Abstract During the Second World War, contrary to enduring images of bombardment and scarcity, people on Britain's ‘Home Front’ continued to take part in a broad array of sporting activities. Cricket played a more significant role in the wartime sporting landscape than many historians have previously recognized. Furthermore, between 1939 and 1945, a substantial portion of the cricket played – particularly within the island of Great Britain – carried pronounced imperial dimensions. Attracting large crowds, widely reported and broadcast wartime cricket gave tangible form to the idea, in ways accessible to mass audiences, that England belonged to a broad imperial community of colonies and dominions sustained by their active involvement in the war effort and loyalty to England's cultural traditions. At the same time, the history of wartime cricket reveals the complexity of racialized wartime identities. By examining these largely overlooked aspects of wartime social and cultural life – shaped by clear propagandistic aims and messages – this article contributes to the historiography of empire and imperial sentiment during the Second World War, deepens our understanding of wartime cricket and sport, and advances scholarship on the wartime politics of ‘race’.

Abstract This article reassesses the classic ‘agitation thesis’ by dissecting how newspaper discourses shaped the trajectory of the Finnish Civil War, focusing on the temporal rhythms and ideological variation of political language during 1917–18. Combining close reading with computational text‐mining of four mass‐circulation political newspapers (socialist Työmies , conservative Uusi Suometar , liberal Helsingin Sanomat and agrarian Ilkka ), the analysis isolates three discursive regimes: an optimistic ‘spring of freedom’, a polarized ‘fall of democracy’ and the wartime rhetoric of 1918. Findings show that socialist hostility towards the ‘bourgeoisie’ surged immediately after the Russian Provisional Government dissolved Finland's parliament in July 1917, preceding the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd. Non‐socialist papers responded more slowly but ultimately fused anti‐socialist and anti‐Russian tropes. While hateful speech alone did not cause the war, it magnified the crisis of democracy and lowered thresholds for violence by portraying political opponents as existential threats. The article argues that discursive factors operated probabilistically – raising, but not determining, the likelihood of civil war – and calls for future multi‐factor research designs that integrate discourse datasets with social and economic indicators across comparative cases.

Abstract The article traces Churchill's engagement with South Africa, from his time as a newspaper correspondent during the Anglo‐Boer War to his services in both Liberal and Conservative cabinets as well as, ultimately, his premiership. The discussion highlights three phases in this relationship. First, Churchill experienced South Africa as a site of imperial conflict and personal adventure, which reinforced his romantic imperialism. Second, in the years after the war, he adopted a pragmatic stance, accepting reconciliation with the Afrikaners and supporting self‐government as a necessary means of stabilizing the empire. Third, in the interwar period and beyond, South Africa became a more peripheral concern for Churchill, and he viewed it chiefly in strategic and imperial terms as part of wider Commonwealth and global defence calculations. Nevertheless, his close personal relationship with Jan Smuts was important to many issues, beyond South Africa itself.

Abstract This article offers new perspectives on the relationship between elementary teaching, scientific expertise and the professionalization of the human sciences. Previous scholarship has demonstrated the ready existence of ‘amateur’ science societies in the nineteenth century where cross‐class exchanges were common. While most scholars contend that science had largely professionalized by the early twentieth century, this article complicates that narrative by examining the role of lower‐middle‐class elementary teachers in the British child study movement, particularly focusing on London. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the role played by professional organizations for lower‐middle‐class men in the early twentieth century. This research adds to that picture by investigating the importance of scientific associational culture and support through child study organizations for teachers. The article argues that London ‘child study’ was shaped into a collaborative space with opportunities for professional development by its lower‐middle‐class teachers. The article centres the intersecting roles of class, gender and profession in shaping access to scientific expertise and considers how this was navigated by teachers of both genders. I argue that teachers used the child study movement to create ‘portable expertise’ – status that could be moved over professional boundaries between the educational and scientific spheres. These strategies for crafting expertise and mutual support were met with ambivalence and sometimes resistance from elite medical actors within the child study community, culminating in conflicts over the authority to produce and make use of scientific knowledge about children.

Abstract No other country defined the trajectory of Churchill's political career more than Germany, a country of which he had little direct knowledge but which he either sought to emulate, accommodate or oppose throughout his time in politics. This article traces Churchill's relationship with Germany from his entry into politics at the beginning of the Edwardian era through to the end of his life, when a newly prosperous West Germany had become a fixture in Cold War international politics.

Abstract This article discusses the ‘Global March for Peace’ of 1960–61 – an initiative that took a group of activists from San Francisco to Moscow, crossing countries on both sides of the Cold War divide. While the general development of this march is well known, this article offers a fresh perspective in several ways. Drawing on a varied range of sources, it pays particular attention to the expectations, experiences and reflections of US activists who had strongly been involved in the march. Moreover, it uses the history of the march to examine different elements of internationalist practice and reappraises the march as an experiment in ‘grassroots diplomacy’, while also revealing the latter's intrinsic tensions.

Abstract In the summer of 1919, W. T. Goode, the Manchester Guardian ’s special correspondent in Russia and the Baltic, was arrested in the Estonian capital Tallinn and briefly detained aboard a British warship. Goode's detention caused a furore, leading to accusations of kidnap, heated commentary in the press and questions in parliament. Reaction to the case divided along ideological lines, with right‐wing newspapers and some officials convinced that he was a ‘dangerous’ Bolshevik agent, while those on the left believed that he had been illegally detained to stop him reporting the truth about conditions in Russia. This article draws on archival material and published sources to provide the first thorough analysis of the case and establish who ordered Goode's detention and why. In so doing, it argues that the case illustrates the anxieties felt in Britain in the immediate aftermath of the First World War concerning the spread of communism on the one hand, and the suppression of news from Russia on the other. At the same time, it highlights Goode's role as one of the first sympathetic British visitors to the Soviet Union and the extent to which his opponents were justified in considering him a propagandist for the Bolsheviks.

Abstract This State of the Field article discusses how, when and why the history of masculinities has emerged since the 1980s, and why it continues to be an important research field today. The article begins with the field's multiple origin stories and then discusses its expansion in chronology, geography and theme, as well as newer directions for masculinities in disability history, trans history and Indigenous history. Many scholars involved in this history over the years have openly wondered whether it remains useful, or whether analysing categories of privilege like masculinities only turns the lens back on men as default historical actors, to the detriment of marginalized peoples and themes. However, this article argues that the history of masculinities has done and continues to do important work in demonstrating to other academic disciplines that masculinities are never static or fixed but dynamic and shifting according to historical time and place. The article concludes that with the rights of women and transgender people increasingly under threat in the United Kingdom and North America as well as globally, it is essential for scholars to continue to historicize masculinities, patriarchal constructs and men's relationships to power. Historians are poised to help bridge the gap between the ivory tower and various publics, moreover, who continue to create and consume their own historical narratives about masculinized behaviours and expectations in the past and today.