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The People's Victory
VE Day Through the Eyes of Those Who Were There
Brief Description
'The VE Day book' Amol Rajan, Today, Radio 4 In 1937, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson created the social survey organisation Mass Observation to capture the thoughts, feelings, and minutiae of individuals across the British Isles. At its height, Mass Observation had 1,000 concurrent writers—stretching from...
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The People's Victory
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A brand-new social history of how Britons felt about and celebrated VE Day, utilising the rich Mass Observation archives - published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of VE Day in 2025.
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Description
'The VE Day book' Amol Rajan, Today, Radio 4
In 1937, Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson created the social survey organisation Mass Observation to capture the thoughts, feelings, and minutiae of individuals across the British Isles. At its height, Mass Observation had 1,000 concurrent writers—stretching from Penzance to Aberdeen and including miners, academics, and housewives—and collected over 1 million individual diary entries between 1937 and 1960.
In The People's Victory, historian Lucy Noakes mines the Mass Observation archive to present a groundbreaking history of how Britons at home celebrated and experienced the end of World War II. Alongside street celebrations and tea parties, we find bonfires and bell ringing, water fights and wagon rides, solitary and shared walks—and copious amounts of alcohol. However, as Noakes also reveals, not everyone felt like celebrating that May: many were still waiting for news of family members who had vanished in the fog of war, whilst thousands of British soldiers were still interned in the Far East.
By centring the voices, feelings, and fears of the public at the heart of the People's War, Noakes also traces the hopes and changing attitudes of a nation in flux, revealing how the camaraderie and selflessness of wartime led to the birth of the welfare state.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781838955151
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 07 May 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Atlantic Books
Edition: Main
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 129.0mm
Height: 198.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 352
About the Author
Lucy Noakes is the Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, a Trustee of the Mass Observation Archive and the current President of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian of twentieth-century Britain and an expert on the social and cultural history of the Second World War. Her publications include three single authored books - War and the British: National Identity and the Second World War, Women and the British Army 1907-1948 and Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain - and three edited collections.
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