As a result of the Second World War, over 60,000 British women married American soldiers (colloquially known as GIs), many of them returning with their new husbands to live in the United States once the war ended. In this special blog, we are going to take a look at how the so-called GI brides were reported on by the press of the United Kingdom. We will examine how they faced warnings over their choice of husbands, and how they were …
home front
When war broke out in August 1914, and again in September 1939, women across the United Kingdom played a pivotal role in the war effort, taking on jobs that we previously seen as the preserve of men. By July 1916 it was estimated that 750,000 women across Britain had taken up ‘war work,’ working in heavy industries and in munitions factories, working as drivers, as well as nurses and as doctors. This represented a seismic shift in the way that women …
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From South Shields to Saint Lucia, from Carmarthen to Canada, we’ve added 155,351 brand new pages to The Archive this week, spanning over 180 years of headlines. Furthermore, we’ve updated eighteen of our existing titles, with updates covering our regional titles from England, Scotland and Wales, as well as some of our international titles from Canada and the Caribbean. So read on to discover more about our updated titles of the week, as well as to learn about the bombing of a newspaper …
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In the decade after the Second World War had come to an end, and indeed beyond, many communities across the United Kingdom were faced with very vivid reminders of the conflict: bomb sites, the country’s ‘war scars.’ In this blog, we will examine how people in Britain lived alongside bomb sits in the 1950s, using newspapers taken from The Archive. We will explore how communities adapted to live beside bomb sites, and how they transformed them into gardens and playgrounds. …
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Flung into new roles in the armed services and other industries, their home life turned upside down during blackouts and air raids, how did women use makeup during the Second World War? In this our fourth and final blog looking at the history of makeup, we delve into how makeup was used during the Second World War. The Sketch | 5 June 1940 Using pages taken from the British Newspaper Archive, we will discover how women in the three branches of …