Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 288 pp. $50.00 cloth

Abstract

In For Home, Country, and Race, Stephen Heathorn sets out to explain the “how” of English nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Rejecting the imperial propagandist theme, Heathorn argues that nationalist agendas in English schools were the product of educators. Accordingly, Heathorn's research focuses on the classroom as the site of nationalist education. Heathorn argues that through educational activities, especially school readers, middle-class educators brought the English working class into their nationalist hegemony. As the book's title suggests, this hegemonic view also promoted class and gender subordination. As Heathorn concludes, the proof of the working class's acceptance of this nationalist hegemony is found in their willingness “to sacrifice their lives and loved ones” in the “cataclysmic clash of rival nationalisms that erupted in 1914” (218).