This thesis compares adolescent engagement with the First World War in Ireland and New Zealand between 1914 and 1918. Twenty-five elite boys' secondary schools are used as case studies, including Catholic and Protestant institutions. This approach not only captures a common adolescent cohort, but also brings transnational connections to the fore; Catholics comprised approximately 14 percent of New Zealand's population, at least nine-tenths of whom were of Irish descent. In addition to differentiating student behaviour from adult-articulated expectations, boys' responses to the war are juxtaposed against those of their teachers. Using school periodicals, newspapers, and memoirs, this thesis partially recovers the neglected history of adolescent wartime experiences in two under-researched regions of the British Empire. It also elucidates the ways in which hostilities disrupted age-specific concerns and practices in elite school settings. Age was critical in shaping how male non-combatants were impacted by, and reacted to, the conflict. This argument is substantiated by in-depth analyses of several related themes, including 'war enthusiasm', death, dissent, and cultural 're-mobilization'. While the First World War was near-uniformly identified as a crucial event, staff responses were mediated by longstanding orientations and responsibilities. Teachers prioritised institutional concerns such as state funding and school status throughout. Irish and New Zealand adolescents also engaged with hostilities on their own terms; 'boy culture' and age-related interests provided a constant baseline against which external interventions into daily life were evaluated. These cross-national similarities were modulated by immediate contexts. Coercive measures implemented by the state did not always receive popular support, contributing to new political trajectories and visions of the future within particular communities. National parameters also had the final say as to when students could legally enlist. This intersection of age and place ultimately proved pivotal in determining civilian reactions to major global developments during the 1910s.

The late-Victorian and Edwardian period marked the zenith of urban park construction, spurred on in part by concerns about the physical and moral health of those living in the city. For the middle-class reformers at the time, public parks offered a space through which the unique and complex social issues of the era could be addressed and resolved. The public park was unique in that it made children visible on an unprecedented scale. Their role was fixed at the very heart of discourses on health; of the body, the mind, the nation, and the empire. This research explores these discussions of identity, and how that was negotiated by children in the very specific landscape of the public park. Previous work on the concept of childhood during this period has focused on an adult interpretation of the figure of the child, steeped in nostalgia and imbued with an adult fear and hope for the future. I argue that this ignores the lived experience of the child, and denies them agency in creating their own identity. This thesis uses a methodology inspired by current research in the emerging interdisciplinary field of childhood studies and drawing on the insights of material cultures studies to address this. The park space offers a unique opportunity to study lived experiences of childhood, designed as it was for use by the general public, with children firmly in mind. This work addresses the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of public urban parks in relation to children and explores the idea of a late-Victorian and Edwardian childhood identity as a complex and nuanced phenomenon. Throughout my thesis I use three parks as my primary case studies. These are Saltwell Park in Gateshead, Whitworth Park in Manchester, and Greenhead Park in Huddersfield. All three parks are situated in towns in the north of England that experienced dramatic change as a result of the industrial revolution and so reflect the anxieties present nationwide as a result of this change. By way of contrast I also consider parks in London and elsewhere to understand the uniqueness of these parks but also how they were situated within broader national debates over children and childhood. My investigation is broken down into three major thematic areas, each of which seeking to explore and analyse a particular aspect of childhood identity. The first of the three themes is the ‘Natural Child’. I explore the notion that children were thought of having a greater connection with, or affinity for, the natural world, and that they benefitted in particular from access to nature. The second area of research is the ‘Playful Child’. Here the idea that children were inherently playful, frivolous and could be shaped through correct play will be discussed. Finally, I investigate the ‘Empire Child’, exploring the notion of the child as the future of the Empire and the Nation, and the embodiment of concerns over racial superiority, military conquest and economic power. Within each of these sections I examine the way that this idea is expressed in the prescriptive and other literature, before addressing the way in which these notions could be articulated in the park landscape. The material culture of the park and the way in which the parks encouraged or discouraged children’s behaviour is analysed in relation to each of these themes. Significantly I also show how children engaged with, or rejected, notions of childhood identity, acknowledging that children were not just passively receiving instruction, but were actively involved in negotiating their own identity.

This thesis examines the book in the nineteenth century by way of an unusual corpus: movable and novelty books for children, drawn from the Opie Collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian Library. It argues that these items, which have been either ignored or actively dismissed by scholars of children’s literature, are of two-fold significance for the history of the book: they encourage a sense of the book as a constitutively (rather than an incidentally) material object, and they demand an understanding of reading as not just a mental activity, but a physical one as well. Each of the first five chapters of the thesis centres on a different format. The opening chapter discusses the Regency-era paper doll books produced by Samuel and Joseph Fuller, exposing the tension between form and content in these works. The second chapter looks at Victorian panorama books for children, showing how the panorama format affects space, time, and the structure of any text accompanying the image. The third chapter reads the pop-up book’s key tension—the tension between surface and depth in the pursuit of an illusion of three dimensions—in terms of flat, theatrical, and stereoscopic picture-making, three other nineteenth-century pictorial modes in which an illusion of three-dimensionality is important. The fourth chapter traces self-reflexive accounts of printing, publishing, and the material book in dissolving-view books produced by the German publisher and printer Ernest Nister at the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth chapter positions the late nineteenth-century mechanical books designed and illustrated by Lothar Meggendorfer in terms of two material analogies, the puppet and the mechanical toy or automaton. The final chapter synthesizes evidence as to how the movable book could and should be read from across formats, foregrounding in particular the ways in which the movable embodies reading.

It is commonly accepted that, prior to the rise of paediatric medicine as a formal medical specialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, medical care of children was primarily conducted by women in the context of the household. However, as this thesis argues, there was vibrant medical interest in children prior to the development of formalized paediatric medicine. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a network of medical practitioners interested in children’s health sought to establish their authority over the subject and, in doing so, devoted increased attention to children, channelling general medical interest into the basis for future medical specialisation. As this thesis argues, medical authority over children’s health was gradually constructed over the eighteenth century through printed texts, institutional experience, medical understandings of disease, and efforts to devise therapeutic practices suitable to children. Key to these developments were the efforts made by medical men to supplant women as authorities on children’s health. Also crucial was the role played by institutions in providing spaces for medical practitioners to encounter children. Institutions, such as the Dispensary for the Infant Poor and the London Foundling Hospital, increased the opportunities for medical practitioners to gain experience treating child patients. As this thesis demonstrates, it was the children of the poor who provided medical practitioners with the hands-on experience necessary to bolster their emerging claims of authority. As such, institutions and poor children both had essential roles to play in the development of medical interest in children, and the translation of that interest into claims of medical authority.

Children’s literature flourished in Edo-period Japan, as this dissertation shows through a survey of eighteenth-century woodblock-printed picturebooks for children that feature children in prominent roles. Addressing a persisting neglect of non-Western texts in the study of children’s literature and childhood per se, the dissertation challenges prevailing historical understandings of the origins of children’s literature and conceptions of childhood as a distinct phase of life. The explosive growth of print culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japan not only raised expectations for adult literacy but also encouraged the spread of basic education for children and the publication of books for the young. The limited prior scholarship on Edo-period Japanese children’s books tends to dismiss them as a few isolated exceptions or as limited to moralistic primers and records of oral tradition. This dissertation reveals a long-lasting, influential, and varied body of children’s literature that combines didactic value with entertainment. Eighteenth-century picturebooks drew on literary and religious traditions as well as popular culture, while tailoring their messages to the interests and limitations of child readers. Organized in two parts, the dissertation includes two analytical chapters followed by five annotated translations of picturebooks (kōzeibyōshi and early kusazōshi). Among the illustrators that can be identified are ukiyoe artists like Torii Kiyomitsu (1735-1785). The first chapter analyzes the picturebook as a form of children’s literature that can be considered in terms analogous to those used of children’s literature in the West, and it provides evidence that these picturebooks were recognized by Japanese of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as uniquely suited to child readers. The second chapter addresses the ways in which woodblock-printed children’s literature was commercialized and canonized from the mid-eighteenth century through the latter years of the Edo period, and it shows that picturebooks became source material for new forms of children’s culture during that time. The translated picturebooks, from both the city of Edo and the Kamigata region, include a sample of eighteenth-century views of the child: developing fetus, energetic grandchild, talented student, unruly schoolboy, obedient helper at home, young bride-to-be, and deceased child under the care of the Bodhisattva Jizō. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

La ricerca ha inteso ripercorrere la storia di “Pro Infantia” nel suo primo ventennio di vita (1913-1933). Il lavoro ha preso avvio dall’analisi dei dibattiti politico-scolastici e dall’approfondimento del contesto pedagogico e culturale in cui si collocava la decisione dei vertici dell’editrice La Scuola di avviare una rivista per educatrici d’asilo. Il lavoro è entrato nel vivo con la messa a fuoco delle prese di posizione del periodico in merito alle novità introdotte dai provvedimenti legislativi coevi, quali, ad esempio, i Programmi per le istituzioni infantili emanati da Credaro nel 1914, la Riforma Gentile e i Programmi elaborati da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice nel 1923. Sono state altresì analizzate le valutazioni espresse circa le prassi didattiche e i metodi pedagogici adottati nelle istituzioni infantili del tempo, l’associazionismo di categoria, i percorsi formativi per le educatrici. Lo spoglio della rivista ha consentito inoltre di fare ulteriore luce sulle scelte dell’editrice La Scuola e sull’atteggiamento assunto dal periodico di fronte ad alcuni momenti chiave non solo della storia dell’educazione infantile in Italia, ma anche di quella politica e sociale, come ad esempio il primo conflitto mondiale, il dopoguerra, l’ascesa del fascismo e la successiva affermazione della dittatura. / The aim of this research was to reconstruct the history of "Pro Infantia" over its initial twenty years of publication (1913-1933). The first step in the study was to analyse the political debate on education and the cultural and educational backdrop against which the publishing house, La Scuola, decided to set up a journal for infant school teachers. The core of the research work involved examining the journal’s positions on the legislation of the period – such as the programs for infant schools issued by Credaro in 1914, the Gentile reform and the programs drawn up by Giuseppe Lombardo Radice in 1923 – and its assessments of the teaching practices and educational methods adopted in contemporary infant schools, as well as of teachers’ associations, and infant teacher training courses. Finally, scrutiny of the journal’s content also shed light on the policies adopted by La Scuola and "Pro Infantia"’s stance concerning both key historical developments in Italian early childhood education and broader political and social events, such as World War One, the post-war period, the rise of fascism and the advent of the fascist dictatorship.

Objectif: Explorer l’association entre différentes expériences de maltraitance subie dans l’enfance chez un groupe de mères adolescentes québécoises et les conditions observables chez ces dernières qui sont reconnues comme pouvant mener à l’Adoption de pratiques parentales maltraitantes (APPM) envers leur enfant, en cohérence avec les repères mis de l’avant par la théorie axée sur le traumatisme. Devis: Analyses secondaires de données quantitatives tirées d’une étude évaluative portant sur le Programme de Soutien aux Jeunes Parents (PSJP) des Services intégrés en périnatalité et pour la petite enfance à l’intention des familles vivant en contexte de vulnérabilité (SIPPE). Échantillon: 288 mères adolescentes québécoises, âgées en moyenne de 18 ans, recevant ou ayant reçu des services par le biais du PSJP. Méthodologie: Les données ont été recueillies en quatre temps de mesure, soit à deux reprises durant la grossesse, ainsi qu’à 5 et 17 mois postpartum, sur une période d’environ deux ans. L’expérience de maltraitance subie dans l’enfance a été mesurée à l’aide de la version abrégée de l’échelle Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Une analyse de partitionnement des données a été menée en utilisant les variables relatives à l’expérience de maltraitance subie dans l’enfance (cinq formes de maltraitance et leur classification d’intensité). Dans un deuxième temps, des analyses de variance, par tableaux de contingence et de régression logistique binaire ont été menées afin d’évaluer l’association entre les différentes expériences de maltraitance subie dans l’enfance et les variables identifiées comme étant des conditions associées à l’APPM chez les mères adolescentes. Résultats: Nos résultats mettent de l’avant la fréquence élevée de l’expérience de maltraitance subie dans l’enfance et font ressortir trois types distincts d’expérience. Un premier type est caractérisé par une expérience de négligence émotionnelle sans cooccurrence; un deuxième par une expérience d’abus sexuel et de négligence émotionnelle; et un troisième par une expérience composée de toutes les formes de maltraitance en cooccurrence mais avec une plus faible intensité de négligence émotionnelle. En général, malgré certaines distinctions, ce seraient les mères s’inscrivant dans les deuxième et troisième types qui présenteraient significativement plus de conditions associées à l’APPM pour ce qui est de la pauvreté matérielle, de la fragilisation de la santé mentale, du fonctionnement parental et de la précarité du réseau de soutien. Constats: Ces résultats suggèrent l’importance d’arriver à une compréhension exhaustive de l’expérience de maltraitance subie dans l’enfance chez les mères adolescentes puisque, selon sa nature et sa cooccurrence, ses conséquences peuvent varier. Ces conséquences peuvent être persistantes et placer les mères à risque de transmission intergénérationnelle de la maltraitance envers leur enfant. Dans une optique de prévention de l’APPM, ceci met de l’avant la pertinence d’étudier la problématique de la maltraitance chez les mères adolescentes non pas seulement en fonction du risque de perpétration mais également en fonction de la maltraitance qu’elles ont elles-mêmes subie. Les implications pour l’intervention en travail social et dans le domaine psychosocial sont également discutées. / Objective: To explore the association between histories of childhood maltreatment types among a group of adolescent mothers and recognized variables linked to the Adoption of maltreating parental behavior (AMPB) towards their child in accordance with Trauma-focused theory landmarks. Design: Secondary analysis of quantitative data from an evaluative study of the Programme de Soutien aux Jeunes Parents (PSJP) des Services intégrés en périnatalité et pour la petite enfance à l’intention des familles vivant en contexte de vulnérabilité (SIPPE). Sample: 288 adolescent mothers from Québec, Canada, 18 years old on average, receiving or having received services through the PSJP. Method: Data was collected four times (twice during pregnancy, as well as at 5 and 17 months postpartum) over an average period of two years. Childhood maltreatment history was measured by using the short version of Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). Cluster analysis was performed using variables related to childhood trauma history (forms of maltreatment experience and severity classification). Analyses of variance, cross tables and binary logistic regression were then conducted to assess the association between the different types of childhood maltreatment and recognized variables linked to AMPB in adolescent mothers. Results: Results show a high occurrence of childhood maltreatment experience among the adolescent mothers that took part in our study. Further, they highlight three distinct types of childhood maltreatment. The first type is characterized by emotional neglect without cooccurrence; the second one, by sexual abuse and emotional neglect; and the third one, by a cooccurrence of all forms of abuse but with a lower intensity of emotional neglect. Overall, despite certain distinctions, mothers from the second and third types present significantly more risk factors for AMPB than mothers from the first type (i.e. higher levels of poverty, fragile mental health, parental difficulties, and lower satisfaction of social network). Conclusion: From a prevention perspective of AMPB, our results put forward the importance of focusing on and understanding adolescent mothers’ diversity of childhood maltreatment experiences. Difficulties related to a history of childhood maltreatment vary according to its nature and the co-occurrence of forms of maltreatment. These consequences can be persistent and put mothers at risk of intergenerational transmission of maltreatment towards their children. This puts forth the relevance of studying maltreatment among adolescent mothers not only according to the risk of perpetration but also according to the abuse they have themselves suffered in their childhood. The implications for social work and psychosocial intervention are also discussed.

“Contested Childhoods” links together three major areas of historical inquiry: war and criminality, law and social change, and the law as it relates to children, in the first half of twentieth-century China. The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 has eclipsed the historical significance of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government and the importance of its role during the wartime period. This study examines how the outbreak of China’s War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945) served as a crucial catalyst to the construction of ideas of criminality and its relation to children during the wartime period. It examines the different measures by which Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government (1928-1949) attempted to handle the rise in levels of criminality involving juveniles. The study analyses how an increase in criminality during the wartime period challenged how ideas on and about children and childhood were in understood within Chinese society. Moreover, it argues that wartime conditions served as a crucial catalyst prompted the construction of a new judicial and legal framework that was aimed at delineating the boundaries between childhood and adulthood during this period.

Immune cell niches are microenvironments that support the survival of specific hematopoietic cells. The size of a given niche is dependent on survival and proliferation signals provided. Modulation of niche size can be a useful therapeutic tool, and a better understanding of the factors that control the size of immune cell niches can lead to more targeted therapies. Here bone marrow and thymic niches were modulated with tyrosine kinase inhibition to achieve increased engraftment following stem cell transplantation (SCT). SCT resulting in mixed chimerism is curative for several benign blood diseases, but toxicities associated with myeloablative and cytotoxic conditioning regimens limit the application of SCT. Sunitinib inhibits multiple tyrosine kinases including KIT, an essential survival signal within the hematopoietic stem cell and thymic progenitor niches. Sunitinib therapy diminishes hematopoietic and thymic progenitor cells in mice and enhances accessibility of marrow and thymic niches to transplanted bone marrow. This provides a novel, non-cytotoxic approach to accomplish mixed hematopoietic chimerism. The observation that T cells undergo increased proliferation and accumulate in IL-7R deficient mice compared to other lymphopenic hosts raised questions about the factors that control the size of the T cell niche. Understanding these factors is useful in designing therapeutics to increase T cell responses for treatment of many diseases including cancer. Dendritic cells (DCs) are well known for their ability to modulate T cell responses; however, very little is known about the role of IL-7R signaling on DCs. The data presented here show that bone marrow derived DCs treated with IL-7 were less able to induce T cell proliferation in coculture. In vivo systems using CD11cDTR mice showed a role for IL-7 signaling on CD11c+ cells in T cell homeostasis. Together these data suggest that IL-7R signaling on DCs is important for regulating the size of the T cell niche.

Since the late nineteenth century, Switzerland, a self-professed “playground” and “classroom” of the world, has successfully promoted itself as a desirable destination for international study and tourism. The historically entangled private schooling and tourism industries have steadily communicated idealised images of educational tourism in Switzerland via advertising. Concentrating on the period 1890 -1945 – when promotional ties between tourism organisations and private schools solidified – this thesis investigates the social construction of educational tourist place in two different types of promotion aimed at English-speaking markets: private international school prospectuses and education-focused tourism brochures. An analysis of early prospectuses from three long-standing private international schools and of education-focused tourism guides written by municipal organisations, travel agencies, school boards and the Swiss government revealed highly visual, ideologically-charged textual representations of locations and markets simultaneously defined, idealised and commodified international education in Switzerland. Chapters provide close interpretation of documents and aim, through thick description, to understand specific place-making examples within a wider socio-historical context. Chapter One examines the earliest prospectuses of Le Rosey and Brillantmont, two of the world’s must exclusive Swiss schools (1890-1916). An examination of photo-essay style prospectuses reveals highly selective portrayals of “Château” architecture communicated capacity to deliver a “high-class” and gender appropriate Swiss finishing. Visual cues hallmarking literary and sporting preferences indicated texts catered to the gaze of social-climbing, Anglo-centric markets desirous a continental cosmopolitan education that was not overly “foreign.” Chapter Two analyses the social construction of towns in French-speaking Switzerland as attractive educational centres (1890-1914). It explores how guides promoting Geneva, Neuchâtel and Lausanne constructed an idealised study-abroad landscape through thematic testaments to the educative capacities of local human and natural landscapes. The remaining chapters explore interwar texts. Chapter Three examines a high-altitude institute’s use of the idealising skills of high-end tourism poster artists to manufacture a pleasant, school-like image for the mountain sanatoria-like campus of Beau Soleil. Chapter Four investigates two series of education-focused tourism guidebooks which promoted education in Switzerland. An examination of a Swiss National Tourist Office series reveals discourses of nationhood racialised the Swiss as natural-born pedagogues and constructed Switzerland as a safe, moral destination populated by cooperative, multi-lingual and foreign student-friendly folk. An analysis of R. Perrin Travel Agency’s series explores guidebooks which openly classified education as a tourism commodity. The final chapter examines Le Rosey and Brillantmont’s interwar prospectuses within the context of complex, transnational schooling and school advertising practices. An analysis of images of school sports at winter holiday resorts suggests prospectuses expressed the sense of freedom which accompanies upper-class identity more so than any sense of gender-driven restriction.