Friendship is a consequential relationship for child development and well-being. This chapter examines recent research on three major themes related to children’s friendships. We begin by reviewing findings from several long-term longitudinal studies documenting the diverse and multifaceted impacts of childhood and adolescent friendship competencies and experiences on later adjustment. We also highlight how these long-term longitudinal studies have allowed researchers to test and refine theoretical perspectives about how early family and peer relationships facilitate the development of skills and understandings that set the stage for social competence and positive adjustment later in development. With this as background, we review theory and research on the processes and provisions that characterize children’s friendships, and then describe important contextual factors that affect children’s friendships, with a particular focus on the school context and how contextual factors can facilitate or undermine the development and maintenance of cross-group friendship.

This chapter lays the groundwork for succeeding chapters in establishing popular understandings of causation and treatment and revealing the considerable flexibility inherent within the overall concept of ‘nerves’. It does this by examining self-help literature from the 1900s to mid-1930s, uncovering contemporary understanding of issues affecting mental well-being, and examining proposed causes, symptoms and remedies. These reveal key themes underpinning popular conceptualisations of stress during the subsequent century. The chapter argues that self-help books represented the opening up of a discourse about the inner self and the sensitive area of mental health and illustrates the increasing reflexivity required to explain everyday life in the twentieth century. Also proposed is the way that such literature both reflected and responded to contemporary social problems, illuminating popular notions of health and well-being, stoicism and personal responsibility.

Amid 20th-century global decolonization movements, Black and white organizers in the Lower Mississippi Valley challenged the economic exploitation and voter suppression of Jim Crow. In the early 1960s organizers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) supported West Feliciana sweet potato farmers who organized against a canning company whom they accused of using contracts to intimidate Black voters, and in October Rev. Joe Carter became the first Black person to register to vote in West Feliciana since 1902. Yet the reaction was swift, culminating in David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in the early 1990s. The linear passage of time does not guarantee progress; but if the forces of reaction are nimble, so are we. And there is joy to be found in that simple truth.

This case outlines a mass casualty scenario involving a targeted automobile ramming attack (TARMAC) during a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans. The scenario features three patients with varying injuries: a 23-year-old man struck by a truck, a 37-year-old woman with a leg fracture from falling off bleachers, and a 63-year-old man with a head injury and confusion after falling. The exercise focuses on key disaster response principles, including scene safety, airway and breathing assessment, hemorrhage control, and trauma stabilization. It emphasizes the need for quick decision-making, effective communication, crowd control, and coordination with emergency services in mass casualty situations. Critical actions include patient stabilization, C-spine precautions, airway management, and rapid transport. Through this exercise, healthcare providers practice managing multiple trauma patients in a chaotic, high-stress environment, preparing them for real-world mass casualty incidents involving blunt trauma, penetrating injuries, and complex triage scenarios.

The Introduction situates Sylvia Plath and the Supernatural within the current scholarship of Plath studies along with the recent new publications of Plath’s works. It introduces the purpose of the book and reviews the previous, often misguided approaches to Plath’s relationship to the supernatural and the occult. The Introduction emphasises the new approach of bringing together literary studies with the framework of the early modern witch trials and historical studies on witchcraft to interrogate the full extent Plath engaged with the political, cultural, and literary heritages of the European and American witch-hunts. Across seven chapters, this book reviews the way in which gender, magic, and power intersect in her poetry and prose contextualised within the post-war era.

Manchester’s academic community played an important role in welcoming academic refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Some of these are well known: Michael Polanyi and Rudolf Peierls, for instance. This chapter explores the largely forgotten story of Franz Koenigsberger, a Jewish refugee who arrived in Manchester in 1938 not for an academic position, but for a position in industry. After the war he made his academic career in the College of (Science and) Technology, and became the UK’s first Professor of Machine Tool Engineering in 1961.

Following recent historiography, the chapter calls into question the overlapping of the foundation of the Red Cross and the origins of humanitarianism. At the same time it explains why the birth of the ICRC marked a turning point: it led to the completion of acts that were already in progress, it catalysed the different forces in action and it intercepted shared opinions and feelings. In the first instance the new organisation directed aid and treatment work towards war victims, marking for a long time the main boundaries of humanitarian action. As well as this, the initiatives promoted by the Genevan committee as early as the beginning of the 1860s for soldiers struck down by enemy fire or illness encouraged an interpenetration between humanitarianism and warfare. This took a leap forward in the Franco-Prussian War and then again in the First World War. At the same time, Europe became the centre-stage for humanitarian operations.