Hospitality and Home: British and American Cultures of Entertaining

Abstract

The eighty years from 1920 to 2000 saw tremendous changes in the ways that hospitality was practiced in people’s homes. These transformations were brought about by broader cultural shifts - acting in different ways within different social class fractions, and in different regions - and by economic factors. Six key factors can be identified as instrumental here: informalization, the development of the hospitality industry as a context for domestic hospitality practices, shifting conceptions of domestic privacy, increased numbers of home owner-occupiers, the amount of media attention paid to the home and the innovation and acceptance of social media channels into our social lives and our homes. This chapter addresses these factors in turn in a chronological sequence that examines the period 1920 to the present as a series of episodes.