'Propaganda for things as they are'? British newsreels in everyday life between c.1920-c.1939.

Existing scholarship dismisses newsreels as trivial status-quo propaganda in interwar Britain. Yet their place in daily life and reception by audiences has been assumed rather than researched. Using a history of everyday life approach, my research seeks to recover the actual quotidian experience of newsreels and analyse the ways they helped forge cinemagoers' worldviews. Building upon an undergraduate dissertation, this project will pay particular attention to how newsreels projected social change. It will use a new array of sources, foremost recently digitised newsreels, to explore newsreels' role in constituting daily interwar British life.