United Kingdom

Changes in higher education, with the development of the polytechnics and the “new universities,” meant that, at least to some extent, higher education was thrown open to children from poorer homes. There was also the liberalization of educational methods in primary and secondary education, along with the emergence of comprehensive schooling, ending the old distinction between the secondary modern and the grammar schools. In practice, many of the old divisions continued and, indeed, increased. However, rather than being accompanied by increasing cultural divisions, the opposite was the case. There was a much more positive understanding of the “popular” than before. A more fluid, open, and commercial popular culture was signalled by the development in the 1950s of commercial television and, with it, the slow decline of the public broadcasting, public service ethic of the BBC. With the explosion of new channels of communication in the 2000s, particularly in television, there was a noted “dumbing down” of all media, which was especially evident in the celebrity culture of the new century and not unique to the United Kingdom. The new television gorged on this, as well as on reality programming and on the enormously increased popularity of professional football. These brought all classes together in a new demotic culture, although at the same time differentiation according to income, taste, and education became increasingly possible because of the technologies of the new media.

The various lifestyles associated with different genres of popular music are one telling indication of the way that lifestyle can determine an individual’s identity in modern society. This development reflects the withdrawal of the state from the direct intervention in social life that was so characteristic of the third quarter of the 20th century. The state’s turn to the market as a model of government has been reproduced in terms of the market’s direct role in the formation of cultural life, so that the relationship between public culture and consumer capitalism has been close, in many ways the one constantly trying to outguess the other. This game of one-upmanship, marked by ironic knowingness, has been labelled “postmodern.” However, this term has come to describe much of late 20th- and early 21st-century international culture and society, not only in Britain. It points to the growing understanding of the relative nature of truth, itself a reaction against the prevailing supposedly “modern” certainties of the 20th century (reason, freedom, humanity, and truth itself), which indeed have often had an appalling outcome. However, it was a sign of the times that these antifundamentalist currents, themselves critical of much of Western culture, emerged at much the same time as new fundamentalisms emerged in the forms of American neoconservatism and certain strains of radical Islam. The ferment of intellectual and cultural changes involved was inextricable from the massive changes under way in the transition to the novel forms of society made possible by new information technologies. Patrick Joyce

Sovereigns of Britain

The table provides a chronological list of the sovereigns of Britain.

Sovereigns of Britain Kings of Wessex (West Saxons) name dynasty or house reign ¹Athelstan was king of Wessex and the first king of all England. ²James VI of Scotland became also James I of England in 1603. Upon accession to the English throne, he styled himself "King of Great Britain" and was so proclaimed. Legally, however, he and his successors held separate English and Scottish kingships until the Act of Union of 1707, when the two kingdoms were united as the Kingdom of Great Britain. ³The United Kingdom was formed on January 1, 1801, with the union of Great Britain and Ireland. After 1801 George III was styled "King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland." ⁴Oliver and Richard Cromwell served as lords protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland during the republican Commonwealth. ⁵William and Mary, as husband and wife, reigned jointly until Mary's death in 1694. William then reigned alone until his own death in 1702. ⁶George IV was regent from February 5, 1811. ⁷In 1917, during World War I, George V changed the name of his house from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. ⁸Edward VIII succeeded upon the death of his father, George V, on January 20, 1936, but abdicated on December 11, 1936, before coronation.

Egbert Saxon 802–839

Aethelwulf (Ethelwulf) Saxon 839–856/858

Aethelbald (Ethelbald) Saxon 855/856–860

Aethelberht (Ethelbert) Saxon 860–865/866

Aethelred I (Ethelred) Saxon 865/866–871

Alfred the Great Saxon 871–899

Edward the Elder Saxon 899–924 Sovereigns of England name dynasty or house reign

Athelstan¹ Saxon 925–939

Edmund I Saxon 939–946

Eadred (Edred) Saxon 946–955