Integrating a variety of historical approaches and methods, this textbook looks at the construction of class within the intimate contexts of the body, the home, the marketplace, the locality and the nation, to assess how the subjective identity of the working class in Britain has been maintained through seventy years of radical social, cultural and economic change. Joanna Bourke argues that class identity is essentially a social and cultural, rather than an institutional or political phenomenon, and therefore cannot be understood without constant reference to gender and ethnicity. Each chapter consists of an essay of historical analysis, introducing students to the ways historians use evidence to understand change. Chapters end with useful chronologies, statistics and tables, suggested topics for discussion, and selective further reading.