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In the nineteenth century city child rescuers developed 'a taxonomy of space' in which geography determined destiny. The privatised spaces of the middle classes were contrasted with the 'dirt, disease and delinquency' of the slums. Yet at the same time as 'dirt' was viewed as 'destructive' and proof of urban neglect it was also accepted in the form of rural soil to be 'fertile' and central to helping sustain life. This paper explores the emergence of this spatial taxonomy of destiny and its associated vocabulary of descriptors; it documents the visual duality of 'dirt' as a signifier of both 'risk' and of the 'pastoral'; and finally it examines some of the ways in which activists in one city sought in the twentieth century to bridge the divide and bring 'nature' into the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Floodgate Street area' was a notorious slum district in the city of Birmingham in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article presents a case study, drawing on the rich archival sources available for this area, to examine the language that local authority and voluntary workers used to describe the local area, and their engagement with local children in terms of welfare provision and punitive measures. The work of teachers at Floodgate Street School is located within a local discourse of urban poverty, and within local attempts to improve conditions for the inhabitants of slum areas. Local activities and discussions are contextualised within broader debates concerning slums and patterns of welfare. This article places schools at the centre of a historiography of urban poverty and welfare from which education is largely absent. It explores the possibilities, and limitations, of using the local archival record for this sort of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores two attempts to envisage a new global world, one created by the West, and to create new colonial subjects. One of these attempts was in Sierra Leone in the 1790s, the other in India in the 1830s. The two case studies are seen through the lens of a father and son, Zachary and Thomas Babington Macaulay, each a representative figure in a particular phase in the development of colonial politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that the local authority attendance officers responsible for the enforcement of compulsory attendance changed their approach to truancy under the influence of child welfare legislation and changing views of the child in the first decade of the twentieth century. Some of the changes in their work emerged as a direct response to implementing the law in relation to child welfare, but at the same time, attendance officers themselves increasingly aspired to a new welfare role which emphasized support and help for the needy family in place of the punitive role they had previously undertaken. However, it was far from easy for them to transform their image from the familiar one of the 'kid-catcher'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dance, as an art form, has traditionally been associated with the programmes of study for physical education in British schools during the twenty-first century. This discussion examines its dual role - as a means of healthy exercise and artistic expression within the specific framework of the Liberal Reforms. It reveals the impact of a systematic and methodical dissemination of dance within the framework of 'physical exercises' to the more coherent concept of 'physical training' by critically appraising the specific content of lessons for children of varying ages. References are made to specific case studies revealing how children were both empowered and enthused to become happy, healthy dancing children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper forms part of a recent trend that aims to contribute to the writing of a more inclusive education history sensitive to the operation of gender. The author presents an analysis of educator activists in twentieth-century England that connects, rather than separates, the domains of education, labour history and politics. The paper also contributes to a redefining of history/histories of education which, instead of relegating gender to the margins, integrates this perspective into its mainstream conceptual frameworks. The intent is to examine the circumstances that make class politics grounded in gendered and occupational identities possible, showing the way in which the politics of place works as an active influence at a range of scales. Here the auto/biographical practices of a married couple who taught in state schools are used as a lens through which to explore the larger questions of the intersection of biography and history, the distinction between lived experience and historical experience, the link between generation and social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Reeder was one of the most important conservers of the traditions of urban history scholarship established during the 1960s at the University of Leicester under the leadership of Professor H. J. Dyos. Among Reeder's major achievements were the application of the skills and objectives of such scholarship to the history of education, and in turn his reminding of urban historians of the importance of the educational dimension within their studies. Reeder was also a key figure in the international diffusion of teaching and research in urban educational history, and in promoting an interdisciplinary perspective that drew together past and present studies of urban educational policy and related social issues. This tribute article places his work in the context of changing attitudes to the history of urban education from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, and focuses by way of illustration on collaborative work between its writer [BM] and David Reeder in national conferences and in contributions to publications on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the establishment of the educational settlements, and how they differed from the better known social settlements, and in particular how the emphasis on education and non-residence marked them out from the older institutions. It examines the influence of members of the Religious Society of Friends—the Quakers—on the establishment and direction of the settlements, and their relationships with other Quaker and non-Quaker educational initiatives. It explores the educational and social ethos of the educational settlements, and how this changed during the first 15 years or so of their existence; and also the relationship between the settlements and other adult education providers such as the Workers' Educational Association (WEA). It also examines the governance of educational settlements, and how this came to be a source of conflict between the pioneers and the students who attended courses in them, and how the actual practices and environment of the settlements differed from the ideas of their originators. It shows how the early intentions of the Quaker pioneers of the settlements were modified following the experience of running the settlements and meeting their students' needs; and shows how the settlements' lack of resources limited the wider impact they were able to make. Nevertheless, it will be suggested that these institutions provided a model of a non-residential type of settlement that came to characterize the settlement movement as a whole as it developed in the 1930s and after the Second World War. Finally, at a time in which the history of settlements is beginning to receive more like the attention it deserves among both historians and social policy specialists, some further avenues of inquiry into the history of educational settlements will be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]