“OK,I Get It! Now Tell Me How to Do It!”: Why We Can’t Just Tell You How to Do Critical Multicultural Education

As educators who work with preservice teachers on critical multicultural education, we often struggle with our students’ desire for us to provide them with the how-to’s of multicultural education—a kind of “answer list.” In this paper, we share the analogies we have developed and found effective in explaining to our students why the list that they imagine not only doesn’t guarantee success, but could actually result in undermining core principles of critical multicultural education.     

‘We want everybody’s salvage!’: Recycling,Voluntarism, and the People’s War

ABSTRACT

This article reveals the role of volunteers in the British government’s campaign to increase recycling during the Second World War. It uses their experience to deconstuct the idea of a 'people's war', showing how this concept was invoked in several different ways. The article demonstrates that voluntary recycling schemes were led from the bottom-up, shifted the balance of power between private citizens and local authorities, and highlighted difference based on age, socio-economic status, gender, and geographical location. It concludes that official appeals may have invoked the ‘people’s war’, but the way that these messages were received was of most importance.     

‘It’s in the Blood,isn’t it?’ The Contested Status of First World War Veterans in Second World War Civil Defence

This article examines how ex-servicemen’s memories of the First World War shaped their experience of working in civil defence during the Second. In response to ongoing public criticism of civil defence as a whole and a dismissive attitude towards veterans in particular, these men expressed a distinct form of ‘useful masculinity’, rooted in their combat experience and developed within the particular context of civil defence. I will argue that through the group setting in which remembering took place, veterans were able to oppose dominant cultural narratives and to develop and express these alternative narratives about their value.     

‘“COFO Is Not Godot’ The Free Southern Theater,the Black Freedom Movement,and the Search for a Usable Aesthetic”*

ABSTRACT

This article explores the home as a site of ‘scientific’ enquiry in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland via the experiences of female experimenters. The focus of their investigation was the cultivation of silkworms for the purposes of making silk and substituting expensive foreign imports with domestic manufacture. This research argues that enquiry was just one of many domestic practices and that the relationship between domestic labour and intellectual work was enmeshed. The spaces and objects of home, alongside the tacit knowledge of its inhabitants, provided a flexible context for experiment, which was accessible to a broad section of eighteenth-century society.     

The ‘Isle of Vice’? Youth,class and the post-war holiday on the Isle of Man

This article broadens our knowledge of post-war holidaymaking (c. 1950–80) by adopting the Isle of Man as a case study. A popular holiday resort from the late nineteenth century, the Isle of Man experienced considerable political turbulence during the 1950s and 1960s about how best to stay competitive as a seaside resort, where authorities employed uniquely stringent methods to contain rowdiness and protect the island’s ‘respectable’ atmosphere. The first two sections examine the leisure habits of the young and working class in a holiday context, integrating this analysis with perceptions of their behaviour gleaned from oral interviews with local residents. The concluding section explores how the presence of holidaymakers on the Isle of Man – uniquely among seaside resorts in the British Isles – informed (and in some cases emboldened) a sense of national identity. Oral history, complemented by the Hansard reports of the Isle of Man parliament and local press coverage, sheds light on the activities of the post-war working class at play, and how the presence of holidaymakers fortified Manx national consciousness.     

The left‐wing movement in Malaya,Singapore and Borneo in the 1960s: ‘an era of hope or devil’s decade’?

Abstract

The 1960s was a period of Leftwing resurgence in the world. As Britain was disengaging from its empire, the ethnically plural societies she had generated within her protectorates and colonies in Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei threw up anti‐colonial movements that began struggling towards self‐determination and national independence. These movements manifested the ideologies of communism, socialism, nationalism and communalism. As British imperialism began planning its retreat, the competition for power among the local movements became intense. In Malaya, the largest of the five colonial territories, the communist party launched an armed rebellion in 1948 in the name of national liberation and independence, but made little headway. As Singapore and Malaya were closely linked and ruled, Britain introduced emergency rule in both territories. Most leftwing parties disappeared. Nationalist and communalist parties in Malaya emerged and eventually succeeded in securing national independence from Britain in 1957. Singapore was given a measure of limited self‐government in 1955, while Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei were gradually awakened towards self‐government. Leftwing parties re‐surfaced in Malaya, and in Singapore, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei in the 1950s and 1960s, and made some headway in parliamentary elections. This paper presents a historical account of their resurgence, which was however short‐lived.