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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: David Cowan, "Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939–2009" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Description: The inter-war period (1918–1939) is still remembered as a period of mass deprivation – the 'hungry thirties'. But how did this impression emerge? Thousands of conversations about life in the inter-war period – between parents and children around the dinner table; among workmates at the pub – shaped these understandings. In turn, these fed into popular politics. Stories about the embryonic welfare system in the early-twentieth century informed how people felt towards the National Health Service; memories of the Great Depression shaped arguments about state intervention in the economy.Challenging accounts of widespread political disengagement in the twentieth century, Politics of the Past...