University of Exeter Press

Miniatures

A Reader in the History of Everyday Life

    • 416 Pages

    This book is the first of its kind to present readers with the rich and innovative source base deployed by scholars studying everyday life in the modern era. Twenty-eight researchers from diverse intellectual and disciplinary standpoints each present a favourite primary source for studying the history of everyday life, accompanied by a reflective commentary on the benefits, challenges, and potential pitfalls of using their chosen material.

    The sources included range from ego documents (diaries, memoirs, letters), oral testimonies, ethnographic fieldnotes, newspapers, magazines, and official documents to photographs, film, maps, floor plans, drawings, material objects, and instant messages. They cover topics and themes as varied as individual mentalities, emotions, identities, sense of place, sexuality, and agency; experiences of space, violence, war, childhood, humour, the body, and the senses; and the history of nationalism, diplomacy, political activism, youth culture, tourism, memory, dictatorship, colonialism, and race and racism.

    This book demonstrates not only the texture and fascination of people’s everyday lives, but also what a critical reading of this microscale can reveal about the broader sweep of history. It will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students alike interested in everyday life, in micro- and local-scales of analysis, and in the study of history and society ‘from below’.


    Introduction: Miniature Perspectives on Big Historical Pictures Huw Halstead and Kate Ferris
    DOI: 10.47788/FJXP9208
    1. Michel Gnimagnon’s Captivity Report: A Handwritten Account of a French Colonial POW, 1941 Sarah Frank
    DOI: 10.47788/JWQN9945
    2. Atmosphere, the City and Everyday Life in Barcelona, 1909: The Journal of the Widow of Trias Matthew Kerry
    DOI: 10.47788/MJRZ9746
    3. Sound and Experience: Mass-Observation and an Exploration of the Senses in Inter-War Britain Jen Purcell
    DOI: 10.47788/YJFZ6040
    4. Diary of a British Schoolboy in Nazi Germany Helen Roche
    DOI: 10.47788/LYTQ5054
    5. Wolfgang Jahn’s Handwritten Letter to the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR): ‘Coming Out’ in 1970s West Germany Craig Griffiths
    DOI: 10.47788/YIWB8860
    6. The Emotional Lives of Letters: Soviet Sexual Morality and Archival Encounters Hannah Parker
    DOI: 10.47788/QZPR5289
    7. Writing Letters to the State: The Normalization of Salazar’s Political Police Duncan Simpson
    DOI: 10.47788/PDSM5638
    8. Reading Ways of Manoeuvring, Mediating and Evading Dictatorship in a Memoir of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy Kate Ferris
    DOI: 10.47788/IUHD5017
    9. Wife Notices, Oral Testimonies and Intimate Partner Violence in the Caribbean: Since the 1930s O’Neil Joseph
    DOI: 10.47788/NBQD5734
    10. Statesman at Home: The Space and Family of a Japanese Governing Elite in the 1960s Seen Through Floor Plans and Video Oral Testimonies Shin Sato
    DOI: 10.47788/ZJYP8355
    11. Ethnokafenology: Oral Testimony, Space and the Noise of the Everyday in Western Thrace, Greece (c.1939–2013) Huw Halstead
    DOI: 10.47788/GCUM1547
    12. Incanting Revolution: A Sonic History of a Six-Word Slogan in Istanbul since the 1970s Christopher Houston
    DOI: 10.47788/YUCU5505
    13. An Ethnographic Bricolage: Mapping Everyday Space on the Urban Periphery in Chongqing, China in the Twenty-First Century Asa Roast
    DOI: 10.47788/OPCH7709
    14. Layers of Knowledge Production and the Archives of Everyday Life in Apartheid South Africa Andile Magengelele and Franziska Rueedi
    DOI: 10.47788/URRQ3075
    15. The Fabric of Everyday Culture: The Lives of a Green Leather Jacket since the 1980s Helen Ahner and Karin Bürkert
    DOI: 10.47788/NVOG7312
    16. Material Culture, Seaside Souvenirs and French ‘Taste’: The Transnational Journey of a Seashell Box in Post-War France and the USA Ludivine Broch
    DOI: 10.47788/KZMA8995
    17. Cut-Throat: Italian Fascist Colonialism According to Razor Blades Diana Garvin
    DOI: 10.47788/MQMX5814
    18. A Photographic Snapshot of Balsall Heath: Race, Sex and Space in 1960s Birmingham Kieran Connell
    DOI: 10.47788/HTBB7375
    19. Docile Bodies? Reflections on a Recruitment Photograph from India during the Second World War Diya Gupta
    DOI: 10.47788/ZPDY9911
    20. Marginalization in Fragments: Photojournalistic Depictions of Loss, Destitution and (Imperial) Mobilities of Portuguese Ciganos under the Salazar Regime Yannick Lengkeek
    DOI: 10.47788/PUSC5636
    21. Everyday Life under the Greek Junta (1967–1974) Through Vassilis Maros’s Documentary Film To Bouzouki Eleni Kallimopoulou and Kostis Kornetis
    DOI: 10.47788/EJVA9674
    22. We Just Demolished Their Story: Using Drawing and Storytelling to Understand the Changing Post-Soviet City in Tajikistan Carl A. Smith
    DOI: 10.47788/KOPM1040
    23. Comprehensive School Magazines from Bristol and Cardiff, 1960s–1980s Laura Carter
    DOI: 10.47788/QIIJ8488
    24. The Children’s Section of the Finnish North American Socialist Women’s Newspaper Toveritar Samira Saramo
    DOI: 10.47788/ULJR6027
    25. Finding Meaning in ‘Peripheral’ Sources: Subscription Lists and ‘Everyday Anarchism’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Argentina Nathaniel Andrews
    DOI: 10.47788/OBXB3980
    26. A ‘Miniature’ Carnival in Franco’s Spain: Official Investigative Reports on the Celebration of the ‘Burial of the Sardine’ in Albanchez (Almería) in 1950 Gloria Román Ruiz
    DOI: 10.47788/CARX7872
    27. Playful Engagements on WhatsApp in Twenty-First-Century Zimbabwe Ushehwedu Kufakurinani
    DOI: 10.47788/XXOA8526
    28. Mapping Memory: Using Google Maps to Understand Lima’s Contemporary Memoryscape Daniel Willis
    DOI: 10.47788/XEVZ4231

    Kate Ferris is Professor in Modern European History at the University of St Andrews. She researches modern Italy and Spain with an emphasis on everyday life history and questions of agency, practice, subjectivity, and space. She leads the ERC-funded project, ‘Dictatorship as experience: a comparative history of everyday life and the “lived experience” of dictatorship in Mediterranean Europe, 1922–1975’.

    Huw Halstead is Lecturer in Public History in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on memory, public history, and everyday life, with a particular interest in the contemporary Mediterranean world.

    ISBN
      DOI https://doi.org/10.47788/XNQO7504
      • 416 Pages