of Britishness that Ward charts in different contexts, different territories and at different moments in this history and the dwindling resonanc…

  • Jordanna Bailkin. Unsettled

    Open AccessWendy WebsterARTICLEThe American Historical Review2023

    Journal Article Jordanna Bailkin. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. Get access Jordanna Bailkin. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vii, 290. Paper $25.00. Wendy Webster Wendy Webster University of Huddersfield, UK Email: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7926-4954 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Goog…

  • G emma R omain . Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and Jamaica

    Open AccessWendy WebsterARTICLEThe American Historical Review2019

    In 2013, Juliet Gardiner spoke on a BBC Radio 4 broadcast, expressing her uneasiness about shots of a black soldier at Dunkirk in a 2007 film. The film—Atonement—was well known to Gardiner because she had acted as its historical consultant. It was “almost impossible,” Gardiner claimed, that a black soldier would have served in the British Expeditionary Force in France, and his inclusion in the film therefore gave “a misleading impression of how B…

  • Sexual Patriotism

    Wendy WebsterBOOKMixing It2018

    This chapter focuses on what I call ‘sexual patriotism’, to describe what much popular opinion demanded of British women—the avoidance of sexual relationships with all men who were not native-born Britons. These rules were generally female-only—British men’s relationships with non-British women attracted little attention. Women’s responses to the demands that they should be sexually patriotic were varied—many flouted the rules that popular opinio…

  • Enemies and Neutrals

    Wendy WebsterBOOKMixing It2018

    This chapter focuses on people of enemy and neutral nationality in Britain—chiefly Germans, Italians, and Irish who served in the British armed forces and as war-workers and propagandists. Through these activities, many Germans and Italians who were in Britain at the outset of the war moved closer to the allied end of a spectrum running from enemy to ally. In the later stages of the war, their place at the enemy end of this spectrum was taken by …

  • Mixing It

    Wendy WebsterBOOKMixing It2018

    During the Second World War, people arrived in Britain from all over the world as troops, war workers, nurses, refugees, exiles, and prisoners of war—chiefly from Europe, America, and the British Empire. Between 1939 and 1945, the population in Britain became more diverse than it had ever been before. Through diaries, letters, and interviews, Mixing It tells of ordinary lives which in wartime conditions were often extraordinary. Among the stories…

  • Gendering Migration

    Wendy Webster, Louise RyanBOOKGendering Migration2016

  • Gendering Migration

    Wendy Webster, Louise RyanBOOKGendering Migration2016

  • Enemies, Allies and Transnational Histories

    Wendy WebsterARTICLETwentieth Century British History2013Cited by: 1

    In mid-1940, Austrians, Germans, and Italians in Britain were labelled ‘enemies’ by the government and subject to mass internment. In an anti-alienist climate they were targets of particular popular hostility. Neutral Irish also attracted hostility and suspicion as Fifth Columnists and spies. But after mid-1940 the British government moved to an increasingly complex view of nationality with Churchill taking a close personal interest in the recrui…

  • Fit to Fight, Fit to Mix

    Wendy WebsterARTICLEWomen s History Review2013Cited by: 1

    During the Second World War the diversity of the population in Britain by nationality and ethnicity was unprecedented, multiplying British women's opportunities for relationships that crossed ethnic and national boundaries. This article uses evidence from Home Intelligence, Mass-Observation and official policy making to explore the gendered nature of anxieties about a wide range of British women's relationships—with white and black allies and wit…

  • Experiencing War as the 'Enemy Other

    Wendy WebsterARTICLETwentieth Century British History2012

    The cover of Wendy Ugolini’s new study of Italians in wartime Scotland shows an Italian man up a ladder outside his Soho restaurant removing the word ‘Italian’ from his restaurant sign advertising Italian Vermouth. The Italian declaration of war in June 1940 transformed Italians in Britain into enemy aliens. The policy of mass internment of enemy aliens was immediately extended to them and there were anti-Italian riots in several British cities i…

  • Chocolate, women and empire

    Open AccessWendy WebsterARTICLEThe Economic History Review2011

  • Mumbo-jumbo, Magic and Modernity

    Open AccessWendy WebsterCHAPTERFilm and the End of Empire2011

  • The Whim of Foreigners

    Wendy WebsterARTICLETwentieth Century British History2011Cited by: 2References: 7

    There have been a number of recent calls for more attention to be given to the auditory in understanding modernity. This article looks at the significant role played by sound in British propaganda in the Second World War, and evidence from audience research about different auditory perceptions, both at home and overseas. In tracing the increasing diversity of English speech in British media – not only by class and region but also by different nat…

  • Home, Colonial and Foreign

    Open AccessWendy WebsterARTICLEHistory Compass2009Cited by: 1References: 28

    This essay reviews the increasingly rich recent literature on 20th‐century transnational movements from empire and Europe to Britain and in the opposite directions, particularly on migration. It suggests that this work offers a way of thinking about British‐empire and British‐European relations – themes that have been comparatively neglected in 20th‐century social and cultural history, especially in the period of decolonisation. While much of the…

  • Europe against the Germans”

    Open AccessWendy WebsterARTICLEJournal of British Studies2009Cited by: 1References: 4

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  • The People’s Empire and the People’s War

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

    This chapter focuses on the role of propaganda in showing the war effort as a ‘people's war’. Much imagery of a ‘people's war’ focused on the home front. In contrast, the imperial war effort was usually shown on the fighting front, showing martial masculinity ‘away’. Its most characteristic image — as in the ‘Together’ poster — was of marching troops. Representations of nation and empire nevertheless converged on common themes. A racial community…

  • The Post-War People’s Empire

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

  • Epilogue

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

    This epilogue focuses on Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was often portrayed in the media, like Churchill, as a politician who did not betray the nation. She could be trusted to deliver on a promise to turn back the tide of post-1945 decline and loss of imperial power. But Thatcher's identity as a woman and a politician added a new resonance to stories of post-war national malaise, reversing the gendering of the story in Guns at Batasi, where betraya…

  • Immigration

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

    This chapter shows that stories of colonial wars and immigration set ‘little England’ in opposition to a multiracial Commonwealth. Stories about ‘the colour problem’ invoked national identity as quiet, private, intimate, domestic, and white — Englishness, not Britishness. As the Commonwealth acquired its new meaning of domestic problem, its promise of maintaining and modernizing a globalized British identity and its claim to demonstrate Britain a…

  • Elegies for Empire

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

    This chapter focuses on Churchill's funeral, exploring its significance as a marker not only of the eclipse of a ‘people's war’, but also of the final demise of narratives of a ‘people's empire’. Its story of valour and victory, honouring a great leader as the personification of national greatness, excluded almost any reference to the Commonwealth. Alongside the major theme of the Second World War, it was not Commonwealth, but empire and Britain'…

  • Coronation Britain

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

    The narrative of a ‘people's empire’ had little currency in Britain after the mid-1950s. This chapter looks at Coronation year in 1953 as a moment that marked a post-war high-point in this narrative. The Coronation could be regarded as a notable example of the type of cultural representation that people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with the nation. The publicity which it received beforehand, the procession and ceremony on…

  • Colonial Wars

    Wendy WebsterCHAPTEREnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007

  • Englishness and Empire 1939-1965

    Wendy WebsterBOOKEnglishness and Empire 1939-19652007Cited by: 27

    1. Introduction 2. The People's Empire and the People's War 3. The Post-War People's Empire 4. Coronation Britain 5. Colonial Wars 6. Immigration 7. Elegies for Empire: The Romance of Manliness Epilogue Bibliography

  • Transnational Journeys and Domestic Histories

    Wendy WebsterARTICLEJournal of Social History2006Cited by: 2

    This essay considers the potential of histories of transnational movements of people, and the erosion of boundaries between British domestic and imperial history, to expand and revise the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British domestic life and work. Literatures on migration demonstrate how far the history of home involves transnational themes, including the recruitment of migrants and refugees who crossed national borders to do dom…