Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World
Susan L. Carruthers
Hardcover
Regular price$29.95With free membership trial$14.9850% off your first book+ Free shipping
Pre-order: Ships Jul 24th, 2025
Do you recommend this book?
Yes!
No
Imagine a world in which clothing wasn't superabundant - cheap, disposable, indestructible - but perishable, threadbare and chronically scarce. Eighty years ago, when World War II ended, a textile famine loomed. What would everyone wear as uniforms were discarded and soldiers returned home, Nazi camps were liberated, and millions of uprooted people struggled to subsist? In this richly textured history, Carruthers unpicks a familiar wartime motto, 'Make Do and Mend', to reveal how central fabric was to postwar Britain. Clothes and footwear supplied a currency with which some were rewarded, while others went without. Making Do moves from Britain's demob centres to liberated Belsen - from razed German cities to refugee camps and troopships - to uncover intimate ties between Britons and others bound together in new patterns of mutual need. Filled with original research and personal stories, Making Do illuminates how lives were refashioned after the most devastating war in human history.
Book Details
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publish Date: Jul 24th, 2025
Pages: 400
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00in - 0.00lb
EAN: 9781009464284
Categories: • Europe - Great Britain - General• Beauty & Grooming - General
About the Author
Carruthers, Susan L.: - Susan L. Carruthers is Professor of US and International History at the University of Warwick. Much of her work focuses on war and the ways in which individuals, and societies more broadly, have made sense of conflict and its aftermath. She is the author of six previous books, including Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (2016).
Get 30% off your first purchase
When you sign up for our popular newsletter (unsubscribe anytime).