This chapter, which pairs with Chapter 7, examines the nature, spread, and function of small-scale recreational string playing in private spaces, the values that people attributed to it, and the meanings it held in individuals’ lives. Emphasis is on instrumental chamber music in the conventional sense of the term, which locates much of the discussion in middle- and upper-class homes, but the chapter also addresses other types of small-ensemble music-making, including activities in working-class culture. The chapter foregrounds the challenges of writing about a private-sphere activity that at first blush seems largely invisible in the historical record, while presenting evidence and arguments for a rich subculture of recreational string playing that contributed to and perpetuated violin culture’s vitality. The ensuing discussion establishes, among other things, that while domestic string playing was valued as a mechanism for reinforcing family ties, it helped many people strengthen relationships with friends and develop networks of personal and professional acquaintances. The chapter also finds beneficial interconnections between public concert life and recreational chamber music.

This chapter complements Chapter 6’s investigation into recreational music-making, with an examination of amateur symphony orchestras – a significant nationwide phenomenon from the 1890s – which were predicated on having adequate numbers of string players. It begins by surveying organizational structures, showing that while orchestras initially operated as subscription clubs for men, they soon admitted women string players, some of whom were highly accomplished. Women’s presence often transformed standards, particularly where a conductor had experience of training strings. The chapter also examines one woman’s contributions to a regional amateur-orchestra circuit, as well as the popularity of all-women string orchestras. It then engages concepts of musical community, asking what amateur string players valued about their orchestral activities and highlighting the social cohesion and team spirit forged by playing alongside others with shared musical interests to prepare works for performances. It also argues that amateur orchestras produced thousands of string players whose knowledge of symphonic music led them to support orchestral concerts throughout their lives. (161)

Chapter 5 augments existing scholarship on the music profession by providing a wide-ranging discussion of what piecing together a freelance living as a string player entailed, decentering the success stories of high-profile violinists to examine the unglamorous, often mundane, work that most string players undertook. The chapter develops two interrelated themes. One concerns string players’ expectations and strategies for finding employment and achieving stable earnings in an overcrowded market, including the practice of “double jobbing.” The other considers how the new women players negotiated the social, economic, and institutional constraints of the patriarchal workplace and its gatekeepers. The chapter also illuminates how the job market changed and diversified in response to the new mass entertainment, retail, and catering industries, and highlights the commercial benefits that ensued from attracting consumers with live music, especially string sounds. These openings in turn brought violin culture into public earshot, raising awareness of its ubiquity.

This chapter focuses on sensation novels including Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Collins’s Armadale, and Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up as a Flower. The chapter argues that novels in this tradition help readers covertly manage their mood. These novels deal, in particular, with the management of socially pathologized emotions, with earlier novels focusing on addiction-induced excitement and later novels focusing on nervousness. After close-reading the novels, the chapter addresses readers who were accused of being addicted to popular literature and readers who have used fiction to interpret pathologized negative emotions in terms that are more flattering.

Viscount Victor Spencer was representative of the British social elites deeply entrenched in business at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was amongst the 41 per cent of CEOs who were peers of the realm. Like most of these peers, he did not have a background in the business world or industry. This chapter details why these aristocratic amateurs initially dominated corporate leadership roles but rapidly declined in number as social and political changes reduced the importance of the aristocracy and the economic environment was transformed by the technological and business innovations of the second industrial revolution. They were replaced by professional managers like Thomas Sutherland of the shipping company P&O, founder CEOs such as Thomas Lipton, and family CEOs such as Archibald Coats of the textile business J & P Coats. These CEOs developed extensive business experience as insiders within their companies, which allowed them to innovate the strategy and structure of their companies. Despite their decline, the gentleman amateurs performed no worse than these players.

This autobiographical fragment begins in a working-class high school and traces a career trajectory shaped by the world I grew up in and the world I entered. As a White woman from an American working-class background, I was an uneasy fit for the academy, circa 1979. I experienced obstacles and intellectual pleasures. I found many fascinating topics to study (e.g., class and cultural variation in early narrative) and many fascinating colleagues and students to work with. The outsider/insider position I occupied offered novel vantage points on the what, who, and how of developmental inquiry and on its telling omissions. My story of marginalization intersected with a historical moment when developmental psychology began to reckon with its narrowness and ethnocentrism. Thanks to the efforts of many developmental scholars, the field is now headed in a more context-sensitive and pluralistic direction while still contending with entrenched deficit discourses and other blind spots.

Class and social structure within early seventeenth-century Saxon units, including the Mansfeld Regiment, seems to have been different from later armies in several important respects. Although commoners were less well-represented in more honorable or prestigious roles, the army could be a source of social mobility. Some men served in the Saxon army for multiple years, and some families for multiple decades. Soldiers probably picked up military experience through long immersion in the military way of life rather than formal drilling. Within this context, social distance between ranks seems to have been less pronounced in early seventeenth-century armies than in later armies or contemporary civilian life. The close social and physical proximity between officers and men led to fights.

The final chapter of this book teases out the empirical and theoretical threads of respectability politics in the French Muslim context. It stresses the ways in which this form of politics operates as a reactive, embodied, gendered, racialized, and class-layered tactic of community advancement, resulting in both conservative and emancipatory outcomes for minority citizens. It further reflects on the relative failure of respectability politics, which falls short of its promise to French Muslims to fully exercise their citizenship. This argument goes beyond the French case; although the problematic relationship between religion and citizenship is often deemed “typically French,” respectability politics seems to be pervasive in Muslim-minority contexts and accompanies the reconfiguration of Islamic traditions into ethical projects of self-fashioning. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the importance of breaking away from the insularity of Islamic scholarship and opening up a transatlantic conversation about the role of ethics and religion in minority politics. The ambition of this chapter, then, is to look beyond the Muslim case and draw parallels with other minority citizens, such as Black elites in the US and European Jews. It examines how these groups have resorted to inconspicuous religiosity and social upliftment to advance their conditions, as well as how such stories reflect the intricate workings of power in situations of subjection.

This chapter, written by a founder of the field and a historian with a long-term interest in DOHaD, examines the key (long) decade in the history of DOHaD, bookended by two conferences: one in 1989 and the other in 2003. At the 1989 workshop, David Barker presented his retrospective epidemiological research to an audience of fetal physiologists and clinicians. Discussions about the plausibility and underlying mechanisms of Barker’s findings fostered new research collaborations, methodologies, and projects, which over the next decade produced a new field. By 2003, DOHaD had grown sufficiently in both numbers and ambitions to host a major global conference. This chapter argues that to understand the objectives, methods, research questions, and intellectual networks making the field of DOHaD, the reactions that it provoked, and how it responded to them, we must understand the historical and geographical context in which it was created, first in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, and then globally. Here we identify and explain three key drivers that shaped the field: interdisciplinarity, the history of social class and attempts to address health inequalities in the United Kingdom, and the globalisation of the 1990s informing the intellectual underpinnings of the global health agenda.

This chapter focuses on social individual differences in relation to second language learning. It explores how the social, cultural, and political context that a learner is situated in affects their success of second language learning. The chapter begins by explaining how society and social interaction that second language learners encounter influence the access they have to second language education. This includes the differences between foreign vs. second language learning contexts. It then focuses on social identity theory, acculturation theory relevant to immigrant learners, and transdisciplinary framework (by Douglas Fir Group). The chapter covers other socially constructed individual differences related to intersectionality, diversity–equity–inclusion (DEI), and heritage language learning. The chapter also addresses socially constructed biases related to race and ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and LGBTQ+. The chapter ends with a series of pedagogical recommendations that mitigate the impacts of socially constructed biases on second language learning in the classroom.

Little work has focused on the college enrollment process of students from immigrant families. Research suggests the intersection of social class and nativity is salient for understanding the college enrollment process. This study draws on data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to examine (1) the extent to which stages of the college enrollment process systematically vary by parental nativity and education and (2) the extent to which each stage of the college enrollment process contributes to differences in postsecondary outcomes. Findings show that students with <BA parents receive less consistent messaging about the importance of college compared to students with BA+ US-born parents. Moreover, students with <BA parents and students with BA+ immigrant parents are less likely to rely on their parents for college information and are less likely to complete important college enrollment steps. Differences in the college enrollment process account for some of the differences in immediate postsecondary outcomes. Findings have implications for research on immigrant-origin and first-generation college students as well as for institutional college readiness strategies.

College access does not begin or end with an acceptance letter; it continues throughout students’ college experiences, especially for first-generation, working-class Latinx students who are experiencing many college milestones for the first time. It is predicted by scholars that the rapid growth of the Latinx population will make them a large college applicant pool in the near future. These predictions show that retention efforts for Latinx students are an important investment for institutions of higher education. However, support for Latinx first-generation, working-class college students is often lacking at universities. In this conceptual chapter, we center on first-generation, working-class Latinx students of immigrant origin and the identity intersections experienced by individual students to equip administrators, academic advisors, and university data analysts with the knowledge to improve Latinx student success efforts through an overview of (1) academic advising, (2) data analytics, (3) social class, and (4) theories and frameworks related to the identity intersections of Latinx students.