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Winner of the Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2012
Blood, Sweat, and Toil
Remaking the British Working Class, 1939-1945
Geoffrey G. Field
416 pages
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10 black and white illustrations
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234x156mm
978-0-19-960411-1
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Hardback
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03 November 2011
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- The first major study of the British working class during the Second World War
- Based on extensive archival work
- Reflects recent developments in social and working-class history, especially research on class, gender, and identity
Blood, Sweat, and Toil is the first scholarly history of the British working class in the Second World War. It integrates social, political, and labour history, and reflects the most recent scholarship and debates on social class, gender, and the forging of identities.
Geoffrey G. Field examines the war's impact on workers in the varied contexts of the family, military service, the workplace, local communities, and the nation. Previous studies of the Home Front have analysed the lives of civilians, but they have neglected the importance of social class in defining popular
experience and its centrality in public attitudes, official policy, and the politics of the war years. Contrary to accounts that view the war as eroding class divisions and creating a new sense of social unity in Britain, Field argues that the 1940s was a crucial decade in which the deeply fragmented working class of the interwar decades was "remade," achieving new collective status, power, and solidarity. He criticizes recent revisionist scholarship that has downplayed the significance of class in British society.
Extensively researched, using official documents, diaries and letters, the records of trade unions, and numerous other institutions, Blood, Sweat, and Toil traces the rapid growth of trade unionism, joint consultation, and strike actions in the war years.
It also analyses the mobilization of women into factories and the uniformed services and the lives of men conscripted into the army, showing how these experiences shaped their social attitudes and aspirations. Using opinion polls and other evidence, Field traces the evolution of popular political attitudes from the evacuation of 1939 and the desperate months of late 1940 to the election of 1945, opposing recent claims that the electorate was indifferent or apathetic at the war's end but also eschewing blanket assumptions about popular radicalization. Labour was an active agent in fashioning itself as both a national progressive party and the representative of working-class interests in 1945; far from a mere passive beneficiary of anti-Tory feeling, it gave organizational form to the
idealism and the demand for significant change that the war had generated.Readership: Students and academics of British history and the history of Labour and the working class; the general reader interested in World War II
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Geoffrey G. Field, Professor of History, Purchase College, State University of New York Geoffrey Field received his undergraduate degree in history from Oxford University and a Ph.D from Columbia University. His research and publications have focused on twentieth-century German and British history and European racism. His book, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book on race relations in any discipline and an Outstanding Book of the Year Award from Choice. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the University of Paris, 13. He is also a former Chair of the New York
Council for the Humanities, was a Senior Editor of International Labor and Working-Class History, and continues to serve on the journal's editorial board.
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"[H]e increases our understanding of an important, still imperfectly understood time, helping to clarify how a substantial, unprecedented shift towards a more equal society was achieved, incomplete and impermanent though it turned out to be." - Pat Thane, Times Literary Supplement "A fascinating, kaleidoscopic history of the British working class during World War II, which upends many familiar stereotypes about the war and British society. It also demonstrates that there is still plenty of life in the field of labor history, whose death has been prematurely announced many times." - Prof. Eric Foner, The Nation "This carefully written, solidly researched and clearly argued book must be a part of all
historical studies of the last century ... Essential." - Prof. M. J. Moore, Choice "Field's book is an important intervention precisely because it decisively brings the workers back in, placing them at the heart of wartime social and political change, and in doing so deepening our understanding of the wars impact on class relations ... an excellent book, one of the outstanding features of which is Field's mastery of a rich body of sources." - Ben Jackson, English Historical Review "This is a splendid, well-written, and deeply researched study of the British working class during the Second World Waran essential text about Britain during the war" - Peter Stansky, Journal of British Studies "For anyone seriously
engaged in the study of wartime Britain, Field's work will likely be read for years to come." - Adam R. Seipp, H-Net Reviews "Field's readable, persuasive, and informed account should hold a prominent place in the literature for some years to come...[He] has unanswerably demonstrated the emergence of a new inclusivity in the wartime nation .. [and] has provided a superbly documented account of the centrality of class to the history of wartime Britain." - Kevin Morgan, International Review of Social History "Field ...brings forth a fresh eye and a highly impressive volume of primary research; his analysis is always thoughtful and stimulating ... He has refocused our minds on class, has proposed some credible hypotheses, and has done much
to illuminate them. His book will repay rereading, and is likely to become a key point of reference in the literature."
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Introduction
1: Evacuation
2: Class and Community in the Blitz, 1940-41
3: The Industrial Front and Trade Unionism
4: The Mobilization of Women
5: Family in Trouble
6: Leisure, Culture, and Class
7: A Citizens' Army
8: Wartime Radicals Envision a New Order, 1940-1942
9: 1945 And All That
Conclusion
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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