This article examines the role, meaning, and practice of letter writing in the lives of two Finnish girls during the Second World War (WWII). We use a particular set of letters (N = 41) from the wartime letter collection kept in the Tampere University Folklife Archives and argue that they give us an interesting perspective on not only the girls'…

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827-1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and…

Scout Rally at Birmingham and Imperial Scout Exhibition organised in July of 1913 by the Boy Scouts Association constituted educational propaganda of the British Empire. The term "imperial", which was used in the British press, reflects the ideological meaning of this outsized event which gathered scouts from the United Kingdom and its…

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…

In this article, we explore the academic life of Julia Grace Wales as a public intellectual and peace activist. The study addresses the largely neglected field of female educators and peace activists in the early to mid-twentieth century through a case study of one woman's lifelong popular education campaign to achieve peace and social justice. In…

In 1943, a report sent to the executive board of the New Education Fellowship (NEF) informed the board that, during a trip to South America in 1942, Carleton Washburne had formed sections in Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil on the NEF's behalf. In some publications, Washburne mentions that it was a study trip commissioned by the US…

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),…

In the early 1940s Olga Cossettini, an Argentine teacher, received missives from several representatives of the cultural and educational world of the Americas. The event that allowed Cossettini's international relevance was the school artwork exhibition that took place in November 1939 in the Castagnino museum in the city of Rosario (Argentina).…

The object of this article is to analyse the development of ethnic Italian schools in Rio Grande do Sul during the years of colonisation in the nineteenth century (1875-1900), during which time Italian immigrants were put under a double process of nationalisation. On the one side, commencing with Imperial Brazil, and then more specifically in…

The high rate of child mortality registered during the early months of the Civil War led the Republican authorities to initiate several operations to evacuate youngsters with the purpose of protecting and saving the children of Spain. At the beginning, the children were evacuated to zones in the interior of the country far removed from the front…

This research explores political-educational debates regarding the concept of women's emancipation in women and family programmes on Belgian television between 1954 and 1975. From the very beginning, the women's episodes were regarded as explicitly educational. The episodes were created to increase women's participation by means of their…

This article aims to offer another reading of the Portuguese civilising process in Africa on the basis of an analysis of a set of alternative sources and to explore the role of other educational configurations, beyond those of the public school and the religious missionary school, such as the civilising missions. With the creation of the Lay…

The objective of this article is to analyse the process of institutionalisation of public elementary schooling associated with the political organisation of the constitutional monarchy and the legislation regarding citizen rights and prerogatives in Brazil, especially in the province of Minas Gerais, during the nineteenth century. During this…

By focusing on letter-writing the article provides an example of how a technology of the word could be used as a panoptic technology of observation and reformation. The article discusses the practice of using letters in monitoring children's development in early twentieth-century reform school education. It is based on the author's study of…

The letters Bishop Edward Synge (1691-1762) wrote to his daughter Alicia (1733-1807) in 1747-1752 are discussed to show how correspondence from a father to a daughter could be used to teach a teenage girl how to spell and write letters. Moreover, these letters are an excellent source to show how emotional behaviour was taught. Instructions on…