Selected Publications
- Arnold, Jörg. ‘Britain and the end of coal’, special issue, Contemporary British History 28/1 (2018), guest editor.
- Arnold, Jörg. ‘Vom Verlierer zum Gewinner – und zurück. Der „coal miner“ als Schlüsselfigur der britischen Zeitgeschichte‘, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42/2 (2016), pp. 266-297.
- Arnold, Jörg. ‘The De-industrialising City: Urban, architectural and socio-cultural perspectives’, special issue, Urban History (in press), co-editor (with Tobias Becker and Otto Saumarez Smith).
- Arnold, Jörg. The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany (= Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare; 35) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pb ed., 2016).
- Arnold, Jörg. Luftkrieg: Erinnerungen in Deutschland und Europa (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009), co-editor (with Dietmar Süß and Malte Thießen).
FRIAS Project
From Loser to Winner – and back again: the British miner in the age of the de-industrial revolution, ca. 1967 to 1997
Throughout the twentieth century, the British coal miner mattered. As the coal industry went into decline in the de-industrial revolution of the late twentieth century, the miners frequently found themselves at the centre of public conflict and debate. The coal strikes of 1972, 1974 and 1984/85 were events of national significance, as were the lesser known confrontations of 1981 and 1992/93. As coal’s share of the energy market declined and employment in the industry contracted, the figure of the coal miner was invested with a plethora of highly charged and often conflicting meanings: Miners were imagined as traditional proletarians and affluent workers, as heroes and villains, as perpetrators and victims. Rather than try to establish who the miners ‘really’ were, the project asks about the overlaps, intersections and frictions between self-images and broader social imaginaries.
Drawing on the theoretical insights of R. Williams and R. Koselleck, the project develops two overarching arguments: First, it argues that the history of coal miners during the period is best understood in cyclical terms as a story of there and back again rather than as a story of decline. The second argument contends that there developed a crucial fault line between social imaginaries and the sense of self of (sections) of the workers employed in the coal industry as the period progressed. The project intervenes in the fields of labour history and de-industrialisation studies, but also in contemporary British history more generally.