On May 18, 1918, fourteen thousand high school students from St. Louis, Missouri, public schools, accompanied by fourteen drum corps and seven professional bands, paraded through the city’s Forest Park. Each school marched behind the US flag and its banners. Boys were dressed like soldiers and girls like nurses, in white uniforms bearing a tiny red cross. Battalions of young drummers, followed by legions of adult nurses, closed the parade. As the young people passed by, spectators applauded the inspiring sight. They could feel their hearts burn with new patriotism and new reverence. As the parade ended at Art Hill, eight thousand children in red caps and capes stood at attention on the slope, saluted the onlookers, and began to form a living cross. Below them, the remaining six thousand young people fell into place to form the word Red Cross. For the occasion – the Inaugural Junior Red Cross Parade – the youth had been rallied to demonstrate their patriotism and participation in the war effort. One journalist noted that “the present generation of children are learning that Service means sympathy as well as sacrifice, a desire and willingness to help others as well as a feeling that it is one’s duty and obligation to do so.”

A national conference on Americanization in April 1918 evidenced how social and political concerns mattered in wartime. Many regarded the global war as an unhoped-for opportunity to patch up the American nation and bring together the various ethnic groups living in the United States. Across the United States, ethnic enclaves existed and hyphenated Americans oscillated between pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and being loyal to their homelands. Assimilationists seized the opportunity to foster American ideals in children. They consistently rallied politicians in their crusade against the hyphen and eventually defeated progressive integrationalists.

From August 1914 to April 1917, although the United States remained officially neutral, private individuals engaged American children in the war effort. At the local and state levels, initiatives mushroomed to capture children’s energy. Educationalists feared that explicit talk of war and propaganda in all forms would spoil children’s innocence. This is why they decided to engage children in civic leagues while others sought to mobilize children in the war effort. Although the leaders of these initiatives differed on how best to foster patriotism in the nation’s youth, the consensus was that American children needed to be engaged in civic and patriotic activities and be aware of their responsibilities as future adults.

As the war ended, politicians and educationalists saw the American Junior Red Cross as a means to promote American ideals abroad. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross shifted its focus on a new form of Americanization, using children as part of a cultural diplomacy that positioned the United States as the global Good Samaritan. Children reached out around the globe, waged war against diseases, dedicated much of their spare time to rescue foreign "brothers" and "sisters," and sponsored children overseas.

Across the nation, children were urged to become “soldiers of the soil,” members of the United States School Garden Army, an initiative created in February 1918 by the US Bureau of Education to promote local gardening. Federal authorities urged local communities to feed themselves while the United States fed the Allies and other nations dependent on the US food supply. The more food civilians grew, the better the United States could feed the world. Children thus became part of a large pool of unpaid labor, serving the interests of both politicians and educationalists: as youth helped to increase food production, they learned skills and habits of self-reliance. Through the United States School Garden Army, children hooverized and learned to change their diet and eat with moderation. Gardening taught them the meaning of sacrifice.

Medical experts and epidemiologists knew the importance of hygiene on the home front. They convinced local, state, and federal authorities that the war on disease had to be fought. Consequently, the Modern Health Crusade, which originated in Detroit, became a nationwide movement in 1915. Federal authorities realized that a high infant mortality rate threatened the fabric of American society in the long run. Additionally, in order to build a strong and healthy army (and nation), bodies had to be physically fit. Children began to matter to the military and the nation writ large. As hygiene became a national concern, between 1914 and 1918, both medical and military authorities promoted hygienic standards to lift the nation.

In organizing a juvenile division of the American Red Cross – the so-called American Junior Red Cross – in September 1917, Woodrow Wilson attempted to mobilize the nation’s twenty-two million schoolchildren. Consequently, the American Junior Red Cross became the first federal youth-focused organization to be specifically dedicated to mobilizing American youth in wartime. In designing this first national youth-focused organization, Wilson impeded radical interventionists and quelled educationalists’ concerns. While directing children’s energy to altruistic humanitarian tasks, the organization opened schools to federal oversight of efforts to instill loyalty and deter dissent. Federal authorities attempted to control teachers and relied upon the educational structures to instill loyalty in the future generations of Americanyouth.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Maconchy’s children’s operas, situating them alongside other works she composed especially for children and young audiences. Much like Benjamin Britten, Maconchy saw the inherent value, intellect, and presence of self in children and youth, and thus did not patronise them in her compositions. Children’s opera can essentially be subdivided into three categories of works: those written about, those written for, and those written with children as the primary audience, subject, or participants. Broadly speaking, children’s operas may coalesce any of the three sets, resulting in an opera that is for an audience of children, about a child- or childhood-focused theme, and performed by a cast or cast members who are children. Justin Vickers examines Maconchy’s children’s operas as an integral facet of her compositional output not to be overlooked, and the milieu proved to be a catalyst for Maconchy’s abundant well of musical creativity. Moreover, these works may be positioned in the broader educational initiatives in music and the arts throughout the British Isles.

Post-mortem imaging is an indispensable tool in the investigation of suspicious childhood deaths, particularly for identifying fractures and intracranial hemorrhages. It offers significant logistical advantages over traditional autopsies, including cost-effectiveness and rapid image acquisition. However, its application requires close collaboration between radiologists, pathologists and forensic experts, and is rarely used as a standalone approach. This chapter delves into the role of post-mortem imaging, with a primary focus on post-mortem CT and some coverage of post-mortem MRI and novel techniques of micro-CT and linear slot scanning.

The chapter discusses key medicolegal considerations, imaging protocols, common findings and interpretation challenges and the importance of maintaining strict chain-of-custody protocols. As post-mortem imaging continues to gain traction, we underscore the need for standardized imaging protocols and enhanced support for multidisciplinary teams to safeguard the well-being of professionals conducting these sensitive examinations.

This paper shows that Elizabeth Anderson’s account of relational egalitarianism offers inadequate resources to combat interactional injustice, that is, the injustices in modes of social interaction that reinforce positions of unequal status and social vulnerability. The paper reviews Anderson’s argument that social integration is key to remedying specific kinds of unjust inequalities before exploring examples of interactional injustice for which integration – as Anderson specifies it – is an inadequate solution because the victims are already highly integrated, such as fat people. The paper argues that a policy-focused account such as Anderson’s misses the fact that interactional injustices are often the cumulative result of many individual people making individually legitimate choices to control their own interactional lives, choices which collectively subordinate, marginalise, or ostracise other people. In order to remedy interactional injustices, we must attend not only to government policies as Anderson does, but also to our personal responsibility for our choices and their collective impact.

Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction is full of girls; in nearly all her work, she focuses on the act of maturing through adolescence to early adulthood. The experience of girlhood among Bowen’s characters maps onto the generic characteristics of her truncated, ambiguous Bildungsromane, all of which subvert expectations and resist satisfying maturation. Her novels focus on figures experiencing historical and emotional arrest, and her adolescent girls often remain in moments of developmental or social suspension. This essay traces girlhood and adolescence in abeyance in Bowen’s short fiction, and in novels ranging from The Hotel to The Death of the Heart to The Little Girls.