Time-Travellers, Divali, and Pork Pies
One of the central questions of our research is the vexed question of conservatism. Historians working from an explicitly left-wing perspective have tended to see the large-scale civic pageants of the first half of the twentieth century as attempts to re-assert class structures and invented ideas of a 'traditional' society. By portraying a long and varied history, pageant-masters aimed to give a sense of stability to a rapidly industrialised and urbanised nation. Not surprisingly, this ...