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Acknowledgements -- Destitute children in Alsace from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end of the 1930s : orphan care in Strasbourg, in between France and Germany / Catherine Maurer, Gabrielle Ripplinger -- Childhood in the Memel Region / Ruth Leiserowitz -- Youth movements in Alsace and the issue of national identity, 1918-1970 / Julien Fuchs -- The everyday life of children in Polish-German borderland during the early postwar period / Beata Halicka -- "We remain what we are" : "Wir bleiben was wir sind" : North Schleswig German identities in children's education after 1945 / Tobias Haimin Wung-Sung -- Generational conflicts, the spirit of '68 and cultural emancipation in the German speaking community of Belgium : a historical essay about the '73 generation / Andreas Fickers -- Notes on contributors -- Index

Establishing and implementing rules that would teach young people to become active citizens became a crucial technique for turning those spots on the map of Europe whose sovereignty had shifted after World War I into lived social spaces. This article analyses how principals of borderland secondary schools negotiated transformation in Polish Upper Silesia with the help of Arnold Van Gennep's notion that a shift in social statuses possessed a spatiality and temporality of its own. The article asks whether and how school principals were called on to offer elite training that would make Polish Upper Silesia more cohesive with the rest of Poland in terms of the social origins of pupils and the content of the history curriculum. In addition, it examines the extent to which borderland school principals accepted, refuted, or helped to shape that responsibility. The social origins of pupils are detected through a quantitative analysis of recruitment figures and the profiles of pupils' parents. This analysis is combined with an exploration of how school principals provided a meaningful explanation of the recent past (World War I and the Silesian Uprisings). The article demonstrates that while school principals were historical actors with some room to make their own decisions when a liminal space was created, changed, and abolished, it was ultimately a priest operating in their shadows who possessed more possibilities to become a master of ceremonies leading elite education through its rites of passage.

Establishing and implementing rules that would teach pupils to become citizens became a crucial technique for turning those spots on the map of Europe whose sovereignty had shifted after the First World War into lived social spaces. This article uses Arnold Van Gennep's notion that a shift in social status possesses a spatiality and temporality of its own, in order to analyse how principals of secondary schools negotiated transformation in the Belgian–German borderlands. It asks whether and how they were called on to offer training that would make the borderlands more cohesive with the rest of Belgium in terms of the social origins of pupils and the content of study, and examines the extent to which they were historical actors with room for their own decision-making on creating and abolishing a liminal phase, thereby leading secondary education through its rites of passage.

Following the Treaty of Versailles, European nation-states were faced with the challenge of instilling national loyalty in their new borderlands, in which fellow citizens often differed dramatically from one another along religious, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic lines. Peripheries at the Centre compares the experiences of schooling in Upper Silesia in Poland and Eupen, Sankt Vith, and Malmedy in Belgium — border regions detached from the German Empire after the First World War. It demonstrates how newly configured countries envisioned borderland schools and language learning as tools for realizing the imagined peaceful Europe that underscored the political geography of the interwar period.

This special issue addresses practices of border-making and their consequences on the territory of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. As the reality did not correspond to the peaceful Europe articulated in the Paris Treaties, a multitude of (un)foreseen complications followed the drawing of borders and states. Articles include new case studies on the creation, centralization or peripheralization of border regions, such as Subcarpathian Rus, Vojvodina, Banat and the Carpathian Mountains, on border zones such as the Czechoslovakian harbour in Germany, and on cross-border activities. The special issue shows how disputes over national identities and ethnic minorities, as well as other factors such as the economic consequences of the new state borders, appeared on the interwar political agenda and coloured the lives of borderland inhabitants. Adopting a bottom-up approach, the contributions demonstrate the agency of borderlands and their people in the establishment, functioning, disorganization or ultimate breakdown of some of the newly created interwar nation-states.

The discussion is dedicated to the question whether it is possible to overcome the power asymmetry between researchers and their subjects in the study of childhood, or at the very least to reduce the gulf between researchers and the objects of their studies. the "new sociology of childhood" places the individual personality of the child and their personal interests at the centre of scholarly investigation, though its central presuppositions remain largely controversial. the focus on children's subjectivity in academic work is related to the public acknowledgement of children's agency as political and legal subjects. the participants discuss ethical and methodological problems related to children as subjects in Childhood Studies.

BORDERING BRUSSELS is an innovative response to the need to provide non-elite knowledge on bordering practices within and beyond Brussels in past and present. Working with a mix of disciplines – (A) history, (B) border studies, (C) political sciences, (D) citizen science and in a dialogue with (E) art and technology – and using our open science methods, the project aims to advance our knowledge about, and unravel, where people in Brussels place(d) borders and why that mattered/s to them.

This contribution looks into nationalization and education in European borderlands in the early post-World War II period. Belonging to Belgium and Poland, respectively, in the interwar years, the Eupen–St. Vith–Malmedy and the East-Upper Silesia regions came under German rule during World War II. Returned to the Belgian and Polish nation-states once the war was over, the regions experienced a pronounced upheaval in the population profile as a result of population transfers and reorientations in education curricula. The aim of these measures was to guarantee the national reliability of borderland inhabitants, with a special role being designated for teachers, who were perceived as crucial in the raising of children as national citizens imbued with certain core values. This contribution compares the methods employed by the authorities in selecting educational personnel for their borderlands, the nationalizing role teachers were to play and the way teachers gave meaning to their professional practices.

This contribution looks into nationalization and education in European borderlands in the early post-World War II period. Belonging to Belgium and Poland, respectively, in the interwar years, the Eupen-St. Vith-Malmedy and the East-Upper Silesia regions came under German rule during World War ll. Returned to the Belgian and Polish nation-states once the war was over, the regions experienced a pronounced upheaval in the population profile as a result of population transfers and reorientations in education curricula. The aim of these measures was to guarantee the national reliability of borderland inhabitants, with a special role being designated for teachers, who were perceived as crucial in the raising of children as national citizens imbued with certain core values. This contribution compares the methods employed by the authorities in selecting educational personnnel for their borderlands, the nationalizing role teachers were to play and the way teachers gave meaning to their professional practices. (Nationalities Papers)