The chapter investigates the cultural place-making of Morris’s country house, Kelmscott Manor, and the reformer’s foundational role in in bringing Kelmscott into mainstream public consciousness. He did so by means of his publications News from Nowhere (1890; 1891) and ‘Gossip about an Old House on the Upper Thames’ (1895). The chapter accords special focus to the power of the accompanying illustrations, examining the circumstances behind their creation. Morris’s hitherto unacknowledged role as the art director of the News from Nowhere frontispiece is analysed at length, arguing that he practised image-building as a counterpart to his literary method. It also argues that Morris thus endowed Kelmscott with particular connotations and symbolic values, laying the foundations for the deeply-rooted Kelmscott myth as a domestic and rural idyll. In so doing he also cemented Kelmscott’s cultural association with himself and its ongoing role as a fitting Morris memorial and as an embodiment of his ideology in relation to buildings’ and nature conservation, Arts and Crafts design ethos, and socialism.

I consider the implications of this study for future research and policymaking, and I reflect on the legacies of the people and policies I discuss in the book. For instance, I discuss potential applications to healthcare policy, specifically around the opioid epidemic, and education policy. I also address how the themes of the book play out in my own everyday work as a teacher.

In 1870, a literate seamstress, the 19-year-old Lumina Sophie dite Surprise, took part in a short-lived insurrection in southern Martinique. She led a group of female insurrectionists called Pétroleuses who burned down plantations with petrol or gasoline. Subsequently, she was deported to the infamous penitentiary located in French Guyana. In contemporary times, this historical figure famously represents freedom and women’s rights in Martinique. She is remembered by twenty-first century labor activists, feminists, and literary figures and celebrated as the symbol of resistance for the Insurrection of the South.

María Remedios del Valle was a free black woman from Buenos Aires. After following her husband and sons to the front lines during Argentina’s wars for independence from Spain beginning in 1810, María Remedios del Valle became part of a community of soldiers.First a nurse, and later a military captain, she served in various capacities – soldier, spy, and caregiver – alongside the soldiers who fought for Argentina’s independence. By fighting with the revolutionary army María Remedios del Valle fought for the freedom of her nation. In recognition of her distinguished military service, she received a pension and later became known as the “Mother of the Nation.” But the irony of this designation cannot be underestimated. Remedios del Valle, a black female heroine, is the mother of a country that is still considered a “white” nation.

Two generations away from slavery in her own family, Carrie Williams Clifford was born in the free state of Ohio in 1862. She came of age during Reconstruction and watched conditions for African Americans erode in the Jim Crow era. Cognizant of the way white Americans were crafting historical narratives to elide black presence and freedoms, she resisted by highlighting the richness of black history, including women’s history, in her poetry, journalism, activism, and theatrical performances. Like her white colleagues in the suffrage movement and male colleagues in race work, Clifford used history to claim self-representation in a world in which African Americans confronted powerful forces attempting to define their place in the nation.

Maria Firmina dos Reis was born in São Luiz do Maranhão, a remote northern province of the Brazilian Empire, probably in 1825. The daughter of a black father and a white mother, and a self-taught woman who had never received formal education, Maria Firmina became the youngest elementary teacher in a newly founded local school. In 1859, she published the novel Ursula and became the first black woman to publish a literary text in Brazil. Ursula not only offers harsh criticism of slavery and the slave-owning patriarchal family, but also gives narrative voice to enslaved characters and their reflections on life under captivity. Forgotten for more than a century, her work started to gain recognition in the 1970s. Nowadays revered as a pioneering black novelist, she is, along with Luiz Gama - former slave, also a self-taught man who became a lawyer, poet and anti-slavery militant - the founder of Afro-Brazilian literature.

Jolanta A. Drzewiecka advances a psychoanalytic discursive approach to the analysis of public memories of the Other. This includes an overview of memory studies in communication, an introduction to key concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis and a discussion of a psychoanalytic approach examining representations of violence committed against Jews by gentiles in Poland and its implications for engaging knowledge and critical learning.

Chapter 5 looks at the public memory of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia as expressed in the memoirs of ex-servicemen. This chapter argues that ex-servicemen in the interwar period still believed that they had been forgotten by the general public, despite a number of popular culture and commemorative representations of their campaigns. Using Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s argument about soldier memoir writers as ‘agents of memory’, this chapter argues that ex-servicemen used their memoirs as a tool to persuade the public that they, too, had suffered and sacrificed during the war. This chapter also investigates the proliferation of crusading rhetoric in the memoirs of ex-servicemen who fought in Palestine, arguing that most soldiers did not use the language of holy war but instead of liberal imperialism and a crusade on behalf of western civilisation. This chapter also returns to the soldiers’ ideas, shown in Chapter 3, that their campaigns had brought civilisation to Arabs and Greeks and that, once again, it was they who had actually won the war. Crucially, these themes arose again after the war but for different reasons, emphasising the need to consider as separate wartime writings from post-war memoirs.