Introduction

The introduction to the book establishes the rationale for the study. The peace movement has featured only minimally in histories of childhood and youth, at least in the English context which is the key reference point for this book. And research into the peace movement in England or Britain has paid limited attention to children and young people, and childhood and youth. Yet many thousands of young people in the early to mid-twentieth century engaged with the peace movement in some form or another and their engagement, I suggest, is worthy of attention. This chapter also introduces the book’s parameters in terms of focus, dates, and the organisations around which the following chapters gravitate: the League of Nations Union, the Peace Pledge Union, the Council for Education in World Citizenship, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It introduces the bottom-up, intergenerationally inflected approach taken by this study, discusses conceptual territory around experience, agency, and generations, and introduces key primary sources and the ways in which they are analysed and discussed. A final section offers an overview of the structure of the book as a whole.