During the crisis of the Second World War in Britain, official Air Raid Precautions made the management of daily life a moral obligation of civil defence by introducing new prescriptions for the care of homes, animals, and persons displaced through evacuation. This book examines how the Mass-Observation movement recorded and shaped the logics of care that became central to those daily routines in homes and neighbourhoods. Kimberly Mair looks at how government publicity campaigns communicated new instructions for care formally, while the circulation of wartime rumours negotiated these instructions informally. These rumours, she argues, explicitly repudiated the improper socialization of evacuees and also produced a salient, but contested, image of the host as a good wartime citizen who was impervious to the cultural invasion of the ostensibly 'animalistic', dirty, and destructive house guest. Mair also considers the explicit contestations over the value of the lives of pets, conceived as animals who do not work with animal caregivers whose use of limited provisions or personal sacrifice could then be judged in the context of wartime hardship. Together, formal and informal instructions for caregiving reshaped everyday habits in the war years to an idealized template of the good citizen committed to the war and nation, with Mass-Observation enacting a watchful form of care by surveilling civilian feeling and habit in the process.

Few historical events have resonated as much in modern British culture as the Second World War. It has left a rich legacy in a range of media that continue to attract a wide audience: film, TV and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The enduring presence of the war in the public world is echoed in its ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with stories of the Second World War being recounted through the generations. This collection brings together recent historical work on the cultural memory of the war, examining its presence in family stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.

The Historical Contexts and Contemporary Uses of Mass Observation embraces new approaches and themes that highlight Mass Observation's long history as an innovative research organization, a social movement, and an archival project. Spanning the period from Mass Observation's inception to the present day, essay authors discuss a wide range of topics including anthropology, history, popular politics, cultural studies, literature, selfhood, emotion, art and visual studies. Indeed, what emerges across this volume is confirmation that engagement with Mass Observation-whether its historical materials or those produced in the last decade-is crucial to understanding the vast array of experiences that make up British life.

How will the Covid-19 pandemic be remembered? What did it mean to people? How did it feel? This book provides a compelling account of the pandemic as it was experienced in the UK. Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic is a democratic history based on the 5,000 diaries collected by Mass Observation on 12 May 2020. It is a record of what many of these diarists wrote, from a wide range of positions, in a variety of voices and on a wealth of different subjects. The book shines a light on their lives on the day in question, their experiences during the first two months of the pandemic, and their hopes and fears for the coming months and years. The diaries capture much of everyday life in the pandemic for millions of people in the UK and beyond: the activities, events, and rituals (from funerals to working from home); the sites and stages (from shops to Zoom); the roles and categories (from 'key workers' to 'vulnerable groups'); the frames (from luck to 'the new normal'); and the moods (from anxiety to grief). In these diaries, we see what people did when the pandemic arrived in the UK, but also what people thought and felt – how they interpreted the pandemic experience and gave it meaning. We see both how the nation responded and the nation who responded. The book also includes two essays offering expert contextualisation of the diaries and discussion of their value for narrating the pandemic and presenting everyday life.

In this original volume, Jennifer J. Purcell and Fiona Courage curate and contextualize the rich archival materials of social research organisation Mass-Observation on the British popular imagination of the monarchy and the royal family between 1937 and 2022. From the coronation of George VI in 1937 to Elizabeth II's death – via war, weddings, a jubilee and a tragedy – this book incorporates everything from diaries and detailed responses to questionnaires, internal organisational documents and published reports on popular attitudes to royalty in order to reveal the complex nature of Britain's relationship with its monarchy in the modern era. How does the British public imagine the monarchy and its role in British society and governance? What is the relationship between the British people and the Crown? Using material from Mass-Observation, which has been asking these questions for over 80 years, Reflections on British Royalty gets to the heart of these issues and more besides.

What do people believe about death and the afterlife? How do they negotiate the relationship between science and religion? How do they understand apparently paranormal events? What do they make of sensations of awe, wonder or exceptional moments of sudden enlightenment? The volunteer mass observers responded to such questions with a freshness, openness and honesty which compels attention. Using this rich material, Mass Observers Making Meaning captures the extraordinarily diverse landscape of belief and disbelief to be found in Britain in the late 20th-century, at a time when Christianity was in steep decline, alternative spiritualities were flourishing and atheism was growing. Divided as they were about the ultimate nature of reality, the mass observers were united in their readiness to puzzle about life's larger questions. Listening empathetically to their accounts, James Hinton – himself a convinced atheist – seeks to bring divergent ways of finding meaning in human life into dialogue with one another, and argues that we can move beyond the cacophony of conflicting beliefs to an understanding of our common need and ability to seek meaning in our lives.

Introduction. Read, Listen, Obey and Keep a Good Heart -- Keeping Watch Over the Population -- Verminous Houseguests and Good Hosts: Evacuation Stories -- Lazy Dogs -- Confused Animacies on the Home Front -- Careless Homes Cost Lives.