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This article reports a local study of the presence of history as a subject in the kindergartens of Kristiansand, a municipality in southern Norway. There is no syllabus for history in the national curriculum; nevertheless, the research sought to find historical content in the kindergartens. The research method was informed by a precept of history didactics, namely that history is everywhere. Using this observation, tentative categories for content likely to feature history were formulated, and then searched for in the individual yearly plans of the kindergartens. This was supplemented by interviews. It is concluded that, in accordance with the national curriculum, history in the kindergartens is a local affair. It emerges especially through local history, visits to museums, and projects with historical features. This research was not designed to determine whether learning outcomes in history are achieved, nor to consider kindergartens outside Kristiansand. However, it references a corpus of literature on history in Norwegian kindergartens, and interacts with it. The conclusion about the presence of the subject is the same as was found for another city, Trondheim, in research by others. For international readers, the article also argues that in principle it is possible for young children to learn history orally and informally.

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Grimnes, Ole Kristian Norway in the Second World War: Politics, Society and Conflict, Frank Stewart, trans., Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2022; 304 pp., 4 b/w illus., 5 maps; 9781350214590, £75.00 (hbk); 9781350214606, £24.99 (pbk); 9781350214613, £22.49 (ebook) This book may be regarded as a manual of how the Second World War affected Norway. Grimnes deals with the internal politics of the wartime regime, with the civilian administration of Josef Terboven needing to find room for manoeuvre against the German army and the Norwegian Nazis. [Extracted from the article]

This article investigates whether the doctrine of social Darwinism had any bearing on the Labour Party's decision to support Britain's participation in the First World War. Many socialist intellectuals were wedded to social Darwinist conceptions of the world. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) published a number of tracts on the interrelationship between Darwinism or science and politics. The article looks for evidence of biological thinking in the Labour Party and the ILP prior to the First World War. It finds only small traces, vastly outweighed by environmental remedies to problems that were regarded as biological by social Darwinists. The labour movement also stood for pacifism as a signature policy. Yet when the war erupted, there was a sudden shift among Labour MPs towards supporting belligerent action. Did social Darwinism finally begin affecting them? Since there was only a slight connection between the doctrine and a few MPs, the article concludes that it was hardly an influence. Pragmatic reasons such as rallying to one's own nation, supporting working-class communities and resisting atrocities predominated. Social Darwinism was in fact more likely to be utilized by neutralists who argued that Germany was more "civilized" than Russia and therefore deserved to win the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the life and work of autodidact eugenist Herbert Brewer (1897-1968). He promoted 'eutelegenesis' (artificial insemination for eugenic purposes) from the nineteen-thirties to the nineteen-sixties. Brewer also tried to reconcile the views of eugenists and socialists. Using his correspondence with the Eugenics Society, and published and unpublished pro-eugenics literature, the article regards Brewer as far from successful in these tasks. But it argues throughout that eutelegenesis and reform eugenics were a revival of Francis Galton's original doctrine and that socialist eugenics is intellectually coherent. Fuller details about Brewer are given than in previous scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]