Böcker av John K. Walton

Awarded 2013 PROSE Honorable Mention in Media & Cultural Studies With the resurgent interest in his work today, this is a timely reevaluation of this foundational figure in Cultural Studies, a critical but friendly review of both Hoggart's work and reputation.

Focusing on the formative influence of the works of John Ruskin in defining and developing cultural tourism, this book describes and assesses their effects on the 'tourist gaze' ('where to go and what to see', and how to see it) as directed at landscape, scenery, architecture and townscape, from the early Victorian period onwards.

Assesses its significance in relation to earlier and subsequent reform legislation.

Examines the major aspects of Disraeli's career and his legacy, asking how far his actions were governed by principles and how far by expediency.

During the first part of the twentieth century thousands of working-class New Yorkers flocked to Coney Island in search of a release from their workaday lives and the values of bourgeois society. On the other side of the Atlantic, British workers headed off to the beach resort of Blackpool for entertainment and relaxation. However, by the middle of the century, a new type of park began to emerge, providing well-ordered, squeaky-clean, and carefully orchestrated corporate entertainment. Contrasting the experiences of Coney Island and Blackpool with those of Disneyland and Beamish, Gary S. Cross and John K. Walton explore playful crowds and the pursuit of pleasure in the twentieth century to offer a transatlantic perspective on changing ideas about leisure, class, and mass culture. Blackpool and Coney Island were the definitive playgrounds of the industrial working class. Teeming crowds partook of a gritty vulgarity that offered a variety of pleasures and thrills from roller coaster rides and freak shows to dance halls and dioramas of exotic locales. Responding to the new money and mobility of the working class, the purveyors of Coney Island and Blackpool offered the playful crowd an "e;industrial saturnalia."e;Cross and Walton capture the sights and sounds of Blackpool and Coney Island and consider how these "e;Sodoms by the sea"e; flouted the social and cultural status quo. The authors also examine the resorts' very different fates as Coney Island has now become a mere shadow of its former self while Blackpool continues to lure visitors and offer new attractions. The authors also explore the experiences offered at Disneyland and Beamish, a heritage park that celebrates Britain's industrial and social history. While both parks borrowed elements from their predecessors, they also adapted to the longings and concerns of postwar consumer culture. Appealing to middle-class families, Disney provided crowds a chance to indulge in child-like innocence and a nostalgia for a simpler time. At Beamish, crowds gathered to find an escape from the fragmented and hedonistic life of modern society in a reconstructed realm of the past where local traditions and nature prevail.

Rejecting what he perceives as "the massive condescension of posterity" in neglecting its importance, the author traces the origins of the fish-and-chip trade, setting its economic, social and political context, charting its spread and analyzing its sources and methods of supply.

If England was 'the first industrial nation', Lancashire was emphatically the first industrial county the first to develop, over a wide area, the combination of steam-powered factory industry and urban sprawl which says 'Industrial Revolution' to most people. It was also one the first fully industrialised areas to experience catastrophic economic decline in the inter-war years. Much has been written about particular aspects of the Lancashire industrial experience, and the social causes and consequences of the changes that took place, but there is not full-length social history of the county as a whole, looking at developments in the long run and comparing and contrasting the patterns of change in the south-eastern textile district, on Merseyside and north of the Ribble. An explanation of Lancashire's unique social history since Elizabethan times is long overdue, and Lancashire a social history, 1558-1939 puts forward a distinctive point of view on the many areas of controversy. How did the 'Industrial Revolution' affect working-class living standards? Why did Lancashire become a stronghold both of Puritan activism and Roman Catholic survival, and what were the long-term consequences of this? Was the 'Industrial Revolution' really funded by the profits of the slave trade? Why was working-class Lancashire in the nineteenth century apparently first Chartist, then Conservative? Was Lancashire the original centre and true home of 'Victorian values', of a culture of thrift, enterprise and self-reliance?This is the first social history of an English county to span the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth, looking at all levels of society and analysing politics and the power structures as well as technological innovation and material wealth.More importantly, it studies a particular vital and controversial place and period, and takes account of continuities as well as changes. Aimed at the sixth former and general reader as well as the academic market, it should become essential reading for historians, and historical geographers, sociologists and economists.

This is the first detailed academic cultural study of therise and fall of the seaside holiday in Britain. This book offers anentertaining and broad interpretation of the holidays and resorts. -- .