Life history and the Irish migrant experience in post-war England PDF Download

Author: Barry Hazley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526128020
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
What role does memory play in migrants’ adaption to the emotional challenges of migration? How are migrant selfhoods remade in relation to changing cultural myths? This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish Diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Based on richly contextualised case studies addressing experiences of emigration, urban life, work, religion, and the Troubles in England, chapters shed new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants and the circumstances that formed them, as well as the cultural and personal dynamics of subjective change over the life course. At the core of the book lie the processes by which migrants ‘recompose’ the self as part of ongoing efforts to adapt to the transition between cultures and places. Life history and the Irish migrant experience offers a fresh perspective on the significance of England’s largest post-war migrant group for current debates on identity and difference in contemporary Britain. Integrating historical, cultural and psychological perspectives in an innovative way, it will be essential reading for academics and students researching modern British and Irish social and cultural history, ethnic and migration studies, oral history and memory studies, cultural studies and human geography.

Author: Enda Delaney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199276676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This fascinating portrait of Britain's oldest migrant group combines rich historical detail with penetrating insights into the everyday experiences of the Irish who made Britain their home after 1945. The Irish in Post-war Britain reconstructs, with both empathy and imagination, the lives of the generation who left Ireland in huge numbers to work in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s. Its original approach demonstrates that any understanding of a migrant group must take account of both elements of the society that they had left as well as the social landscape of their new country, and explores the ethnic diversity of post-war Britain.

Author: Clair Wills
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141974966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Generous and empathetic ... opens up postwar migration in all its richness' Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian 'Groundbreaking, sophisticated, original, open-minded ... essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the transformation of British society after the war but also its character today' Piers Brendon, Literary Review 'Lyrical, full of wise and original observations' David Goodhart, The Times The battered and exhausted Britain of 1945 was desperate for workers - to rebuild, to fill the factories, to make the new NHS work. From all over the world and with many motives, thousands of individuals took the plunge. Most assumed they would spend just three or four years here, sending most of their pay back home, but instead large numbers stayed - and transformed the country. Drawing on an amazing array of unusual and surprising sources, Clair Wills' wonderful new book brings to life the incredible diversity and strangeness of the migrant experience. She introduces us to lovers, scroungers, dancers, homeowners, teachers, drinkers, carers and many more to show the opportunities and excitement as much as the humiliation and poverty that could be part of the new arrivals' experience. Irish, Bengalis, West Indians, Poles, Maltese, Punjabis and Cypriots battled to fit into an often shocked Britain and, to their own surprise, found themselves making permanent homes. As Britain picked itself up again in the 1950s migrants set about changing life in their own image, through music, clothing, food, religion, but also fighting racism and casual and not so casual violence. Lovers and Strangers is an extremely important book, one that is full of enjoyable surprises, giving a voice to a generation who had to deal with the reality of life surrounded by 'white strangers' in their new country.

Author: Roger Swift
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book illustrates the diversity of the Irish experience by reference to studies of specific towns and regions which have hitherto received little attention from historians of the Irish in Britain during the Victorian period.

Author: Jenny Hazelgrove
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719055591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Historians of modern British culture have long assumed that under pressure from secular forces, interest in spiritualism had faded by the end of the Great War. Jenny Hazelgrove challenges this assumption and shows how spiritualism grew between the wars and became part of the fabric of popular culture. This book provides a fascinating and lively insight into an alternative culture that flourished--and continues to flourish--alongside more conventional outlets for spiritual beliefs and needs.

Author: Paul O'Leary
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9780853238584
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
A collection of essays, the contributors to this volume describe the experiences of Irish migrants who moved to Wales. The essays also examine in depth the social and cultural impact the Irish immigrants made on the country.

Author: A. James Hammerton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719071331
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
The authors draw upon a rich life history archive of letters, diaries, personal photographs and oral history interviews with former migrants, including those who settled in Australia and those who returned to Britain. They offer original interpretations of key historical themes, including motivations for emigration; gender relations and the family dynamics of migration; the 'very familiar and awfully strange' confrontation with the new world; the anguish of homesickness and return; and the personal and national identities of both settlers and returnees, fifty years on. --book cover.

Author: Tyler Anbinder
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544103858
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
By an acclaimed historian, a sweeping history of the peoples who have come to New York for four centuries: a defining American story of millions of immigrants, hundreds of languages, and one great city. New York has been America’s city of immigrants for nearly four centuries. Growing from Peter Minuit’s tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million immigrants today, the city has always been a magnet for transplants from all over the globe. City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of New York’s immigrants, both famous and forgotten: the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, who condoned the murder of American industrialists as a means of aiding downtrodden workers; Dominican immigrant Oscar de la Renta, who dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama. Over ten years in the making, Tyler Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs. In so many ways, today’s immigrants are just like those who came to America in centuries past—and their stories have never before been told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit. "Told brilliantly, even unforgettably...An American story, one that belongs to all of us."—Boston Globe “A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness.”—New York Times Book Review

Author: Panikos Panayi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317864220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
Immigration, ethnicity, multiculturalism and racism have become part of daily discourse in Britain in recent decades – yet, far from being new, these phenomena have characterised British life since the 19th century. While the numbers of immigrants increased after the Second World War, groups such as the Irish, Germans and East European Jews have been arriving, settling and impacting on British society from the Victorian period onwards. In this comprehensive and fascinating account, Panikos Panayi examines immigration as an ongoing process in which ethnic communities evolve as individuals choose whether to retain their ethnic identities and customs or to integrate and assimilate into wider British norms. Consequently, he tackles the contradictions in the history of immigration over the past two centuries: migration versus government control; migrant poverty versus social mobility; ethnic identity versus increasing Anglicisation; and, above all, racism versus multiculturalism. Providing an important historical context to contemporary debates, and taking into account the complexity and variety of individual experiences over time, this book demonstrates that no simple approach or theory can summarise the migrant experience in Britain.

Author: Wendy Webster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351934333
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Gendering Migration demonstrates the significance of studying migration through the lens of gender and ethnicity and the contribution this perspective makes to migration histories. Through a consideration of the impact of migration on men and masculine identities as well as women and feminine identities, it extends our understanding of questions of gender and migration, focusing on the history of migration to Britain after the Second World War. The volume draws on oral narratives as well as documentary and archival research to demonstrate the important role played by gender and ethnicity, both in ideas and images of migrants and in migrants' own experiences. The contributors consider a range of migrant and refugee groups who came to Britain in the twentieth century: Caribbean, East-African Asian, German, Greek, Irish, Kurdish, Pakistani, Polish and Spanish. The fresh interpretations offered here make this an important new book for scholars and students of migration, ethnicity, gender and modern British history.