Children and youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era edited by James Martin with a foreword by Paula S. Fass
January 2017
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Journal article
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History of Education
The psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the ‘extraordinary child’ in postwar British science fiction
November 2016
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Journal article
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Medical Humanities
A sudden influx of portrayals of ‘extraordinary children’ emerged in British science fiction after the Second World War. Such children both violated and confirmed the new set of expectations about ordinary childhood that emerged from the findings of developmental psychologists around the same time. Previous work on extraordinary children in both science fiction and horror has tended to confine the phenomenon to an ‘evil child boom’ within the American filmmaking industry in the 1970s. This article suggests that a much earlier trend is visible in British post-war science fiction texts, analysing a cluster of novels that emerged in the 1950s: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). It will be argued that the groups of extraordinary children in these novels both tap into newer child-centred assertions about the threats posed by abnormal childhood, underwritten by psychology and psychoanalysis, and represent a reaction to an older progressive tradition in which children were envisaged as the single hope for a utopian future. This article will ultimately assert that the sudden appearance of extraordinary children in science fiction reflects a profound shift in assessment criteria for healthy childhood in Britain from the 1950s onwards, an issue that had become vitally important in a fledgling social democracy.
Education, parenting and concepts of childhood in England, c. 1945 to c. 1979
September 2016
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Journal article
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Contemporary British History
Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, c. 1914–1960
July 2016
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Journal article
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Contemporary British History
Inside the ‘blackboard jungle’
October 2015
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Journal article
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Cultural and Social History
‘ “Children” and the nanny state: shifting the boundaries of adolescence,’
December 2013
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Internet publication
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'That was what Life in Bridgeburn had Made Her': Reading the Autobiographies of Children in Institutional Care in England, 1918-46
September 2013
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Journal article
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Twentieth Century British History
'Michael Gove's education policies would have looked old-fashioned in the 1950s,'