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Introduction In the historiography of interwar Britain, the narrative is often dominated by the shadow of the two world wars or the economic misery of the Great Depression. Yet, beneath the surface of high politics and economic statistics, a fierce cultural struggle was being waged for the soul of the nation. It was a “civil war” fought not with munitions, but with information. The combatants were two emerging superpowers of the twentieth century: the popular press, headquartered in the chaotic, ink-stained bustle of Fleet Street, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, enshrined in the cool, white stone fortress of Broadcasting House.…
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Introduction The narrative of British modernism has long been dominated by the spectral presence of the Bloomsbury Group. The intellectual geography of the early twentieth century is frequently mapped around the squares of WC1, defined by the stream-of-consciousness experiments of Virginia Woolf, the formalist aesthetics of Roger Fry, and the intimate ethical philosophy of G.E. Moore. This version of modernism is interior, domestic, and fiercely individualistic. It is a modernism of the drawing room and the private mind. However, as the jazz age of the 1920s gave way to the “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s, the trajectory of British…
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Introduction In January 1929, a new periodical appeared on the British newsstands, inserting itself quietly but firmly between the dense columns of The Times Literary Supplement and the sensationalist headlines of the Daily Mail. It was titled The Listener. Its cover was austere, its typography modern, and its provenance formidable: it was the publishing arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation. For the next sixty years, The Listener would serve as one of the most significant cultural barometers in British history. However, in the historiography of the twentieth century, it has often been relegated to a footnote, viewed merely as a transcript service for the radio. This…
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This article examines the pervasive and vehement antijazz crusade of the 1920s as a significant cultural phenomenon that reveals profound anxieties about race, modernity, and social order in post-World War I America. It argues that the widespread condemnation of jazz music by medical authorities, religious leaders, social reformers, and public intellectuals functioned as a proxy war against the rapid social transformations of the Jazz Age, with the music serving as a potent symbol for broader fears regarding racial integration, sexual liberation, and the erosion of Victorian morality. Through analysis of primary source discourse from the period, this article categorizes the…