Ian Cooke, Lead Curator in International Studies and Politics at the British Library and co-curator of the new Propaganda exhibition writes about propaganda songs and national anthems. Join in with his quick Friday quiz!

Well, that was embarrassing. I’ve been checking and making final notes on the recorded sound that we’ll be including in Propaganda: Power and Persuasion. I’d settled in to one of the SoundServer terminals in the Humanities Reading Room and called up the recording of the Four Vagabonds performing Rosie the Riveter (my favourite song in the exhibition). I put on the headphones and the music started – much more quietly than I was used to. As I was searching for a way to turn up the volume, I noticed a couple of people nearby looking at me with some puzzlement. Eventually one came over. ‘I don’t think that your headphones are plugged in’.

Well, there are worse propaganda songs that you can play out loud. All the same, my apologies to anyone I disturbed that day, and who may have strains of Rosie the Riveter in their head. It’s a catchy tune, almost matched by Potato Pete – which is sung by Betty Driver, who would later become famous as the long-standing character Betty Turpin in Coronation Street.


Above: Potato Pete

Another highlight from listening to music for the exhibition has been uncovering recordings of early versions of the Chinese play/opera ‘White Haired Girl’ – a play which uses a mix of traditional tale and more-contemporary stories circulating during the 1940s to portray communism and the Communist Party as a force of liberation in rural communities. These discs look like they were produced pretty quickly - one looks like it has finger imprints from somebody involved in the manufacture – and they capture an early performance of the play.

Above: White Haired Girl

National anthems are another important way in which states can provide a simple and unifying story about their values or history. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been looking into the histories and lyrics of a number of anthems. The origins of many are bound to a particular part of that nation’s history and often reflect a period of crisis as much as a period of birth or rebirth. What’s also striking, is that, although states do sometimes involve themselves in fairly formal procedures for choosing anthems, such as competitions or organising popular votes, often the choice of an anthem comes first from popular use and adoption. Sometimes it’s only much later that a state formally adopts an anthem that had been in use as such for generations.

I’ll finish this post with a quick national anthems quiz (sorry, no prizes):

1. The official version of which country’s anthem is sung using 5 languages?

2. Which country (other than Italy) refers to Italy in the chorus of its anthem?

3. The anthem for which intergovernmental organisation has no words – instead using the ‘universal language of music’?

Answers next week.

Ian Cooke, Lead Curator in International Studies and Politics at the British Library and co-curator of the new Propaganda exhibition, writes about the background to the exhibition and about how decisions were made about the focus and content.

The posters are up all around the building this morning, and it’s just under two weeks to go until Propaganda: Power and Persuasion opens on Friday 17 May. It’s an exciting and slightly strange feeling for me, after two years planning and working on the exhibition. I’ve been co-curating Propaganda with Jude England, Head of Social Sciences, and with the enormous support from a very large group of curators and others in the British Library and elsewhere too. As the exhibition runs, I hope that you will be able to hear from them too.

Right now though, here’s some background on how the exhibition came together and some of the themes that we’ll discuss. Initially we were just impressed by the diversity of materials from around the world that we could show, and the opportunity to put on an exhibition that would be visually stunning. Propaganda encompasses many different methods across all types of media. Also, we were struck by how many definitions there were for propaganda and how they didn’t always agree. So, to keep things manageable, we decided to focus on state use of propaganda over the past 100 years. State use because most discussions of propaganda identified states as the most significant users; and past 100 years as the 20^th and 21^st centuries have experienced a huge increase in the volume, variety and tactics in propaganda.

   Propaganda: Power and Persuasion - coming soon! 

It was this point that brought home to us how significant a subject it is to be discussing today. All of our lives are affected by propaganda on a scale that would have been unknown 100 years ago, and we all react to that propaganda in different ways, including in how we define and recognise propaganda in the world around us. Over the past two years, we’ve seen the use of new and old media in communicating political change in the Middle East. More recently, news reports from North Korea have reminded us of the use of state propaganda on a large scale. In the UK, there has been close scrutiny and discussion of the relationship between newspapers and the state. The Olympic Games and the Jubilee celebrations both provided examples of the ways in which we describe ourselves and the UK both within this country and to the wider world. In the last few weeks, the debate over the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, and the announcement that Winston Churchill will appear on the next Bank of England banknote, reminds us of the significance and controversy surrounding the ways in which public figures are memorialised.

Our exhibition looks at propaganda as used across these different themes: in binding a nation together and projecting national power; in demonising people, either within or outside a state; in fighting wars and in fighting disease. We’ll end by looking at what is changing in the 21^st century, and particularly how social media is providing new ways to influence public debate – and to challenge propaganda. We’re interested in your views and reactions to our exhibitions and events and hope that you will join the debate on Twitter #BLPropaganda.

Calling all researchers and developers!

Our colleagues at BL Labs have launched a new competition. Propose an innovative and transformative project that answers a research question using the British Library's digital collections / data and if your idea is chosen, the Labs team will work with you to make it happen and you could win a prize of up to £3,000.

From the digitisation of thousands of books, newspapers and manuscripts, the collecting of UK websites, bird sounds or location data for our maps, over the last two decades we’ve been faithfully amassing a vast and wide-ranging digital collection for the nation. What remains elusive however is understanding what researchers need in place in order to unlock the potential for new discoveries within these fascinating and diverse digital collections. The Labs competition is designed to attract scholars, explorers and trailblazers to the Library who see the potential for new and innovative research lurking within these immense digital collections. Through soliciting innovative and transformative projects utilising this content you will be giving us a steer as to the types of platforms, arrangements, services and tools needed to surface it. We’ll even throw the Library’s resources behind you to make your idea a reality.

To find out more, visit the competition pages (deadline for submission of ideas is the 26 June 2013), sign up to the wiki,  express your interest and participate in one of the related events, virtually (17 May 2013, 1500 GMT), hack event in London on the 28 and 29 May, 2013 or one of our roadshow events, or hack event in London on the 28 and 29 May, 2013

Good luck!

This post originally appeared on the British Library digital scholarship blog here and was posted by Mahendra Mahey. Follow BL Labs on Twitter @BL_Labs.

The British Library is rolling out a new look for its blogs. The design has changed, but the content will stay the same. Our social sciences blog will continue to cover our social science collections, events and research as well as discussion about methodologies and resources. We hope you will enjoy the new look blogs and that you’ll find them easier to read and use! Try the search, for example.

All change all change © Elsie Esq under creative commons attribuition license

Dr Peter Johnston is a freelance researcher, copywriter and editor, who recently worked on researching and writing labels and other text to accompany our Propaganda: Power and Persuasion exhibition. You can follow him on Twitter @PeteAJohnston. Here, Peter describes his experience, and explains the background to one of our exhibits.

When I began conducting research on the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, I was a little daunted by the task. I’m no stranger to research, far from it - but here was a massive project, more than 200 objects that needed to be researched and explored in quite a short space of time, with the results written up and presented to an audience that will number in the tens of thousands.

The obvious question was where to start? Propaganda is not a new concept, and if you visit the exhibition you’ll see that, while it has not always been known by that name, propaganda stretches back as far as Ancient Greece and Rome – and probably further. So in order to tackle this massive project I started in the most logical place: the beginning.

Using Explore, the British Library’s catalogue, meant that I had access to thousands of books and articles on the subjectfrom which to extract knowledge. The ability to handle original documents and study the original productions was truly remarkable. The problem of where to start soon became one of how I could possibly fit in all of the fantastic information. Apart from the fascinating objects displayed in the exhibition, I was able to find out about aspects of propaganda that I never knew existed and some of the stories that surrounded them.

One of the most striking examples of this was the propaganda employed by the American colonists in the War of Independence. The colonists who wished for revolution were very conscious of the importance of public opinion and propaganda in promoting and attracting popular support for their cause. Boston was the Revolution’s propaganda nerve centre, the hub from which the majority of propaganda emanated.

Initially, propaganda was orchestrated by figures such as Samuel Adams through the Boston Gazette, and his depiction of the Boston Tea Party was a propagandist triumph. Adams later headed the Boston-based Committee of Correspondence, which became the chief agent of persuasion and propaganda used by American politicians seeking initially to further the cause of ‘no taxation without representation’, and targeted both British and Canadian public opinion. In time, the propaganda came to foster calls for independence.

American revolutionary propaganda was diverse, incorporating words and images. Entertainment was politicised to further the cause and Liberty Songs and plays depicting recent events were common. Other propaganda included poems, paintings, and printed caricatures. Pamphlets by authors such as Richard Price and Thomas Paine (copies of which are in the British Library) sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and General George Washington had Paine’s writings read to his troops to motivate them and raise morale before the successful Battle of Trenton, at a time when morale amongst the Continental Army was perilously low. When reading them now you can see why, as they include quotes such as this:

‘These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country... Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.’

(Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, 1776)

The British counter-attacked on the propaganda front with their own pamphlets and leaflets, but the Americans certainly won the propaganda war. They even went international, and Benjamin Franklin was despatched as an Ambassador to France in order to enlist French support and worked closely with French publishers so as to gain support amongst the wider populace. This work resulted in direct French military involvement later in the war. Similarly, John Adams also went to Amsterdam to continue and support the work Franklin was doing in Paris.

  The Massachusetts Calendar, 1772

This is one aspect of a diverse and detailed history behind just one exhibit that features in the exhibition, a Paul Revere engraving of the events in Boston of 5 March, 1770.

What was truly amazing is that, despite the evolution of propaganda mediums with the growth of mass media, the central methodologies and motivations remain the same. Propaganda remains a tool for spreading messages and influencing opinion, a vital exercise in the spreading and consolidation of power that was recognised by Alexander the Great as much as it is in the 21^st century.

Useful information

'Propaganda: Power and Persuasion' launches on 17 May 2013. For more information see the 'What's On' pages. To join in the converstation on Twitter use #BLPropaganda

Bridget Lockyer, a PhD student at the University of York, reviews the TSRC conference which was held at the British Library in April 2013.

In 2013, the voluntary sector is in a state of flux and disruption. After a period of expansion and mainstreaming under New Labour, a change in the political and economic climate has led to scaling back of financial support and a different ideological approach to the voluntary sector and the provision of welfare in general. This has led to questions about the role of the voluntary sector in the UK and how organisations can adjust to this new environment.

The TSRC was established in 2008 with the aim to enhance knowledge of the sector through independent and critical research. A collaborative project between the University of Birmingham and the University of Southampton, it received five years of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Office for Civil Society (previously the Office of the Third Sector) and the Barrow Cadbury Trust. As this current funding is set to end, the event at the British Library on 19^th April was a chance for practitioners, researchers and policy makers to discuss the key issues facing the sector and contribute to the TSRC’s Futures Dialogue.

The conference was also an occasion to reflect on the vast amount of current third sector research and the resources available to those within and those researching the sector. TSRC director, Pete Alcock, informed us that the TSRC has produced almost 100 working papers on the current state and future of the voluntary sector. We were also reminded about the TSRC’s Knowledge Portal, an online and searchable library which collates academic papers, reports by voluntary organisations and government policy documents. This is a really useful tool for those seeking third sector evidence. Head of Social Sciences at The British Library, Jude England, discussed the Social Welfare Portal, launched in December 2012 as a single point of access to its print and digital collections of research and information on social welfare policy development, implementation and evaluation. Fiona Armstrong from the ESRC reiterated their continuing commitment to third sector research, via the Big Data Investment and the Centre and Large Grants capital funding initiative.

The day was organised into five themed workshops: People, Organisations, Resources, Independence and Impact. I had chosen ‘Workshop A: People’ which focused on the voluntary sector workforce, volunteering, skills and training, chaired by Stephen McKay (TSRC) with Keith Mogford (Skills-Third Sector) speaking. Keith discussed some of the challenges facing the voluntary sector workforce, including underemployment (as full-time, permanent roles are scarce); constrained training budgets; organisations playing it safe in recruitment decisions (chosing experience over enthusiasm); lack of long-term strategic planning and increased job insecurity. He also summarised the preliminary findings of the Marsh Review, a review commissioned by Nick Hurd, minister for civil society, which, through holding a series of conversations with key figures in the third sector, set out to recommend ways in which the sector can maintain and improve its skills. The recommendations Keith outlined were: increased digital fluency; better use and sharing of data; higher standard of governance; greater enterprise and innovation; more effective collaboration, the building of effective entry routes to and through the sector (for graduates and school-leavers) and better leadership development and management. The workshop group were very interested in these findings and the review’s recommendations and there was a general sense of despair about the false economy of short termism within the sector.

The discussion moved on to talk about young people, internships, apprenticeships and volunteering and the moral dilemmas inherent in providing and managing unpaid work. I was particularly interested in a discussion about the career routes into and through the sector as this was very relevant for my own research. The group considered how the voluntary sector could accentuate the strengths of work in the sector to attract graduates and school leavers. The distinctiveness of a career in the sector was examined, e.g. the horizontal rather than vertical career progression; the ‘portfolio’ or ‘rucksack’ career format and the fluidity and movement within the sector. Although the group devised two different questions to ask in the following ‘question time’ panel session, the question that stuck in my head was the age-old ‘what makes the voluntary sector different?’. To be specific, does/should the voluntary sector have a special commitment to provide jobs and a greater sense of responsibility (compared to other sectors) in the treatment of its workforce? I was left pondering these questions as we moved into the final sessions.

During the next session chaired by Sara Llewellin from Barrow Cadbury Trust, panel members Debra Allcock Tyler, Jonathon Breckon, Caroline Slocock, Karl Wilding and Pete Alcock were asked the workshops’ questions. The questions and answers focused on what the core values of the sector should be, the value of collaboration and partnership working, how to maintain voluntary sector assertiveness and its relationships with other sectors and organisations. This was a friendly and lively discussion, which gave a great overview of the current debates taking place within the voluntary sector.

The final plenary was given by David Walker, an ESRC council member. He expressed some criticism of the current government’s approach to empirical evidence, describing today as the best and worst of times to be a researcher of public policy. I agreed with him to a large extent but was unsure of the suggestion that those who research the voluntary sector could themselves be ‘moral heroes’, mindful of Debra Allcock Tyler’s comment in the previous session that ‘the voluntary sector does not have the monopoly on good intentions or worthy actions’.

It can often be quite difficult and frustrating to bring together different stakeholders who have diverse experiences and perspectives, but it is always worth doing. Overall, the conference provided an excellent networking opportunity and generated some stimulating discussion on the current condition of the voluntary sector and what its future role might be.

Bridget Lockyer is in the second year of an AHRC funded PhD at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. She is researching women’s experiences of volunteering and working in the community and voluntary sector since the 1970s.

This blog post was originally published on Bridget’s blog: bridgetlockyer.wordpress.com and has been posted here with her permission. All views expressed are her own. Bridget has also blogged for the Guardian.

The forthcoming Myths and Realities event at the British Library (to be held on 29 April) will explore whether we ‘work to live or live to work'? Many of us are working longer hours than ever before, and the age of retirement is increasing, while at the same time there is increasing job satisfaction reported many areas. The event will consider whether work is a means to an end or if it is the end itself. In this post, Toby Austin Locke explores the idea of work in our society.

We all have those mornings when we wake up and breathe a deep sigh at the prospect of dragging ourselves from bed, to return to our office or place of work to start all over again. Even those of us who are lucky enough to work in jobs we enjoy, in which I thankfully include myself, every so often face a sinking feeling at the sound of the six o’clock alarm. Our dreams of youth, of being an artist, musician or robot, seem distant absurdities, the follies of youthful imagination.

We all have these moments of despair at the reality of work, at realising we have become something other than the object of our dreams, but as far as I know there is only one case of someone having woken up to find themselves transformed to a giant bug…Ok, maybe not a real case, I do know that Kakfa’s Metamorphosis (2009) isn’t a true story. But regardless of whether it is factual or literary, the point remains the same

Franz Kafka, 1906 

The transformation of Gregor in the Metamorphosis is often considered to mirror Kafka’s life. As his diaries and correspondence (1982) show us, he was torn between a deep dissatisfaction with his job and an immense guilt resulting from his desire to write. His family, and particularly his father, did not consider authorship a worthy way to spend his life – he should work, work hard, and earn good money to support himself and his family. His writings demonstrate the clear anguish these conflicting interests caused within him.

This guilt that arose within Kafka was explored by avant-garde French theorist Georges Bataille in one of his later works, Literature and Evil (1985). In the only existing television interview with Bataille he discusses how Kafka is exemplary in showing how literature is on the side of ‘evil’, of how “writing is the opposite of working” (1958). This seems like an odd statement, and not particularly logical - Bataille is known for his off the wall propositions, next to statements such as “the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space” (1988), the claim that writing is ‘evil’ looks like common sense.

A little contextualisation helps to uncover what is meant by this statement. Bataille comes from a line of philosophy that, following from Nietzsche, considers ‘evil’ as an entirely relative component of socially constructed values and moral codes. ‘Good and evil’ do not hold the same absolute qualities in this way of thinking, as they do in, say, the Christian way of considering morality. ‘Good and evil’ are produced by society’s moral standards and expectations.

German sociologist Max Weber famously described the Protestant work ethic as part of “the spirit of capitalism” (2011). The notion of working hard, of bringing your best to a job whatever that job may be, of being useful, productive, and noble in your labour was considered by Weber as central to capitalist societies’ moral codes. And you can certainly see his point, Government employment policy, as a browse of the employment section of the British Library’s Social Welfare Portal will show, has long been oriented around ensuring people contribute their labour to society, ensuring people are useful and productive. This notion is ever more salient in contemporary government rhetoric, and one could barely ask for a better example than the opening line of George Osborne’s latest budget speech, where he declared “this is a budget for people who aspire to work hard and get on” (2013).

This helps us understand what Bataille means by his statement; what he is saying is that literature goes against this productive work ethic and as this work ethic is generally considered virtuous and ‘good’, the unproductive act of writing literature, the non-useful expenditure of time that it entails, is ‘evil’. Literature is an unproductive use of time and energy.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once considered hunter-gather societies as The Original Affluent Society (2004). He outlined how it was precisely because these societies did not have the drive to work, to produce, because it was considered virtuous, that they were more affluent. These social groups do not work because of a moral code that considers work ‘good’, that insists that the use of time must be focused on productivity and utility, they work for their needs and as a result spend much of their time engaged in seemingly unproductive activity, they are affluent in their leisure time and the time they spend with their social groups and families.

Situationist International

All this throws up various questions. Why do we work such long hours? Why do we spend so much of our lives in our places of work? Why do we feel the need to always be productive, to always be useful? Do we simply adhere to a socially constituted moral expectation when we work? Or is it something else? Is it that many of us quite simply enjoy working? There are certainly days when one can be forgiven for sympathising with the cries of the radical group Situationist International to “abolish work” (1981). Sometimes, we have to ask ourselves - is work really a means to an end, or, in our societies, is it the end in itself?

Myths and Realities

The event 'Work to live, or live to work?' will be held on the evening of Monday 29 April at the British Library. For further details and booking see our 'What's On' pages.

References and useful links

Bataille, Georges (1958) Interview with Pierre Dumayet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WiwNekNJGA

Batille, Georges (1985) Literature and Evil, London: Boyars, X.950/46419

Batille, Georges (1988) The Accursed Share: an essay on general economy, Vol. 1: consumption, New York: Zone Books, YC.1988.b.10164 

Kafka, Franz (1982) The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-23, Max Brod (eds), Harmondsworth: Penguin, X.958/15070 

Kafka, Franz (2009) Metamorphosis, London: Arcturus, YK.2011.a.28425 

Knabb, Ken (eds) (1981) Situationist International Anthrology, Berkeley California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 83/26856

Osborne, George (2013) Budget speech: full text, New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/03/george-osbornes-budget-speech-full-text

Sahlins, Marshall (2004) ‘The Original Affluent Society’ in Stone Age Economics, Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, YC.2005.a.1789

Weber, Max (2011) The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, New York: Oxford University Press, YC.2011.a.16275 

Toby Austin Locke is currently working for the British Library Social Sciences team on the Social Welfare Portal and is due to start working towards his doctorate in October 2013 at Goldsmiths College, University of London. You can contact him on twitter @tobyalocke or read more of his blog-posts at www.plurality-press.info

 

In this post Sarah Evans outlines materials and resources available at the British Library that can be used to research social, political and cultural aspects of Britain in the 1980s

The events of the last two weeks have fuelled discussion about British society, politics and culture during the 1980s. Serendipitously, I was today browsing through the British Library Sounds website and came across this new oral history collection entitled ‘Observing the 1980s’  which features interviews with those involved in key events such as the Falklands War, the uprisings in Brixton and the Miners’ Strike, as well as on social issues such as unemployment and HIV. It brings together different voices from those who lived through the 1980s and is part of a project led by the University of Sussex, in collaboration with the British Library and the Mass Observation Archive.

As well as this collection, there are many others which offer insight into politics and life during the 1980s. Indeed, the recently launched website ‘Sisterhood and After’ includes extracts with women who were involved in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. For example, the below extract from Rebecca Johnson about the idea of ‘Embrace the Base’:

‘I don’t know who came up with the idea to call Embrace the Base but what came out of that idea of the action was, we were going to bring women to Greenham in their thousands.  We were going to do it on the anniversary of the NATO decision to put Cruise and Pershing into Europe and that was December 12^th 1979, so we were going to do this on December 12^th 1982 and that was a Sunday.  And having got loads of women to come to the camp we were going to invite as many as possible to stay and help us close the base so it was Embrace the Base on Sunday, Close the Base on Monday.  And this action began to kind of form in our minds as a way to bring women to see what’s going on, to see the sheer immensity of this nuclear base expansion ‘cos it had been a nuclear base for quite a while.’

Embracing the base, Greenham Common December 1982, near to Greenham, West Berkshire, Great Britain. At noon on December 12th 1982, 30,000 women held hands around the 6 mile perimeter fence of the former USAF base, in protest against the UK government's decision to site American cruise missiles here. The installation went ahead but so did the protest - for 19 years women maintained their presence at the Greenham Common peace camp. This image was taken from the Geograph project collection. See this photograph's page on the Geograph website for the photographer's contact details. The copyright on this image is owned by ceridwen and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. 

Alongside the oral history collections which document personal experience, the British Library sound collections include other kinds of recordings which will no doubt be of value to researchers in many different disciplines. For instance, the collections include recordings of speeches of the major political parties during the 1980s. Indeed, I have just found Margaret Thatcher’s speeches at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference in Brighton and the 1989 Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool.

Researchers of pop culture during the 1980s will be interested in the music recordings and pop videos which are held at the British Library. From The Specials singing Ghost Town to Kylie Minogue talking the audience through her favourite songs on BBC Radio One, the sound collections offer the opportunity to remember the events which fuelled musical responses or to be catapulted back to one’s younger self (I also just found ‘Smash Hits’ magazine in the main catalogue!).

Nearly three years ago my colleague Dr. Phil Hatfield and I organised, with a number of external partners, an event which brought together witnesses from the uprisings (sometimes called ‘riots’) of the early 1980s, alongside those who have subsequently undertaken research on what happened. The chair was Professor Gail Lewis and the speakers were Linda Bellos OBE, Wally Brown CBE, Kunle Olulode, Prof. Louis Kushnick OBE, Dr Anandi Ramamurthy and Sean Creighton. The podcast for this event is available on the British Library Website.

The recent political, cultural and public discussion about the impact and legacy of social change during the 1980s has certainly shown the need for researchers to be able to access a variety of materials relating to recent history. For those who remember the 1980s and for those who want to find out more, the British Library’s diverse collections are a good place to start.