In the 1960's academic attention became increasingly focused, in many cases of necessity, on the forms taken by student protest and, possibly in conjunction with this, there appeared almost simultaneously a corresponding upsurge of interest in the history of organized international youth movements, many of them with their origins in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Such a development in historiography would seem to contradict the statement once made by an English youth leader, Leslie Paul, that “because the apologetics of youth movements are callow, their arguments crude, and their practices puerile, they are dismissed or ignored by scholars.”