This study of the transformation of popular leisure in Cumbria between the middle of Victoria's reign and the outbreak of the Second World War draws principally on oral evidence and the archives of the local press, and covers all areas of leisure from pastimes within the home to pub-going, church and chapel activities, sport, amateur and professional music, dancing, the stage and screen, and the enjoyment of public holidays. Distributed by St. Martin's. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book traces the history of the relationship between work and leisure, from the ‘leisure preference’ of male workers in the eighteenth century, through the increase in working hours in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to their progressive decline from 1830 to 1970. It examines how trade union action was critical in achieving the decline; how class structured the experience of leisure; how male identity was shaped by both work and leisure; how, in a society that placed high value on work, a ‘leisured class’ was nevertheless at the apex of political and social power – until it became thought of as ‘the idle rich’. Coinciding with the decline in working hours, two further tranches of time were marked out as properly without work: childhood and retirement. Accessible, wide-ranging and occasionally polemical, this book provides the first history of how we have imagined and used time.

The Emergence of Football fuses sports history into mainstream economic, social and cultural history, setting the development of the people’s game against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution. The book challenges conventional histories of nineteenth-century football that surrounded mass games and the public schools and extends the revisionist critique of those histories with the imaginative use of new and original empirical evidence. It outlines the continuing presence of a working-class footballing culture across the century, arguing that the structure of football was a product of industrialisation, urbanisation and population growth that had resulted in a far-reaching restructuring of the class system and urban hierarchies. It was these new hierarchies and class system that gave birth to professional football by the late 1870s. It is essential reading for students of sports studies, economic, social and cultural history, urban and local history, and sociology, as well as a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football across the world. This is an absorbing and fascinating read for any of the millions of fans of the game who are interested in the early history of football.

This original and fresh approach to the emotions of adolescence focuses on the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men in the inter-war years. Being Boys challenges many stereotypes about their behaviour. It offers new perspectives on familiar and important themes in interwar social and cultural history, ranging from the cinema and mass consumption to boys’ clubs, personal advice pages, street cultures, dancing, sexuality, mobility and the body. It draws on many autobiographies and personal accounts and is particularly distinctive in offering an unusual insight into working-class adolescence through the teenage diaries of the author’s father, which are interwoven with the book’s broader analysis of contemporary leisure developments. Being Boys will be of interest to scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences and is also relevant to those teaching and studying in the fields of child development, education, and youth and community studies.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

Informative, vivid and richly illustrated, this volume explores the history of England's northern borders – the former counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Durham, Westmorland and the Furness areas of Lancashire – across 1000 years. The book explores every aspect of this changing scene, from the towns and poor upland farms of early modern Cumbria to life in the teeming communities of late Victorian Tyneside. In their final chapters the authors review the modern decline of these traditional industries and the erosion of many of the region's historical characteristics.