Restaging the past : historical pageants, culture and society in modern Britain / edited by Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman.

1. Introduction / Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman -- 2. Historical pageants in Yorkshire before the First world war / Keith Johnston -- 3. A national church tells its Story : the English church pageant of 1909 / Arthur Burns -- 4. The pomp of obliteration : G. K. Chesterton and the Edwardian Pageant Revival / Michael Shallcross -- 5. Historical pageants, citizenship and the performance of women’s history before second-wave feminism / Zoë Thomas -- 6. Nobility, duty and courage : propaganda and inspiration in interwar women’s and girls’ pageants / Amy Binns -- 7. Historical pageants, neo-romanticism and the city in interwar Britain / Tom Hulme -- 8. ‘A chorus of Greek poignancy’ : communism, class and pageantry in interwar South Wales / Daryl Leeworthy / 9. The ‘Quite ordinary man’ at the pageant: history, community and local identity in the 1951 Festival of Britain / Alexander Hutton -- 10. ‘The Scots pageant’ : The Arbroath abbey pageants 1947–2005 / Linda Fleming -- 11. After the show is over...souvenirs and mementos : the material culture of historical pageants / Ellie Reid -- 12. ‘The Story of Us’? Kynren and the uses of the past / Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman -- 13. Afterword / Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Alexander Hutton and Paul Readman.

"Across Britain in the twentieth century, people succumbed to ‘pageant fever’. Thousands dressed up in historical costumes and performed scenes from the history of the places where they lived, and hundreds of thousands more watched them. These pageants were one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past between the 1900s and the 1970s: they took place in large cities, small towns and tiny villages, and engaged a whole range of different organised groups, including Women’s Institutes, political parties, schools, churches and youth organisations. Pageants were community events, bringing large numbers of people together in a shared celebration and performance of the past; they also involved many prominent novelists, professional historians and other writers, as well as featuring repeatedly in popular and highbrow literature. Although the pageant tradition has largely died out, it deserves to be acknowledged as a key aspect of community history during a period of great social and political change. Indeed, as this book shows, some traces of ‘pageant fever’ remain in evidence today." -- Baksida