Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children’s Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as ‘enemy’ lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children’s literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.

Perceptions of the Great War have changed significantly since its outbreak and children's authors have continually attempted to engage with those changes, explaining and interpreting the events of 1914-18 for young readers. British Children's Literature and the First World War examines the role novels, textbooks and story papers have played in shaping and reflecting understandings of the conflict throughout the 20th century. David Budgen focuses on representations of the conflict since its onset in 1914, ending with the centenary commemorations of 2014. From the works of Percy F. Westerman and Angela Brazil, to more recent tales by Michael Morpurgo and Pat Mills, Budgen traces developments of understanding and raises important questions about the presentation of history to the young. He considers such issues as the motivations of children's authors, and whether modern children's books about the past are necessarily more accurate than those written by their forebears. Why, for example, do modern writers tend to ignore the global aspects of the First World War? Did detailed narratives of battles written during the war really convey the truth of the conflict? Most importantly, he considers whether works aimed at children can ever achieve anything more than a partial and skewed response to such complex and tumultuous events.

What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. This time was unique for British children--parental controls were often relaxed if not absent, and the radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future. Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, films and book-related play-activity in relation to value systems, the child's perspective versus the adult's perspective, the development of sophistication, retention and loss of pre-war attitudes and their post-war fate. British literature is placed in a wider context through a consideration of what British writing reached the USA, and vice versa, and also through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban-rural division, ageism, class, race, and gender awareness are explored. In this incredibly broad-ranging book, covering over 100 writers, Owen Dudley Edwards looks at the literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered in the war temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war as a whole on what children could read during the war and what they made of it, he reveals the implications of this for the world they would come to inhabit.

From puzzles and cards to pinball and die games, find out about the children's games produced as propaganda during World War II. During the Second World War, hundreds of games were manufactured by the British, Germans and Americans aimed at children. Despite being cheaply made due to the wartime economy, the games were often fun to play and challenging to win. They also had considerable propaganda value helping to manipulate children into supporting the war. To get their attention, many of the games incorporated dramatic artwork and were based on real wartime events from the evacuation of children in 1939 to the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945. This book features a large selection of different games produced by the British, Germans and Americans and tells the stories behind their wartime propaganda. The Nazis in particular prided themselves on producing games which promoted and glamourised war, exploiting children's patriotism and pride in German conquests. Some of their most insidious games included Juden Raus! (Jews Out!) and Bomber u?ber England (Bomber over England). However, the British and Americans also produced unethical games like Target for Tonight which promoted the carpet bombing of Germany and Atomic Bomb, a dexterity puzzle about the nuclear bombing of Japan. The games featured in this book include roll and move games with a board and die, pinball and similar ‘shooting’ games, dexterity and other puzzles and card games. They were made out of paper, card, wood, rubber, bakelite plastic and initially metal. Remarkably despite wartime restrictions games were manufactured throughout the conflict to meet the demand from boys and girls as they closely followed the changing fortunes of the war. Today many of the games have become scarce so for collectors a guide to their value and rarity is included.

British children were mobilised for total war in 1914-18. It dominated their school experience and they enjoyed it as a source of entertainment. Their support was believed to be vital for Britain's present and future but their participation was motivated by a desire to remain connected to their absent fathers and brothers.

WHAT WAS LIFE LIKE for Norfolk people during the First World War? This book sets out to answer that question, largely through contemporary sources: letters, diaries and journals, together with a wide range of visual material. It looks at life on the battlefronts throughout the world, as well as men serving at sea and in the air. It focuses on the home front, too, and the widening contribution of women, both in such traditional roles as nursing and in a vast range of other occupations. The book considers many other issues, such as conscription, conscientious objection, air raids, fear of invasion and the dangers of war to local fishermen. It describes how these dramatic events affected the lives of ordinary people; their patterns of work, diet and social behaviour. The author also discusses the careers of world-famous Norfolk figures, such as Edith Cavell, the nurse who was shot by the Germans, and others who deserve to be better known like George Roberts, the Labour MP for Norwich whose strong support for the war gained him a seat in the Cabinet but drove him away from his former friends in the Labour Party. However, the book's main emphasis is on how men, women and children in the county lived, and sometimes died, during the four years of the Great War. After a chapter on "strangers" within the county - refugees, prisoners of war and enemy aliens - the book ends by looking at how individual communities chose to remember their dead. The author is a well-known local historian who has long had a particular interest in the First World War. In a gripping narrative he has skilfully combined these two areas of expertise to produce a very readable contribution to the history of Norfolk. It will appeal as much to the younger reader interested in the past as to those senior citizens for whom that great conflict and its aftermath is still a living memory.

Unearths the history of the thousands of forgotten children of World War II, including its prelude and aftermath during the Spanish Civil War and the Allied occupation of Germany. This book looks at liaisons between German soldiers and civilian women in the occupied territories, and the Nazi Lebensborn program of racial hygiene.

Examines aspects of demographic, social, and political change in Warsaw in the late 19th-early 20th centuries which led to the development of Warsaw as a modern city, focusing on ethnic themes. Ch. 6 (pp. 76-106), after surveying the "Jewish question" in Warsaw between 1860-1909, deals with this problem during the election to the Russian State Duma (1906-12). These elections marked the politicization of the "Jewish question" in Warsaw and Congress Poland. Discusses the attitudes of various political parties, underlining their radicalization and antisemitism (not only within the National Democrats' movement). Stresses that during this period most Polish nationalist groups concluded that the Jews were an internal enemy, an alien and threatening force.

Quakers in the 20th century redefined their pacifist witness to include relief for the victims of war. Drawing upon research in archives plus interviews with surviving participants, Farah Mendlesohn provides an account of British and American friends' relief to both sides in the Spanish Civil war.