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Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is the first global history of Girl Scouting and Guiding that addresses the successes and pitfalls of the 100-year-old organization from its beginning in Great Britain through its international expansion. Since 1910, millions of girls worldwide have been exposed to Scouting. While much has changed since 1910, the core values of Scouting/Guiding are still recognizable in todayÕs programs, namely the empowerment of girls through adventure, character-building, home skills, outdoor pursuits, and active learning. But has ScoutingÕs very w

Intelligence before the great war -- DORA's women and the enemy within Britain -- Women behind the scenes -- Soldiers without uniforms -- Spies who knew how to die -- Intimate traffic with the enemy

This article investigates specific Quaker war relief and reconciliation projects among prisoners of war during and after World War I in Europe. The Friends' efforts emphasized the individual face and experience of suffering—of seeing the victims as human—and provided a powerful model for reconciliation in the wake of devastating violence. Their deeply radical notion of having war victims helps war victims in order to reconcile enemies became central to the Friends' relief projects and their lived values as pacifists. This approach could not easily be scaled up to meet the societal/structural/institutional power changes required after the war, especially as more workers joined the effort, sometimes from quite different backgrounds than the original Quaker volunteers. Through a sometimes painful process of small successes and failures, the Friends moved away from their early vision of reconciliation work toward cooperation with large‐scale professionalized postwar food aid programs, thereby ensuring their future viability in relief work.

This article analyzes the ordeal that became the 'Louvain Library Controversy' in order to demonstrate competing visions of postwar memory and reconstruction that emerged in the 1920s. As a country trying to mediate between the claims of its larger neighbors (Germany, France, and Britain), Belgium provides an excellent window into the climate of postwar Europe and US intervention. I argue that the controversies that surrounded the Louvain Library reconstruction reflect three main themes that plagued European–US relations in the 1920s: first, US pretensions as Europe's cultural protector; second, US economic power over debt and reparation questions; and last, the question of reconciliation in the wake of war. For Belgium and other European nations, the experience of being the object of aid for the United States of America led to a reassertion of sovereignty and autonomy in the face of external interference, exposing the gaps between Americans' assumptions about their roles and responsibilities in Europe and Europeans' sense of their own role in rebuilding their world. For Americans, the controversy demonstrated the perils of US 'generosity' and its price in postwar Europe.

Despite the fact that Scouting has touched the lives of a quarter of a billion boys and girls and their leaders around the world in the past century, its history has been largely ignored. Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement's First Century is the first book to discuss the history and principal themes of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements on an international scale. Inspired by presentations at the ground-breaking 2008 Johns Hopkins University symposium, "Scouting: A Centen