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By analyzing how the Girl Guide movement sought to maintain social stability in England, Canada, and India during the 1920s and 1930s, this book reveals the ways in which girls and young women understood, reworked, and sometimes challenged the expectations placed on them by the world's largest voluntary organization for girls

By analyzing how the Girl Guide movement sought to maintain social stability in England, Canada, and India during the 1920s and 1930s, this book reveals the ways in which girls and young women understood, reworked, and sometimes challenged the expectations placed on them by the world's largest voluntary organization for girls

Kristine Alexander is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario. In fall 2012, she will take up the Elizabeth & Cecil Kent Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on the imperial and international histories of the Guide movement and the experiences of children and families during the First World War.

While most histories of Guiding and Scouting have focused on single national contexts, this article takes a broader approach by discussing the early history of the Guide movement in England, Canada and India. It asks how the Girl Guide movement's ideology and programs were affected by the imperialism and internationalism that characterized the 1920s and 1930s. The effects of imperial internationalism, the paper argues, were felt at the discursive level (through an emphasis on imperial and international sisterhood), on the organizational level (through bureaucratic changes leading to the formation of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts), in international gatherings, and in publications, personal correspondence, radio and cinema. However, Guiding's varied attempts to create an egalitarian and interracial imagined community were limited by a number of factors, including economic constraints, Anglocentrism and a persistent belief in racial hierarchies.

This open access volume of A Cultural History of Youth, The Modern Age, explores the cultural history of youth from 1920 to the present day. With each chapter dedicated to a specific theme, it covers concepts of youth; spaces and places; education and work; leisure and play; emotions, gender, sexuality and the body; belief and ideology; authority and agency; war and conflict and towards a world history. Readers can trace one theme throughout history using all six volumes, or can gain an in-depth understanding of an individual period. A Cultural History of Youth presents historians, scholars and students of related fields with a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of youth from ancient times to modernity. With six highly illustrated volumes covering 2,500 years, they each focus on a specific period; Antiquity, the Medieval Age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Empire and the Modern Age. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC-BY-ND 3.0 license on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Abstract
The desire to conquer old age is as old as humanity itself, yet the pursuit of youthfulness acquired a fiercer urgency with the rise of post-Enlightenment conceptions of youth as a redemptive social force. This introductory essay widens the circle of what constitutes modern rejuvenation by moving beyond the standard focus on anti-aging medicine and lays out the historiographical and methodological stakes of conceptualizing rejuvenation more broadly. Its main contention is that rejuvenation can serve as an analytical linchpin to reveal unrecognized connections between various historically specific projects of regeneration and repair that were comprised in individual flesh-and-blood as well as in imagined collective bodies such as nations and empires.