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Between Control and Emancipation: Youth Work with the Second Generation of Post-Colonial Immigrants in 1970s and 1980s London

‘The Fire Next Time’—with this alarming subtitle, the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) published a report on ‘youth in multi-racial society’. It stressed that the children of post-colonial migrants from India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean faced disadvantages in education and the labour market. Spending much of their time in public spaces and out of work, these young people had become a focus of public concern. The CRE argued that youth work should play a central role, particularly by engaging ‘Black youth’ in inner-city areas, described as ‘virtually or totally alienated from society’, through supervised leisure programmes aimed at averting unrest.1

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  1. Commission for Racial Equality, Youth in Multi-Racial Society: The Urgent Need for New Policies. ‘The Fire Next Time’ (London, 1980), 11. []

The Enemy’s Weapon: Learning Guerrilla Warfare Through an American Rifle

Sarawak, January 1964

‘You may be intrigued to hear that we have got our first Armalite rifle in Sarawak—captured from the Indos yesterday’, an officer of the British Far East Land Forces stationed in Singapore wrote to his colleague in Whitehall. ‘This may act as a suitable incentive to hasten our own.’1 In the context of the broader correspondence between these officers, preserved in the National Archives, the ironic tone becomes clear—a barely concealed frustration with the sluggish procurement bureaucracy in London, expressed through studied understatement.

Indeed, British troops fighting since 1963 in an undeclared war against Indonesian guerrillas in the jungles of Borneo felt abandoned by their leadership. While their own long, heavy rifles, designed for conventional warfare against Soviet troops, were of little use in the dense jungle, their opponents carried brand-new American weapons with which they could execute rapid raids from the undergrowth. Attempts to obtain such rifles themselves led to what amounted to organized looting expeditions; the British government could only gradually procure these still barely known weapons, today familiar under the name AR-15 and primarily known for horrific mass shootings and as an identity symbol of American gun culture.

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  1. J. F. Kenyon to T. J. Richardson, 6 Jan. 1964. The UK National Archives (hereafter TNA), DEFE 24/644. []

Who’s Responsible? ‘Illegitimate’ Children in England and Wales

Throughout time, the concept of ‘the family’ has had a variety of—often politicized—meanings in different parts of the world. In twentieth-century Britain, the nuclear ‘male breadwinner family’ remained the ideal, consisting of a father who provides for the family and a mother who raises the children and takes care of the household.

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(De)Constructing Europe? Some Findings . . .

Bringing together nine researchers based in Hamburg, London, Rome, and Warsaw, the (De)Constructing Europe project (also known as the ‘Euroscepticism project’), sought to view the history of European integration through different lenses. Challenging and moving beyond what some, such as Mark Gilbert, have termed the ‘progressive narrative’, whereby the European Union is portrayed as inexorably heading towards closer integration, the project sought to cast light on alternative viewpoints and underappreciated actors.

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Competition between Profit and Principles: The ‘Natural’ Market Niche in 1980s Britain

Below are findings that are part of my research for my doctoral thesis on the entanglement of commercial business and moral responsibility in the 1970s and 1980s. My access to archives across England, and specifically London, was made possible by the opportunity to stay at the German Historical Institute London in July and August 2023. In particular, the Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive in Nottingham and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London provided me with relevant sources.

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Trial and Error: The Federal Republic of Germany’s Failed First National Day of Remembrance and Where to Go from There

On 7 September 1950, the improvised West German parliamentary building—the Bundeshaus in Bonn—was packed with people. The Federal Chancellor with his cabinet, the majority of both chambers of parliament, as well as a significant number of honorary guests from high society had come together for the first ‘National Day of Remembrance of the German People’ (Nationaler Gedenktag des deutschen Volkes). Even the Allied High Commissioners were there.1

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  1. See C. E. L., ‘Ein Tag wie jeder andere’, Die Zeit, 7 Sept. 1950, at [https://www.zeit.de/1950/36/ein-tag-wie-jeder-andere], accessed 12 June 2023. []

All Along the Peace Walls – Revisiting 1960s and 1970s Belfast

I had the absolute pleasure of spending a day exploring Northern Ireland’s capital Belfast with Kevin McGlinchey in June 2022.1 Kevin replied to my letter to the editor of the Irish Independent seeking people to share their experiences of growing up on the island of Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s for my Ph.D. project. He instantly agreed to take me on a trip down memory lane, as he ‘valued the opportunity to bring to life an historical, personal, local and community experience of this particular area of Belfast and Belfast as a whole during both good and bad times.’2 Kevin was born in 1950 and grew up in Belfast, where he witnessed the beginning of the Troubles as a teenager.3

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  1. I sincerely thank Kevin and his sister Deirdre McGlinchey for their time and willingness to share their youth experiences with me, without which my research would not be possible. I am also grateful to Dr Séan Ó Duibhir for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article. []
  2. Kevin McGlinchey, email to the author, 3 Nov. 2022. []
  3. ‘The Troubles’ is a euphemism for the Northern Ireland conflict, which lasted from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The Troubles are often considered to be a religious conflict between the Catholic and Protestant populations of Northern Ireland, but were in fact caused by Ireland’s colonial past, which was marked by political and confessional frictions. ‘[T]he Northern Irish conflict is not a religious conflict . . . Although religion has a place—and indeed an important one—in the repertoire of conflict in Northern Ireland, the majority of participants see the situation as primarily concerned with matters of politics and nationalism, not religion.’ Richard Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations (London, 1997), 120. A summary of this view can be found in Claire Mitchell, Religion, Identity and Politics in Northern Ireland: Boundaries of Belonging and Belief (Aldershot, 2006), 5: ‘The central argument is that religion is an ethnic marker, but that it is not generally politically relevant in and of itself. Instead, ethnonationalism lies at the root of the conflict.’ For more background to the conflict, see CAIN Archive: Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland, accessed 20 Feb. 2023. []

Women’s Centres and their Newsletters: Feminist Spaces and Print Cultures in Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom

In April confusion reigned due to the last issue of Sisterhood thinking that the first Wednesday in April fell on the 8th rather than the 1st (Tut tut sack the proof readers I say). In the end we had two meetings but the discussion on Sexism and Education remained on the 8th. As a result of the confusion only 7 women attended.1

Taking place at the Cleveland women’s centre in Yorkshire, this seemingly benign communication mishap among the group producing the centre’s newsletter, Sisterhood, managed to leave the centre in disarray. In the end, the programme announced in the newsletter prevailed despite the organizers’ initial plans, illustrating just how central a role local newsletters could play in the basic functioning of key structures of local feminist scenes.

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  1. Sisterhood: Cleveland Womens Centre Newsletter, 3 (May 1981). []

Conference Report: The History of Medialization and Empowerment: The Intersection of Women’s Rights Activism and the Media, 20–21 January 2022

The third and final meeting of the International Standing Working Group on Medialization and Empowerment was held virtually on January 20 and 21, 2022. At the end of a three-year project, looking at the interconnections, contingencies, and dependencies of women’s rights and the media throughout the long-twentieth century, the conference explored the role of the media in shaping and constituting discussions of gender roles and women’s rights globally. Convened by Christina von Hodenberg and Jane Freeland (London), it is part of the international research project Knowledge Unbound: Internationalization, Networking, Innovation in and by the Max Weber Stiftung and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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Imagining a Transnational and Transhistorical Movement Against Violence

As a college student in the U.S. in the 1980s, I first became aware of Take Back the Night. In countless cities, towns, and campuses across the U.S., feminist organizations coordinated these annual events to protest violence against women. Participants—typically women (and often intentionally and exclusively women)—gathered for night-time marches and rallies to speak out against rape and other forms of sexual assault and to assert that women should have the right to occupy public spaces and travel at night without fear.

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