This article addresses the ways in which education systems responded to the aftermath of World War I with respect to education for nationalism and internationalism. It does so by drawing on theories of internationalism and through an analysis of the writings of Daniel Prescott, an American scholar who toured European schools in the middle of the…

This article traces the evolution of the statutory Youth Service in rural Westmorland (now part of Cumbria), from its establishment in 1939 to the early post-war years. It focuses on how the county's Youth Service innovated and developed new ways of working with young country people in their spare time, and the challenges of introducing…

This article is concerned with the history of "yours sincerely," a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of…

Robert Baden-Powell's role in initiating the Scout movement is well covered in historiography. This article addresses a little-researched question concerning his associations with contemporary educationalists as a means of promoting social reform through education. In combining social network analysis with the study of hitherto underutilised…

This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period…

In the early 1990s, Dr. O.L. Davis of the University of Texas at Austin sought evacuee teacher and student recollections in England during World War II. The overarching purpose for Davis was to gain an understanding of the effect on schooling and education, specifically as it relates to the curriculum for students. This article continues where he…

This paper investigates performative manifestations of sincerity across Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In particular, it locates adverbial sincerity markers used to qualify performative speech act verbs in late medieval letters (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), at a point when Middle English was rapidly replacing Anglo-Norman as the…

This article introduces the nonmedievalist reader to the multilingual landscape of England 700-1400. Building on recent work exploring in particular the relationships among English, French, and Latin in medieval England, it discusses a series of "multilingual moments" from a range of sources, including letters, poems, travel writings,…

This study offers a microhistory by exploring the impact regular smallpox outbreaks had on the lives of gentry families in seventeenth-century England. It particularly focuses on the question as in what way smallpox influenced upbringing and educational decisions and draws on a collection of personal letters of the Clarke family (1667-1710),…

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel…

To celebrate Blue Peter turning 60, we took a closer look at children and young people's letter writing in 2017/18, exploring how many children write letters in their free time, how often children write letters, and why children decide to write, or not write, letters. Our report is based on the responses of 42,363 pupils aged 8 to 18 who answered…

This article surveys the extracurricular writing of the first women to attend Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge University. It argues that such student writing did more than promote intellectual formation or rehearse new knowledge; indeed, it changed institutional culture and the social horizons for middle-class women's lives.

Published in London between 1839 and 1852 and aligned with the commercial objectives of the New Zealand Company, the "New Zealand Journal" included letters from emigrants. This paper studies letters written by a small cohort of rural labourers who emigrated from Ham House in Surrey to Wellington in 1841. Following Dorothy Smith, I read…

Examines, rhetorically, the formal dynamics and internal action of an eighteenth-century political text by Edmund Burke, the "Letter to William Elliott, Esq." (1795). (SR)

Describes a writing activity in which children in England wrote letters to various children's authors. Discusses the content of both the children's letters and the author's replies. (MM)