Rock Against Racism (RAR) operated between 1976 and 1981, and was a mass campaign that combined anti-racist politics with popular culture in Britain. The two musical forms became most closely identified with RAR: punk rock and reggae. The author aims to locate RAR within a lengthy tradition of left-wing engagement with popular culture. He also locates a tradition which had imbibed some of the spirit of the so-called 'New Left', a political tendency which was in itself a reaction against both the stultifying dogmatism of official Communism and the patently reactionary nature of Stalinism. The author then suggests how the RAR developed a cultural politics that accepted the necessity of engaging with the products of the capitalist 'culture industry', without succumbing to the pacifying effects of what Marxists term 'commodity fetishism'.

The connection between national identity and the experience of war forces a question relevant to all home-front accounts of World War II: how to adequately portray a nation at war? That is the question which centrally motivated Humphrey Jennings' films Words for Battle (1941) and Listen to Britain (1942). This chapter explains how, in addressing this question, Jennings constructed representations that departed radically from extant practices characteristic of the nonfictional forms of newsreels. It discusses the way Jennings utilised the elements such as sound, image and nation in those films. In Words for Battle, Jennings uses extracts from literature and other texts as the basis of a commentary that cues images which expand the meanings and metaphorical connotations inherent in the texts. In Listen to Britain, the commentary is replaced by the masterful juxtaposition of sounds and images as the vehicle for narrative.

The military conquest of 1704 was followed by failure and frustration. The occupation of Gibraltar in the name of ‘King Charles III’ was not the prelude, as expected, to his triumphant enthronement in Madrid. As a result, and consequent upon partition and the containment of allied troops behind the walls of a fortified town at the south end of an isthmus on the tip of southern Europe, the problem arose as to who would thereafter govern Gibraltar, and how. There was the question of whether the separation between Gibraltar and mainland Spain would be reversed and, if so, how and on what terms. This chapter examines Gibraltar's government and politics during 1704–1819. It looks at the territory as a British fortress, military rule, civilian politics, cooperation and protest, and civic self-government. The chapter also explores efforts to bring Gibraltar constitutionally into line with towns in Britain and indeed in other parts of the eighteenth-century colonial empire.

This book speaks for historical actors who formed a large sector of the Irish population but who have not been noted or have been marginalized in the historical record. It examines the plight of poor, illegitimate and abused children to re-evaluate the Catholic influence in post-independence Irish society. It also provides a different interpretation of the relationship between and among the Catholic hierarchy, the political establishment and Irish people. The place of the family in Irish society is addressed. Irish society quickly became convulsed with misery, grief and anger, and all of that emotion was directed almost entirely at the Catholic Church. Legislation and parliamentary debates, government commission reports, annual reports of the Departments of Health, Education and Social Welfare, and the archival material of various government departments offer insight into official attitudes towards the state's responsibility in caring for poor, neglected and abused children.

Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men suggested that in studying the perpetrators of the Holocaust we were really looking into a mirror, which reflected a human potential for violence. As Browning acknowledged when applying the Alltagsgeschichte method, there was little that was 'everyday' about the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. The Alltagsgeschichte established that Germans were tied to the criminal policies of the Nazi state, whether they approved of them or not. During the Historikerstreit the idea of a European civil war was revived in an explanation of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. If Western societies have a history and heritage of genocide, then a new context for the study of Nazi genocides emerges. The links between colonialism and genocide have usually been drawn inside critiques of Western modernity and the political impacts of the spread of western power.

This chapter reviews the housing situation in Russian cities before the October Revolution. It also investigates the revolutionary government's attempts to develop a distinctly socialist housing policy in the chaotic conditions of the Civil War and War Communism, concentrating on their views on new byt and gender relations. Education and the encouragement of a more cultured outlook would play a significant role in the creation of new byt. Women were the principal targets of propaganda on new byt. It is suggested that this new byt was an awkward combination of a utopian vision of the new society and a set of rather mundane domestic goals. Appropriate housing was seen as a key element in the creation of gender equality. Women would hardly have the time to take part in the building of a new way of life because they struggled under the phenomenal workload.

This chapter focuses on a group of popular women writers, all of whom were applicants to the writers' charity, the Literary Fund (later the Royal Literary Fund). The picture that emerges from these writers' publications and their pleas to the Fund – the archives of which provide a rich and largely unmined seam of evidence concerning the material conditions, and rhetorical construction, of authorship – is illuminating. Increasingly presented as the degraded other against which the activities of the male professional were defined, women's work was to play an ever more central role in the discourse of authorship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the detriment of a number of its best-loved practitioners. Moreover, as gender became increasingly constitutive of literary authority at the turn of the century, so the discourse of authorship served more insistently to reinforce constructions of gender.

This chapter focuses on the politics of recognition that are so central to contemporary democratic thought. It analyses recognition in terms of its other modalities, espionage and camouflage. It describes the way in which liberal-democratic calls for recognition function to bracket alterity and explains what occurs within the so-called brackets of recognition. The analysis reveals that discourses of belonging in late liberalism produce injustice rather than justice, insofar as belonging is explicitly limited to those who are sufficiently ‘like us’.

This chapter compares and contrasts the opposing interpretations as a means of introducing the landscape upon which Holocaust studies has been constructed. It considers the differing conceptions of not only the Nazi past but the entire philosophical exercise of accessing the past, of writing history, upon which those opposing interpretations stood. The Institute of Contemporary History in Munich produced narratives of various aspects of the Nazi regime to support the German war crimes trials programme which began in 1958. The trial produced a Holocaust metanarrative which had antisemitism at its very centre. The chapter analyses Adolf Eichmann himself, in order to explain why he could stand as symbolic of the entire 'Final Solution' both in the court and in historiography. The prosecutorial narrative which indicted Eichmann's ideological intentions was typical of some emerging Holocaust historiography and as such had a much wider resonance than the Jerusalem court.

This chapter examines the relation between otherness and violence by inquiring into the language used to incite and defend group combat and genocide. It argues that when groups hold out the promise of immortality tied to group membership, this enables a paradigm of sacrifice that accommodates mass, systemic violence directed against groups distinguished by hereditary or religious differences. This chapter also reviews the means by which nation and religion create the structures appealing to their members' desire for immortality and analyses how this desire for immortality manifests in discourses of sacrifice. It also looks at first-person narratives referenced by Adolf Hitler and former U.S. President George Bush.

This chapter focuses on the BBC in Northern Ireland. Broadcasting in Northern Ireland was quite distinct from broadcasting in Scotland or Wales. The sectarian divide between Catholic and Protestant inevitably dominated BBC policy in Northern Ireland. Yet, despite the neutrality with which Northern Irish broadcasters sought to conduct themselves, the BBC in Northern Ireland strove to forge an ‘Ulster’ identity for the region. ‘Ulster’ represented an organic, primeval community, based on geography and history. Although the whole purpose of ‘Ulster’ identity was to represent the differences between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State in a way that minimized the role of religion, it was, de facto, a Protestant identity. In addition to this state-building function, the BBC in Northern Ireland represented a vital link to the rest of the Britain. Small and peripheral, Northern Ireland needed the BBC to reaffirm its Britishness as well as its regional identity. Indeed, the BBC itself became one of those institutions through which the Northern Irish Protestants could recognize their British national identity.

This chapter outlines the House of Lords reform since 1997 and the role of the Labour Party government in the reform agenda. It employs historical institutional theory to analyse the events, as well as the language of the attitudinal and contextual approaches in order to understand what did and did not happen. The attitudinal approach, while setting out the conditions required for parliamentary reform to succeed, also places a great deal of emphasis on the presence of political will, which the contextual approach indicates will is often lacking because of the way that institutional norms and values structure political life at Westminster, and shape the logic of appropriateness used by MPs to determine their goals and actions. The chapter also discusses New Labour's commitment to Lords reform, the House of Lords Bill and the amendment proposed by former Speaker of the Commons Bernard Weatherill, the creation of the Royal Commission on Reform of the House of Lords in February 1999, window of opportunity and political leadership, and the creation of the Joint Committee on House of Lords reform in 2002.

This chapter offers a theoretical framework for studying and understanding hegemonic discourses and their function and effects. This framework is based on a synthesis of comparative institutionalism and discourse theory, and is focused on the interaction between the hegemonic and the national public discourses. This chapter proposes an understanding of hegemonic discourse communication as an integral part of national ideology-production mechanisms. It also elaborates on how the concept of hegemonic discourses can be operationalised in terms of research strategy and methodology.