Charlotte MacDonald

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a wave of state-sponsored 'national fitness' programmes swept Britain and its former colonies. Following revelations of the Nazi enthusiasm for government-backed sports and the organisation of mass leisure, the programmes quickly foundered. They probably laid, however, the foundations for the twentieth century's obsession with fitness— a key facet of modern life. In this...

The pivotal year of 1870 brought down the curtain on the redcoat garrison world at both the metropolitan and colonial ends of the empire... In fewer than forty years, less than a lifetime, Aotearoa had gone from being a Maori world in which rangatira dominated, to a colony in which the settler state was in control of the economy, politics...