A History of Everyday Life in Twentieth Century Scotland

Edited by Lynn Abrams and Callum Brown

Scottish culture in the twentieth century changed more rapidly and dramatically than previous centuries. The patterns of people's lives today would be unrecognizable to their nineteenth-century ancestors, and by examining the bodies, homes, working lives, rituals, beliefs, and consumer practices of Scots over this turbulent century, this volume reveals the composition of the very substance of everyday Scottish life. Employing novel persepctives and methods, it traces both intimate and mass changes in work, art, and the experience of death. The book accounts for Scots' conception of themselves and their homes and the process through which the oppressive community rules of "old Scotland" broke down as the country reinvented itself and its culture. This volume brings together leading cultural historians of twentieth-century Scotland to study the key spaces in which daily experience is made and to expose the controversial personal and national politics that ritual and practice can generate.

Related Subjects

• European History

About the Author

Lynn Abrams is professor of gender history at Glasgow University. She teaches, researches, and publishes in the fields of modern European and modern Scottish history and is the author of The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland’s Broken Homes, 1840 to the Present (1998). Her recent articles concern fatherhood in Scotland and the history of women in Shetland, and she has just completed Respectability and Revolution: A History of Women in Nineteenth Century Europe for Pearson. Callum Brown is professor of religious and cultural history at the University of Strathclyde and editor of the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies.

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