A History of Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century Scotland

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.

Lynn Abrams is Professor of Gender History at the University of Glasgow. Callum G. Brown is Professor of Religious and Cultural History at the University of Dundee.