Suchergebnisse

The period after 1945 saw a rapid growth in social welfare, with the state taking on increasing responsibility for pensions, health care, unemployment relief and income support. In Western democracies economic growth underpinned state investment and was reinforced by demands from the new social movements of the 1960s. Just as the clamour for reformism reached a crescendo in the late 1960s, the global economy began to falter, culminating in the oil crisis of 1973–1974. This volume explores the factors that shaped the trajectories of welfare state change over this crucial period. A close analysis of countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom reveals signs of a broader shift towards the decline of government spending and the first tentative moves towards a nascent neoliberalism. Other countries, such as Sweden and West Germany, remained comparatively untouched by the economic crisis and even sought to reinforce their welfare state in response to it. Ireland and Northern Ireland also showed little evidence of these changes, isolated as they were by complex political and religious factors. This book brings together a range of case studies at both country and provincial level in order to build up a more complex and nuanced picture of the welfare state in the 1960s and 1970s

The Australian Assistance Plan (AAP) was an innovative yet largely forgotten social welfare program from the 1970s. A key platform of the Whitlam Labor government, which established a series of Regional Councils for Social Development across Australia, the AAP reframed citizens' participation in their communities, stimulated voluntary organisations and volunteering and attempted to transform engagement among all levels of governments and the voluntary sector. Through an analysis of three Regional Council case studies in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, this article focuses on the themes of regionalism and regional distinctiveness in order to assess how questions of regional difference can impact on the development of policy practices.

The Star Hotel in Newcastle has become a site of defiance for the marginalized young and dispossessed working class. To understand the whole story of the Star Hotel riot, it should be seen in the context of other moments of resistance such as the 1890 Maritime Strike, Rothbury miners' lockout in 1929 and the recent battle for the Laman Street fig trees. As Australia's first industrial city, Newcastle is also a natural home of radicalism but until now, the stories which reveal its breadth and impact have remained untold. Radical Newcastle brings together short illustrated essays from leading scholars, local historians and present day radicals to document both the iconic events of the region's radical past, and less well known actions seeking social justice for workers, women, Aboriginal people and the environment.

Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world

Since the 1960s, nations across the "developed world" have been profoundly shaped by deindustrialization. In regions in which previously dominant industries faced crises or have disappeared altogether, industrial heritage offers a fascinating window into the phenomenon's cultural dimensions. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, even as forms of industrial heritage provide anchors of identity for local populations, their meanings remain deeply contested, as both radical and conservative varieties of nostalgia intermingle with critical approaches and straightforward apologias for a past that was often full of pain, exploitation and struggle