scholarly journals “For Home, Country and Race”: The Gendered Ideals of Citizenship in English Elementary and Evening Continuation Schools, 1885-1914

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Heathorn

Abstract Between 1885 and 1914, English Elementary and Evening Continuation Schools - the institutions designed to cater to the educational needs of the working class - engaged in both formal and informal efforts to indoctrinate their students in the principles of “good citizenship”. This ideological initiative was an attempt to construct “appropriate” individual and collective character traits in children, many of whom were never expected to attain formal political rights. The books and lessons of the schools tended to romanticize English history and use specific figures from the past to explain values and traits deemed especially worthy in the“good citizen”. This article points to the ways in which these projected civic virtues were explained to working-class boys through association with accepted notions of virtuous masculinity. Demonstrated with examples of both real and fictitious martial heroes this masculine code resembled the ethic of service to the nation prevalent in elite educational culture, but with an entirely different result implied.

Author(s):  
Gilbert Estrada

The inclusive ideals of George Sánchez have helped shape a new generation of academics who have promoted connections with nonacademic organizations. This article discusses how Sánchez has continued these efforts through his pivotal contributions to an award-winning documentary focusing on the multiethnic, working-class community of Boyle Heights: Betsy Kalin’s film East LA Interchange (2015). East LA Interchange’s greatest contribution to the generative scholarship Sánchez emphasizes is its critical analysis of modern urban problems, utilizing history as a tool for social change. The story of Boyle Heights is not just a history of a single working-class community with a diverse culture. It is also a tale of a neighborhood trying to solve real world problems such as gentrification, unaffordable housing, community displacement, and urban pollution. The film portrays these difficulties in the present while showing that they originated decades ago. Sánchez and East LA Interchange are at their best when they provide the historical contexts of contemporary problems, emphasizing that history is not only the study of the past. Rather, history is the unending dialogue between the past, present, and future, and any significant discourse on today’s urban ills must be rooted in the past. For students and others interested in the diverse communities common in many US metropolitan regions, East LA Interchange has much to offer regarding the issues of immigration, redlining, deed restrictions, political activism, freeway construction, living with racially and ethnically diverse community members, and the nationwide problem of gentrification. These themes, especially gentrification, are the primary focus of this article.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 323-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Ellis ◽  
Jerry Rawicki

This article extends the research of Jerry Rawicki and Carolyn Ellis who have collaborated for more than eight years on memories and consequences of the Holocaust. Focusing on Jerry’s memories of his experience during the Holocaust, they present dialogues that took place during five recorded interviews and follow-up conversations that reflect on the similarity of Hitler’s seizing of power in the 1930s to the meteoric rise of Donald Trump. Noting how issues of class and race were taking an increasingly prominent role in their conversations and collaborative writing, they also begin to examine discontent in the rural, White working class and Carolyn’s socialization within that community. These dialogues and reflections seek to shed light on the current political climate in America as Carolyn and Jerry struggle to cope with their fears and envision a hopeful path forward for their country.


2018 ◽  

What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.


2021 ◽  
pp. 185-192
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Karavaeva

The article explores the motif of love in a totalitarian society in Anchee Min’s novel “Wild Ginger”. Though an American citizen, Anchee Min belongs to a group of modern Chinese-American writers whose interests focus around the past of her home country China. Childhood and teenage years which Min spent in Communist China provided her with a lot of material for her later novels. In Wild Ginger through a classic plot of love triangle the writer approaches the motif of love in the times of Cultural Revolution. The author examines love as a relationship between a man and a woman, and as a religious feeling and communist ideology. Grotesque becomes the main literary device. Over-exaggeration bordering on incredibility expresses the author’s rejection of the surrounding reality. Intertwining comical and tragical situations, the novels brings the reader to a conclusion that love is the only means of attainting personal freedom and maturity in a totalitarian society.  


2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (299) ◽  
pp. 251-271
Author(s):  
Mimi Ensley

Abstract This article examines a manuscript poem composed by the seventeenth-century author John Lane. Writing in what is now London, British Library, Harley MS 5243, Lane revives the medieval poet John Lydgate in order to re-tell the story of Guy of Warwick, famous from medieval romance. In Lane’s poem, Lydgate returns from beyond the grave to proclaim the historicity of Guy’s legend and simultaneously preserve his own reputation as a chronicler of English history. While some scholars suggest that Lydgate’s popularity declined in the post-Reformation period due to his reputation as the ‘Monk of Bury’, and while it is true that significantly fewer editions of Lydgate’s poems were published in the decades after the Reformation, Lane’s poem offers another window into Lydgate’s early modern reputation. I argue that Lane’s historiographic technique in his Guy of Warwick narrative mirrors Lydgate’s own poetic histories. Both Lane and Lydgate grapple with existing historical resources and compose their narratives by compiling the accreted traditions of the past, supplementing these traditions with documentary sources and artefacts. This article, thus, complicates existing scholarly narratives that align Lydgate with medieval or monastic traditions, traditions perceived to be irrecoverably transformed by the events of the Reformation in England.


Author(s):  
Joel Westheimer ◽  
Joseph Kahne

The notion of democracy occupies a privileged place in our society. Educators and policymakers are increasingly pursuing a broad variety of programs that aim to promote democracy through civic education, service learning, and other pedagogies. The nature of their underlying beliefs, however, differs. “What Kind of Citizen?” calls attention to the spectrum of ideas represented in education programs about what good citizenship is and what good citizens do. Our argument derives from an analysis of both democratic theory and a two year study of educational programs in the U.S. that aim to promote democracy. The study employed a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative data from observations and interviews with analysis of program documents and quantitative analysis of pre/post survey data. We detail three conceptions of the “good” citizen: personally responsible, participatory, and justice oriented that emerged from literature analysis and from our study. We argue that these three conceptions embody significantly different beliefs regarding the capacities and commitments citizens need in order for democracy to flourish; and they carry significantly different implications for pedagogy, curriculum, evaluation, and educational policy. We underscore the political implications of education for democracy and suggest that the narrow and often ideologically conservative conception of citizenship embedded in many current efforts at teaching for democracy reflects not arbitrary choices but rather political choices with political consequences.


1950 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 197-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Hunter

Few eras are more interesting and profitable to study than those in which the basic ideas of mankind change under the impact of new discoveries and ideas. Our own appears to be such a period; of previous ages perhaps only the ebullient Renaissance can equal it. At its English beginnings in the sixteenth century men reached avidly for new experiences; in the course of time they tried to codify them into theories which would do justice to the observed facts and at the same time harmonize as far as possible with the dicta transmitted from the past. These early efforts resulted in the foundation of the modern methods of science, not to mention permanent and still unchallenged achievements like Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood or Boyle's theory of gases. Such is the seventeenth century: the first great age of scientific generalization in English history.


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