{"id":688,"date":"2008-06-11T11:10:26","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T11:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/06\/because-im-daft.html"},"modified":"2008-06-11T11:10:26","modified_gmt":"2008-06-11T11:10:26","slug":"because-im-daft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/06\/because-im-daft.html","title":{"rendered":"Because I’m daft"},"content":{"rendered":"

I pitched all the other reading on the sidebar for Austerity Britain <\/a><\/em>, a history of England after World War II.
\nI had been interested in the book since hearing the author David Kynaston on BBC4’s Start the Week <\/em>some months back<\/a>. What stuck with me was his remark that every survey done of English people after the war inquiring as to what kind of homes they would like in the massive rebuilding that was going to take place indicated that desired above all was a bit of privacy and just enough space for a garden. Even a small one.
\nSo what was the emphasis of the post-war housing efforts?
\nApartments.
\nOf course!
\nThe bigger themes that drew me to the book,\u00a0 were those which always seem to draw me: unintended consequences, what the Powers That Be think is best for The People (no matter what The People think) as well as the fundamentals of historical exigency and context. I am very big on understanding context, always and everywhere.\u00a0 England’s plunge into a greater state involvement in economic and social matters after the war can only be understood in the shadow of the war itself and the privations which the people had endured during that time. There was a real sense that this post-war era offered a chance to a) fix some real problems afflicting the country – class division, poor health, inequitable schooling, work conditions and so on and b) to “reward” the people, in a sense, for their great sacrifices during the war.
\nBut as I said…unintended consequences…
\nIt’s a fascinating book – I’m about halfway through and will blog more when I’m finished. A great deal of the material, aside from the usual sources, \u00a0is derived from the work of Mass-Observation<\/a>, an effort to record the opinions of the British people based on individual diarists as well as the work of researchers on the street both interviewing subjects as well as simply recording conversations they heard. Another major source is an impressive scouring of published autobiographies and diaries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I pitched all the other reading on the sidebar for Austerity Britain , a history of England after World War II. I had been interested in the book since hearing the author David Kynaston on BBC4’s Start the Week some months back. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}