Bulletin
Transcription
Bulletin
Bulletin Society for the History of Children And Youth Issue #14 Fall 2009 To Our Readers: This is the conference issue ‐‐ check out the photo album of events at Berkeley in July, the papers on critical historiography from one of the conference sessions, an account of the session on history and public policy (with announcement of a new website), and the summaries of the keynote and presidential addresses. The editors have changed the name of the publication to the SHCY Bulletin. We have also shifted the publication dates to Fall and Spring issues; the new Bulletin will now appear in October and March. And, you will see that the Bulletin has been streamlined, with fewer columns. We invite volunteers to resurrect the missing columns, and as always, we invite members who want a forum for their interests to create new sections of the Bulletin. We want this publication to be reader‐driven. Enjoy, The Bulletin Editors Table of Contents (Issue #14: Fall, 2009) Message from Steven Mintz, SHCY President, “The Value of Interdisciplinarity” Report from 5th Biennial Conference, University of California, Berkeley, July 10‐12, 2009 Keynote Address by Peter Stearns Presidential Address by Paula Fass Presentation of SHCY Grace Abbott Book Prize and Best Article Prize Photo Album (not included in pdf download) Conference Sessions Entering into the Fray: Historians of Childhood and Public Policy . . . . Julia Grant Check out the new website that emerged from this session The Critical Historiography of Childhood, Essays from the SHCY Session, July 10, 2009 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Harvey J. Graff On the Role of Theory and Investigation in Critical Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jim Block Critical Historiography of Childhood Roundtable . . . . . . .Rebecca de Schweinitz Round Table on the Critical Historiography of Childhood . . . . Colin Heywood Comments for Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Jennifer Ritterhouse History and Theory, and Whose Side We Are On . . . . . .Michael Zuckerman Pedagogy: The Interdisciplinary Nature of Childhood Studies . . . . .Stephen Gennaro, ed. Steve’s introductory essay includes a link to a powerpoint presentation on the need for theory in childhood studies. The column also features essays from the Rutgers,Camden Interdisciplinary Childhood Studies Program by: Lynne Vallone Daniel Thomas Cook Deborah Valentine Conference Reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Priscilla Clement, ed. Bulletin call for conference reporters Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, “History Without Boundaries,” Seattle, Washington March 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Leslie Paris American Association for the History of Medicine April 23‐26, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cara Kinzelman Children and War, Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ April 3‐5, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Patrick Cox Models of Childhood and their Cultural Consequences, University of Sheffield June 15, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Afua Twum‐Danso Expanding Literacy Studies: An International, Interdisciplinary Conference for Graduate Students, The Ohio State University April 3‐5, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shawn Casey The Political Child: Children, Education and the State, University of Helsinki 15‐16 May 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karen Stanbridge Breaking the Boundaries: A Peer Reviewed Research Conference on Radical Children's Literature, University of British Columbia April 25, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Megan Lankford Omohundro Institute for Early American History, 15th Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah June, 2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rebecca de Schweinitz Member News and News from the Field . . . . . . . . . Nancy Zey, ed. U. Chicago Press Announces New Publication: The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion 2 Opportunities Calls for Conference Papers and Journal Submissions Fellowship Opportunity: Hench Post‐Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society Dissertation Abstracts and Dissertations in Progress . . . . . . . .Colleen Vasconsellos, ed. Contributors ~~~ Message from the SHCY President: “The Value of Interdisciplinarity” This is a tremendously exhilarating and fertile moment in the study of childhood. From anthropology to archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and sociology, a series of paradigm shifts are radically reshaping the way we think about children. One key shift involves a growing recognition of the role that children play in their own socialization. For example, challenging William James’s characterization of the infant’s mind as a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” the psychologist Alison Gopnik instead depicts newborns as scientist and philosophers—as active agents engaged in a process of discovery, testing, and reflection. Another major shift involves the growing emphasis on children’s culture as mediator between the individual child and the adult world. Especially suggestive is William Corsaro’s concept of “interpretative reproduction.” Rather than conceiving of acculturation as a process in which children internalize adult culture, children engage in intricate negotiations with adults and participate in peer cultures which creatively reinterpret and comment upon adult values and behavior. Yet another significant shift involves the documentation of the extraordinarily varied ways that children’s lives are structured across and within cultures. Drawing on primate studies and ethnographies, David Lancy’s The Anthropology of Childhood offers a particularly insightful look at variation in parenting practices, schooling, and the pathways to adulthood across cultures, and helps free us from constricted, culture‐ bound, and ethnocentric conceptions of childhood and child development. Historians of childhood have a great deal to learn from the anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and sociology of childhood—and much to contribute as well. One challenge is to reconcile a recognition of the cultural and social constructedness of childhood with the insights of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Another is to wrestle with anthropological, psychological, and sociological theories, including those dealing with initiation rituals, age sets, peer cultures, diversity and variation, colonialism and globalization, and children’s capabilities. 3 But we must not minimize the inputs that we can offer to cross‐disciplinary conversations about childhood. We can show anthropologists and sociologists that childhood, both as an experience and as a cultural category, is not static or uncontested, but has diachronic, dynamic, and longitudinal dimensions. We can help psychologists understand that the stages and transitions of childhood must not be viewed in excessively rigid, universal, overspecified, invariant, or teleological terms. Above all, we can illustrate with concrete examples from the past how learning and child development is a product of an on‐going process of negotiation and social interaction embedded in social interactions and specific cultural contexts. Steven Mintz, Columbia University ~~~ Reports from the Conference, July 10‐12, 2009 SHCY 2009 Keynote Address by Peter N. Stearns Friday afternoon, in a crowded hall on the Berkeley campus, Peter N. Stearns, Professor of History and Provost at George Mason University presented the keynote address of the 2009 conference. Stearns’s many publications include American Cool, Constructing a Twentieth‐Century Emotional Style (1994) and Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America (2004), and editor of An Emotional History of the United States (1998), American Behavioral History: An Introduction (2005), and Childhood in World History (2006). Stearns summarized his talk for the Bulletin: “In my keynote address, Defining Happy Childhoods: Assessing a Recent Change, I tried to identify a bit more clearly when the idea that childhood should be a happy time gained traction. I've long been interested in this, after hearing colleagues in the field mention what a novel notion this is (correctly, as it turns out). My interest was further spurred by work for my survey of childhood in world history, when it became clear how many agricultural societies assumed that childhood was something to be endured, not a particularly sparkling period in life. “A caveat: this is not an argument that children before the contemporary era were necessarily less happy than they are now. It focuses on changes in adult beliefs (which children also pick up) about what childhood should be. “In Western culture, the gradual abandonment (in majority circles) of the idea of original sin helped prepare the transition, but 19th century materials on childhood still rarely mentioned a positive happiness goal. This occurred only from the 1920s onward, when it became a major focus. This chronology also allows discussion of what caused the shift, from the new demographics to consumerism. 4 “Beyond identifying and, tentatively, explaining the transition, the essay explored consequences, in terms of altered parental and childish expectations alike. Schools are affected with efforts to associate learning with "fun", and other institutions for children show the imprint as well. Consumerism obviously expands the emphasis, but downsides may include the growing incidence of depression for children aware of the goals but unable to meet them. “This particular talk focused on American evidence, but comparative work is amply justified to see if, when, and how other societies (partly perhaps reflecting some American consumer influence) effected similar changes, and with what results.” Paula Fass Gives Presidential Address at SHCY Meeting After the Saturday evening banquet, outgoing SHCY president Paula Fass challenged the audience in her presidential address, “Childhood and Memory.” Fass urged historians of childhood to consider the important relationship between memory and children’s history. As someone who has just completed a memoir, Fass argued that the commitment to memory work and acute sensibilities regarding children have had intersecting courses of development while serious studies of memory and about childhood have developed in tandem historically. In the eighteenth century, Fass argued Enlightenment thinkers began to explore both how memory and how childhood contributed to the constitution of the human, domains which Jean Jacques Rousseau, above all, brought together in his famous Confessions. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, new insights into the human psyche in Vienna and in the United States emerged just as scientists began to pay close attention to children and childhood. In both realms of investigation there was a new effort to understand how distortions in these arenas influenced the human personality. Fass also included in her discussion the imaginative literature of the time where writers such as Marcel Proust and Henry Roth were newly attuned to these matters. Finally, Fass urged historians of childhood to consider how their own contemporary enterprise—the outpouring of a serious interest in children’s history—comes at a moment when the memoir has come to the fore as a literary genre. Each questions grand narratives of the self and of society. And both, she suggests, are related to a “postmodern” view. In the memoir, a coherent historical vision is fragmented while in childhood studies, the unity of the personality, first proposed by the Enlightenment, is being subtly replaced. Thus, if the memoir proposes that the personal and fragmentary is more authentic than a unified historical narrative, the separateness and integrity of childhood is today seen as legitimate in itself, apart from its contribution to adulthood. 5 Grace Abbott Prize to Catriona Kelly Julia Mickenberg, UT‐Austin & Chair, Prize Committee The Grace Abbott Prize for the best book published in 2007‐2008 on the history of children and youth went to Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890‐1991 (Yale UP, 2007) by Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford and author or editor of numerous books on Russian history and culture, including Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (2005). Children's World offers an engaging, compelling, and often surprising survey of childhood in Russia over 100 years of dramatic changes and transformations. Drawing on sources including literature; material culture such as toys, games, and furniture; architecture; educational materials; legal, medical and social welfare records; photographs; government propaganda; music; film; and scholarship in several languages; as well as an extensive oral history project involving a number of researchers and hundreds of interviews; Kelly's synthesis of these elements is nothing short of a tour de force. The book will be useful, certainly to scholars of Russian history and culture, but also a model for historians of childhood, especially those interested in the relationship between children's socialization and state imperatives. Julia Mickenberg served as chair of the 2007‐2008 book award committee along with committee members Linda Gordon and Colin Heywood. Best Article Prize to Susan J. Pearson; Honorable Mention to Marta Gutman Tamara Myers, University of British Columbia and Chair, Prize Committee The committee for the 2007‐08 SHCY best article award included Ning de Coninck‐Smith (Danish University School of Education, Rebecca L. de Schweinitz (Brigham Young University), and Tamara Myers (University of British Columbia). The committee received 16 articles, many prize‐worthy. After several rounds of discussion the committee decided to award the prize to Susan J. Pearson for “Infantile Specimens” with an honorable mention going to Marta Gutman’s “Race, Place, and Play: Robert Moses and the WPA Swimming Pools in New York City,” Journal of Society of Architectural Historians (December, 2008). The committee found Pearson’s article superbly rendered: a pleasure to read, this article makes a significant contribution to children’s, women’s, cultural, and social history. In focusing on the emergence of the baby show in the nineteenth century, Pearson locates child body objectification in a large cultural frame that speaks to domesticity and motherhood, markets and consumption, spectacle and classification, while showing their interrelatedness. Gutman’s article was similarly impressive – well‐written and carefully researched, it pays particular attention to children’s place in the history of urban swimming and leisure. Demonstrating how race and racism fundamentally shaped the location of New York City pools, Gutman’s work 6 challenges its readers to integrate thinking about childhood, children’s space, neighborhood, race, and urban planning. Photos from the Conference at: http://www.history.vt.edu/Jones/SHCY/Newsletter 14/photoalbum.html ~~~ Conference Sessions Entering into the Fray: Historians of Childhood and Public Policy Julia Grant, Michigan State University During the first session of the SHCY conference, at 8:30 sharp, with good strong coffee in hand, my colleagues and I hosted a roundtable entitled “Entering into the Fray: Historians of Childhood and Public Policy.” All of the participants came prepared to discuss how historians might contribute to public policy debates about children and what lessons can be learned from the past experiences of those who have written editorials, made presentations at gatherings of professionals in child welfare, or have had their research made use of in policy discussions about education and child welfare. The panelists included Barbara Beatty, author of Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Childhood from the Colonial Era to the Present (Yale, 2007), and a number of essays and opinion pieces on early childhood education. Beatty, along with Julia Grant and Emily Cahan, also edited the volume When Science Encounters the Child: Perspectives on Education, Child Welfare, and Parenting (Teachers College, 2006). Julia Grant has written Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (Yale University Press, 1998) and is completing a manuscript for Johns Hopkins University Press, tentatively titled, The Boy Problem in American Education and Society. Tim Hacsi has been involved in the world of historical scholarship and advocacy, serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Chapin Hall for Children and a Spencer Fellow at the (late lamented) Harvard Children’s Initiative, and authoring, among other things Second Home Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (Harvard, 1998) and Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform (Harvard, 2002). Our chair and discussant, Roberta Wollons, has edited the anthologies Children at Risk: History, Concepts, and Public Policy (SUNY, 1993) and Kindergartens and Culture: The Global Diffusion of an Idea (Yale, 2000). During the session, panelists discussed whether we should focus on writing good history that also appeals to policy makers, or whether we should write in more than one mode: the mode that employs traditional historical methods, and one which directly speaks to policy makers and boils down the lessons of our research. One of the problems with the second approach, of course, is that there may be no easy lessons and historians may need to over‐simplify their findings. Others noted that policy makers are 7 notably resistant to referring to good evidence in crafting policies, preferring instead to forge blindly ahead based on anecdotes and popular opinion. Nevertheless, both the panelists and the audience felt the need to find ways to disseminate their ideas more publicly, in the interest of enabling educators and advocates of children to make more historically‐informed choices. Ultimately, we would like historians of children and childhood, ourselves included, to hone their abilities to write in ways that capture the attention of policy makers. A unique feature of the session was that I, as a novice web master, created a website prior to the conference to provide information to conference goers about the session. http://sites.google.com/site/childhoodandpublicpolicy/ The site includes the abstract for the session and information about the participants. We have also posted Barbara Beatty’s remarks, “Mixing History with Policy” and Julia Grant’s “Reflections on the ‘Boy Problem’ and its Public Implications.” With a link for “visitor comments,” we hoped to stimulate discussion before and after the panel. Although we have a long ways to go in terms of learning to craft and make use of such web sites, this might be a feature of future conferences that could be promising: online conference programs could provide links to web sites or further information to use in helping conference goers to make decisions about which sessions to attend and host initial discussions about the topic at hand to spur conversation. We feel that more interactive sessions, involving online conversations, and a more visible role for participants, would make our already dynamic conferences even more enjoyable. Conference Sessions “The Critical History of Childhood” Essays from the Conference Session, July 10, 2009 The Critical Historiography of Childhood:Introduction…Harvey J. Graff On the Role of Theory and Investigation in Critical Childhood Studies…Jim Block The Critical Historiography of Childhood Roundtable… Rebecca de Schweinitz Round Table on the Critical Historiography of Childhood… Colin Heywood Comments for Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood… Jennifer Ritterhouse History and Theory, and Whose Side We Are On… Michael Zuckerman The Critical Historiography of Childhood: Introduction Harvey J. Graff, The Ohio State University This session focusing on Critical Historiography of Childhood follows, at least in part, from a session at the 2007 Norrköping conference, entitled “How can the history of children grow up?” [aka “What’s wrong with the history of children/childhood”] with Jim Block, Harvey Graff, Pavla Miller, and Bengt Sandin. 8 This year our focus falls on issues related to critical approaches to questions of “child development” in a critical historiography of childhood. Jim Block and Harvey Graff developed the session protocol and proposal (and the questions for the participants), circulating it first among potential panelists and then to the SHCY program committee. It read: If there is no such thing as a ”natural child,” but only children socially generated and culturally constructed in particular societies at particular historical times, how can and do historians of childhood and youth understand the generational cohorts they are investigating and critically evaluate what societies do to, for, and with their young? How can we address the role of the social and the historical in examining child‐rearing and socialization practices and child development itself? That is, are there standards of appropriate practice and/or optimal development against which social practices and their consequences are or should be compared? How might they be measured or otherwise determined? If so, from what discourses or disciplines do they arise, and what clarity and persuasiveness do they offer? Is there a place for the discourse of nature and what is naturally viable? If there are no standards applied from outside the historical evidence itself, then is it possible to locate or develop alternatives to the standards applied by the specific society, or subculture, or family being investigated? Does holding a social group to its own standards constitute sufficiently critical historiography? Or does it in the end risk validating that group’s treatment of the young as the fulfillment of its own particular social claims? This effort to render more explicit the standards historians of childhood and youth bring to their work is essential to the issue of generational interaction and social change. Michael Zuckerman has argued that “childhood” is a discourse framed by adult culture to specify its agenda for shaping the adults it wants. At the same time, young people often appropriate the ideas, expectations and claims adults have constructed about childhood to their own ends. What happens when generational or other forms of social conflict over treatment of the young are an explicit dimension of the investigation? Does the evaluation of generational relations turn into a discourse on institutional power? Are the standards, expectations or anticipations of adults a better or worse measure of the treatment of the young than the young’s own aspirations? Or are there viable ways of thinking about childhood and human development that enable historians to evaluate a social group’s socialization and integration of the young? As historians of childhood and youth examine developmental and generational issues, can they bring their own insights to shed light on the processes that might not be accessible in other fields? Can we think of particular ways in which this might or does occur? 9 The goal of this panel is less to provide firm answers to these complex matters than to open up a dialogue among working historians and theorists in the field about their practices. Through a roundtable discussion of our work and its assumptions and methods as well as extensive conversation with the audience participants, we hope to help historians of the field become more self‐conscious about the assumptions embedded in their work. By encouraging historians to make our assumptions explicit, and to consider the dangers of uncritical approaches to theories and interpretations we employ, we believe that participants in this field will move toward increasingly reflective readings of the evidence and formulation of theses regarding childhood, child socialization and child development. No small goals. Panelists responded to these questions, and especially to questions 1 and 5 in 5‐7 minutes opening statements, followed by discussion. Questions for SHCY Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood If there is no such thing as a “natural child,” only children social generated and cultural constructed in particular societies in particular historical times, the concern is how do and in what ways should historians of children, youth and the family frame their inquiries: 1. Does the student of the history of the child, history of childhood, and history of children need a theory of childhood and/or child development? If so, why? 2. In order to critically evaluate what societies do to socialize, shape and integrate their young, is it feasible to judge social practices by the standards of that group? Or does this risk validating those practices? 3. What does a historically useful and rich approach to a theory of childhood and child development require? From what discourses and disciplines is it most likely to arise? What discourses are more problematic? Can historians of childhood and youth bring their own insights to shed light on these processes? Examples? 4. How should generational conflict or other forms of social conflict over the treatment of the young be framed? Is it simply a discourse on institutional power? Given that the young often appropriate the ideas, expectations and claims adults have constructed about childhood for their own ends and aspirations, how does one balance the perspective of the different generations in such cases? 5. What is the place of child development in your own scholarship? 10 6. Are theories or other approaches to child development part of the future of the history of children and youth, as you see it? What possibilities and problems do you see emerging in such a discourse/s. That the stakes can be great is emphasized in the recent work, for example, of André Turmel on the construction of “normal” and “normality” A Historical Sociology of Childhood: Developmental thinking, categorization and graphic visualization (Cambridge University Press, 2008)—about how historical sequential development and statistical reasoning led to a concept of what constitutes a “normal” child and resulted in a form of standardization by which we monitor children “This book reveals how wrong it is to assume that childhood is either a natural or universal entity, which amounts to an inconsiderate denial of its historical processes. . . . Childhood is neither an inevitable consequence of the historical accumulation of western societies’ public policies, be it in the form of infant welfare, compulsory schooling or whatever, nor a simple outcome of experts’ advice to parents and others. It is, rather, the product of the complex movement of cooperation, conflict and resistance between a broad range of social actors, including children themselves, in a historical process of moulding a form via diverse social actions: the child as a social form to be moulded throughout ‘a sequence of biographic trajectory’ [Bourdieu]” The presentations sparked a very lively and bracing set of exchanges that, in one way or another, etched the borders and questioned the boundaries and limits of the history of childhood and the history of children. This included recognition of the different approaches and meanings of child and psychological development; developmentalism more generally; critical historiography and critical theory(ies); “voices” and agency of the young; historical change; and the very possibility of a history of children as opposed to a history of childhood. On the Role of Theory and Investigation in Critical Childhood Studies Jim Block, DePaul University As a theorist of childhood and particularly child development in history, I of course find it inconceivable to do without at least an implicit developmental framework – or at the minimum to be in search of one. To indicate the extent of my bias at the outset, I focus on societies, prominently the U.S., and eras in which children and youth have taken a major role in social and cultural (and, inferentially, developmental) change. And yet if I may (perhaps dubiously) offer a character reference on my behalf, I have gained new perspective from my talks over the years with some, including members of this panel, amidst the profusion of our disagreements, and the searching discussion before this roundtable has similarly complicated my thinking to the good. As I study the United States, I witness how the adult world and younger cohorts working in tandem create ideals of human potential which then get over time reduced to 11 ideologies and manufacturies of the normal, which as its mechanisms of compliance tighten and misshape growth get shattered and reworked. In this process, the young integrate, appropriate and advance adult expectations and demands at the same time they continually (most of the time under the radar) resist and periodically erupt with their own developmental demands and expectations. I now believe that as a nation begun in youthful rebellion and a young more advanced than the elders (think Bailyn and Paine’s Common Sense), generational struggle has formed the deepest cleavage in our national history [and my book on this will soon be out]. What does this say for the study of children and childhood? I see a dynamic tension between the socially constructed and the individually unfolding. What is their relation? Let me draw on an (admittedly highly prejudicial) metaphor of the plant with which Rousseau begins Emile: at once it can by devoted arts be pruned and diverted into nearly any shape, and yet if watered and allowed to grow, it will become something different from and beyond what any gardener had in mind – how could you – the adult – ever have that plant/child’s developmental sequence and final shape in mind at the beginning? Yet, since the final form is a combination of the gardener’s ideal and the plant’s will toward its own shape, let me address those arguing either that there is no “plantness” or “nature” beyond the constructed or naturalists who believe the young have their own developmental compass from the outset. Social construction does not seem to me incompatible with a view that children develop, nor that they are capable of resisting shaping regimens. Explaining how the young come to understand, form attitudes about, disagree with parents and society over, act upon divergent views of be it race, social oppression, anything including the role of conflict and normality, has – must have ‐‐ a temporal trajectory. Social history can bring to light the actual experience and sequence as the young evolve in the adaptive process, including the real tensions embedded in its implementation and rationalization of adulthood and citizenship. Instead of giving society a pass, it can reject the claim of most communities that its maturation process is conflict free (I have seen how the U.S. has made adolescent turmoil go away – several times), and expose how socializing institutions muzzle conflict over their social agendas, including the use of theories of child plasticity designed (Dewey is key here) to deny resistance. Childhood thus becomes a compelling site to examine not only the stages in the social construction of the adult, but the tensions within a community’s notion of the normal before these tensions have been papered over, f.e., the movie The Long Walk Home. Unearthing these developmental sequences need not point in this socially constructivist view to anything deeper than socially constituted development and conflict. But once one has laid out how societies normalize attitudes and repress conflict, how they measure using their own objectified social indicators their very process integration and adaptation and calling it the child’s capacity for maturation – or abnormality if it fails – 12 what does one have? What is the constructivist basis for questioning that normal? What lies beyond the society being studied besides other, equally relative, normals? How would or should adult feudalism, or the feudalism of the young, including the No Child Left Unmaligned of current practice, be addressed? Are all treatments the same? Of what value is a scholar’s external critique? So what? While this work is important, isn’t there a limit to social constructivism? Why is it that children in no society turn out to become giraffes? And if they did, we would I hope condemn it as a violation of their humanness? Aren’t there practices that risk losing the plantness of the plant and the humanness of the child? Isn’t the cult of the normal, our wish for standardized adults, a giant cover for our violations of what lies beneath? – a child seeking to become quite itself, and resisting social compliance in part from the call of its being, however inchoate? This critical historical view rejects the adult presumption that child construction is entirely its prerogative and project. It exposes how the young are forced into reactivity and hiddenness, and labeled for resistance as developmentally inadequate or recalcitrant. The danger of this view is that it tends to tar all social practice with misshaping the young, and gives insufficient attention to the way social practices can promote human flourishing by developing conditions to nurture developmental capacities and potentialities. In the end, social history and critical child study have much to learn from each other about how the young balance their roles as social absorbers and social initiators. Social history can help us differentiate practices by society, group and era and delineate their impacts. Critical study may be able to discern patterns that limit the claim of social constructivism and reveal the broader potential the young have for developing competences, activism and identities. Both vindicate Children and Youth Studies as a realm apart from history from the adult perspective, particularly when each is attentive to the realities and tensions underlying society’s claim of unconflicted adaptation. This dialogue between what children do become and what they might become can help us understand the young as they struggle for space and place in a world they are told – errantly – is already fixed upon their arrival. The Critical Historiography of Childhood Roundtable Rebecca de Schweinitz, Brigham Young University In my research I’ve been interested in both shifting ideas about childhood and youth and young people as historical and political agents. Theories of child development have played a role in helping me to understand both, but in different ways. In order to understand how historical actors understood childhood and youth and then used or applied those understandings, I think we have to understand how a variety of 13 scholars (and for me that’s included psychologists, sociologists, education experts, and anthropologists) thought and talked about child development at the time. As it turns out, in the case of my research, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) organizational stance toward young people and their use of ideas about childhood as a weapon in the struggle for racial equality, closely reflected the ways that contemporary scholars talked about child development and development‐ related issues. So I saw that child development theories help to explain the trajectory of the civil rights movement and it successes and limitations—which is to say that attention to such theories can be quite useful! But I’ve been less interested in “a historically useful and rich approach to a theory of childhood and child development” than in examining how people in the past used theories and ideals (often shifting) to judge themselves and push for change (or to keep things the same). As historians we’re well equipped to be wary about any one child development theory and to recognize that such theories don’t exist in a vacuum. As children’s historians I hope we’re equipped to show that theories about the young are sometimes shaped by young people themselves. So in my research, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War (and the effects—or fears about the effects—of those events) as well as young people’s activism serve as an important backdrop for helping make sense of shifting views of children and youth and a reassessment of their agency and place in American life in general and the black freedom struggle in particular. I have been especially struck by how young people themselves sometimes stimulated different ways of thinking about childhood and childhood development. What I’ve seen is how attention to young people’s developmental needs encouraged young people to become more politically active, which then resulted in greater attention to their needs, which further encouraged youth activism, and so on. So there’s this circular or dialectic process happening whereby young people are both acting on ideas about themselves and urging a reevaluation of those ideas. Young people have also been among those who are adept at using child development theories to challenge the status quo. In my research, for instance, young civil rights protestors, bring up ideas about childhood innocence, children as victims of racism—how prejudice warps their personalities and makes them “unable to cope with society”—while it’s clear that the young people who are employing such theories are hardly dependent victims. [1] I also found child development theory useful in trying to understand generational differences and the proliferation of youth activism for civil rights in the late 1950s and 60s. There I drew on ideas from William Tuttle’s Daddy’s Gone to War, Robert Coles’s work, Erik Erikson’s theories, and the work of social theorist Pierre Bourdieu. Tuttle talks about how age, culture, and history determine individual development and shape social change. [2] Coles suggests that “a nation’s history becomes a children’s apparently idiosyncratic conscience.” For him, and he was an observer/participant in the 14 movement, young people’s stage in human development made it likely that they would be successful actors in American’s racial battles. But it is was “this very time,” as he put it, that acted as “their essential catalyst.” [3] Erikson similarly argued that “in youth the life history intersects with history,” and Bourdieu posited that “conditions of existence . . . impose different definitions of the impossible, the possible, and the probable” and that childhood experiences form “the basis of perception and appreciation of all subsequent experience” and account for generational conflict (or differences). [4] What I found useful here was that each of these scholars pay attention to child development theory but see it working in specific historical and cultural contexts. They accept the idea that young people experience things differently and the importance of an individual’s childhood—their most formative years to later life choices and perspectives—but time and place matter, too. Age plays a role in how people see and interact in their specific worlds—and how we understand (or should understand) history. So for me I think this means we can say, okay, young people are different. And maybe we don’t know exactly how or why—but there is a general consensus that childhood is a significant period of identify formation. The task then becomes identifying what influenced young people of a particular time period during their formative years, how young people acted, or thought, or felt differently than their elders, and determining if, why, and how that matters. I would also like to warn against the desire to see young people acting, thinking, and feeling differently when they don’t—developing a kind of obsession with discovering agency. We don’t want to let child development theory, the idea that young people are different than adults, keep us from seeing the ways they are or act or think the same. This danger was especially clear to me at a recent early America conference where one presentor suggested that the diaries of elite eighteenth century Philadelphia girls show them challenging gender and class norms and asserting personal autonomy. The evidence, however, more persuasively shows the degree to which these young women internalized class‐based gender prescriptions. This is not the kind of argument that’s very exciting to make. But just like women and gender historians have emphasized the need to look at anti‐feminists as well as feminists, or women who supported the KKK as well as civil rights activists, children’s historians need to recognize young people’s collusion with socio‐political norms and the success of adult‐directed socializing processes as well as the ways young people exercise agency. On the other hand, just because young people have similar experiences as adults— including experiences that we associate with adulthood we can’t assume that those experiences are actually the same or have the same effects on young people in history. An example of this might be Jim Marten’s decision to not look at boy soldiers in the Civil War in his (otherwise brilliant) study of children and the Civil War because, “military service made them de facto adults.” [5] At the same early American conference 15 mentioned above, Caroline Cox gave a compelling paper on Revolutionary War boy soldiers that shows that war did not necessarily make boys men (or even independent) and that boys experienced war service decidedly differently from their older counterparts, and not because they were relegated to being fifers and drummer boys. [6] In my work I found that many scholars of the civil rights movement have started with the assumption that young people are different (and I would suggest that even if, in response to question 1, we say we don’t need a theory of childhood or child development, most of us usually start with assumptions that look like one). But those scholars end up (along with many people at the time) generally taking for granted young people’s activism in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and1960s, suggesting that’s it’s no wonder children and youth were on the front lines—they had less to lose and were rebelling (like young people are wont to do) against norms, etc. But by not looking at what theories of child development meant for a particular cohort growing up in a particular time and place, historians of the movement miss much of the story (not to mention not being able to explain why it didn’t happen earlier). Child development theory then, even if we’re conscious of it, isn’t enough. We don’t want to let it take on explanatory power that it doesn’t really have. I would say, too, that historians, and this is generally true in civil rights scholarship, also start with the assumption that what adults do is most important in history. So here again I think we see assumptions about child development playing a role in historical scholarship without historians being conscious of it. In this case, the very idea that childhood is a developmental stage on the way to becoming what matters (an adult), shapes the stories we usually tell about the past. Here again I think children’s historians have something to say. Notes 1 Sermon (Prince Edward County, Virginia, 28 July, 1951) by the Rev. L. Francis Griffin quoted in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Racial Equality, 480. See also Rebecca de Schweinitz, If They Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) 237‐39. 2 William Tuttle, Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 236‐41. 3 Robert Coles, The Political Life of Children (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968) 62‐ 71; Robert Coles, “Children and Racial Discrimination,” American Scholar 34 (Winter 1964‐65) 90‐92. 16 4 Erick H. Erikson, “Youth: Fidelity and Diversity” in Youth: Change and Challenge edited by Erik H. Erickson (New York: Basic Books, 1963) 20; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 72, chapter 2. On these points and those from notes 2 and 3 see also de Schweinitz, If They Could Change the World, chapter 5. 5 James Marten, The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 6 Caroline Cox, “Boy Soldiers: Citizenship and Patriarchy in the American Revolution,” paper presented at the Omohundro Institute and Early American History and Culture Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah (June 2009). Round Table on the Critical Historiography of Childhood Colin Heywood, University of Nottingham I do find these six questions intriguing, making us reflect on the yardsticks we use to assess our findings. They also bring to light the way our approach to the history of young people has changed over the last few decades, under the influence of a renewed interest in the study of childhood and children among social scientists. [1] I am going to start with Question 5. I am pretty certain that I did not have a theory of child development in mind when, during the 1970s, I started to research the history of child labour in nineteenth‐century France. Or rather, I would have taken for granted our modern Western version of a ‘protected’ childhood, which sees children as innocent, vulnerable creatures who should be sheltered for as long as possible from the harsh realities of adult life. Children, from this perspective, have a right to schooling and time for play instead of pressure to earn their living. [2] Hence, I was surely predisposed at the outset to favour the reformers campaigning for child labour legislation, and to condemn out of hand their opponents. [3] It follows that my answer to Question 1 would be that historians will have a theory of childhood of some sort in mind, even if they think they don’t, so it is better if they are conscious of it. With a later project, on growing up in modern France, it was necessary for me to get to grips with theories on the nature of the child and on child development. I was conscious of having luminaries like Jean‐Jacques Rousseau breathing down my neck. In Emile, or on Education (1762), Rousseau organized his argument around successive stages in childhood and adolescence as the basic framework for progression in a new system of education. In this way, he justified a ‘negative’ education, as opposed to that of the schools in eighteenth‐century France, on the grounds that children were slow to develop powers of reasoning. [4] The notion of linking the physical development of children to their education, to help parents and teachers with their expectations of what the young could learn at successive ages, was to have a long history. Above all, the period running from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century 17 brought a massive acceleration of scholarly effort on refining the stages and sequences of ‘developmentalism.’ [5] One outcome of all this new knowledge during the late twentieth century was a debate over whether childhood was a universal or a culturally‐ constructed stage of life. This is largely a matter of divergence between disciplines. On the one side, a biologist can confidently state that as we evolve from other primates, we develop new stages of life. So, according to Barry Bogin, ‘the majority of mammals progress from infancy to adulthood seamlessly’ – (neat shades of the Ariès thesis there for the historian!). [6] But Bogin goes on to assert that humans have evolved extra time for the development of the brain and learning. He discerns five stages for human development between birth and reproductive maturity, taking the form of (1) infancy, (2) childhood, (3) juvenile, (4) adolescence, and (5) adulthood. [7] He concludes that ‘there seems to be a pan‐human ability to perceive the five stages of human postnatal development and respond appropriately to each.’ [8] Rousseau, as it happens, set out five stages to human development – and evidently such frameworks are ‘good to think.’ Developmental psychologists, until recently at least, have also had a prominent role in proposing a natural path to maturity as an adult. If we were to accept all this, the answer to Question 1 would be relatively straightforward for historians. However, such a framework is open to the charge of ‘biological reductionism.’ We are aware, for example, that there were many variations on the way these stages were perceived in the past, notably the four stages based on the four humours, or the seven ages linked to, say, the seven days of creation. Hence, on the other side of the debate, the sociologist Allison James could assert that childhood is ‘a social and cultural, rather than a universal phenomenon.’ [9] Historians are likely to find this latter type of argument more fruitful as a starting point for their research, rather than the inherently ahistorical approach of the biologist. It allows them to range freely over past societies investigating the different ways that people thought about the early years of life. This does not mean ignoring the ‘biological facts,’ but rather discovering how people in the past interpreted them. [10] For my purposes as a historian, therefore, I never contemplated using the stages in childhood outlined by biologists or other scientists such as developmental psychologists – the specific target of social constructionists – as a template for ‘growing up’ in France during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead I poked around in the ‘dustbin of history’, as the sociologists would have it, to see what ‘presociological’ ideas influenced people at that time. [11] I looked at past conceptions of childhood such as the supposedly ‘natural’ evil or innocence of the young, as depicted by philosophers, priests, poets, painters and novelists. However, what really interested me was how French people attempted to make sense of their own childhoods. [12] Much of my primary source material took the form of ‘ego documents’: letters, diaries, childhood reminiscences and autobiographies, where authors set down their thoughts on their own feelings and actions. I therefore turned to the various rites de passage that marked an individual’s journey from the cradle to the grave in village society before industrialization (baptism, first communion, and so forth) as a framework for my 18 autobiographical material. These were important, we may assume, as a way of helping people to cope with important transitions in their life. I also noted changes that came to these rites during the nineteenth century, such as leaving school and doing military service. Finally, I also thought in terms of an individual life course, borrowing once more from sociology, to set beside the relatively fixed life cycle of the traditional popular culture. [13] Here the individual could identify their own turning points in life, introduced randomly from outside or a matter of their own strategic choices. In this way I sought, as a historian, to focus on childhood in a particular period and place. Notes 1. Here one might cite as particularly influential on historians Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Allison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Construction of Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1990); and Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996). 2. See, for example, Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society 1880‐1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 9‐15; Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2004), pp. 75‐93; and Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 54‐64. 3. Colin Heywood, Childhood in Nineteenth‐Century France: Work, Health and Education among the ‘Classes Populaires’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4. Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or on Education (1762), transl. Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1991). See also Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, 1754‐62 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 5. André Turmel, A Historical Sociology of Childhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 2,9. 6. Barry Bogin, ‘Evolutionary and Biological Aspects of Childhood’, in Biological Perspectives on Children, ed. Catherine Panter‐Brick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 10‐44 (p. 17). 7. Ibid, p.18. 8. Ibid, p. 38. 9. Allison James, ‘From the Child’s Point of View: Issues in the Social Construction of Childhood’, in Panter‐Brick, Biological Perspectives, pp. 45‐65 (p. 45). 19 10. Note that specifying a link between the biological and the social dimensions to childhood remains problematical for social scientists. 11. Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan Prout (eds), Theorizing Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 9. 12. Colin Heywood, Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Regime to the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 13. Alan Bryman, Bill Bytheway, Patricia Allatt and Teresa Keil (eds), Rethinking the Lifecycle (Hounsmills: Macmillan, 1987). Comments for Panel on the Critical Historiography of Childhood Jennifer Ritterhouse, Utah State University I want to thank Jim Block and Harvey Graff for organizing this panel and inviting me to participate in it. I'd like to address the question of whether historians of children and childhood need a theory of child development from the perspective of my own experience trying to write about black and white children's racial learning in the Jim Crow South. Let me begin by saying that I did not set out to write about children. Instead, I found myself in the unusual situation of having an interest that was easier, rather than harder, to study in relation to children‐‐a very different story, I think, than that of most people who attempt historical work on children and childhood. That interest was in racial "etiquette," the widely understood conventions that guided day‐to‐day encounters between blacks and whites before, during, and after the period of legal segregation. From my reading in southern and African American history, I could tell that both contemporaries and historians had some understanding of what the etiquette entailed and why. But trying to study racial etiquette was like trying to find salt in the sea‐‐it's everywhere but still hard to put your finger on. I quickly learned that one place where racial etiquette often appeared in a distilled form was the autobiographies of blacks and nonconformist whites, both of whom tended to describe how they learned the code of behavior expected of them in their segregated society. I initially intended to focus a chapter of my dissertation on these kinds of autobiographical stories. I ended up supplementing autobiography with other kinds of sources and making children's racial learning the subject of my entire book, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race. Which brings me to my main point: that as historians we are dependent on sources, which are rarely as plentiful or as revealing, especially for the study of children, as we would like. I think I am actually rather lucky to have backed into my work on children's racial learning because, had I set out with more knowledge of theories of child 20 development or the social science literature on race awareness in children, I think I would have considered my project completely impossible. No historian can go back in time and ask a child to draw a picture or participate in an experiment, yet I found that even the relatively rare diaries, letters and other sources produced by children in the past were not very helpful because, by the time children were old enough to know how to write, they had already learned the racial conventions of their society and seldom had any reason to comment on them. Race and racial etiquette had become for them, as for the adults around them, salt in the sea. Retrospective sources such as autobiography and oral history were the best I was going to find, in the sense that they at least offered some insights into the subjective experience of growing up black or white. But these kinds of sources were by no means transparent windows even into the minds of the adults who produced them, much less the minds of the children those adults once were. Thus, in Growing Up Jim Crow, I tried to take a thoughtful as well as a pragmatic approach to the use of retrospective sources in the study of children's experiences in the past. Meanwhile, once it became clear that I was going to focus my entire project on children, I tried to get a handle on the existing scholarship in the history of childhood, and I also did some exploring in the extensive literature on children's understandings of race. I did not gain as much expertise in the latter as I would have liked, but I did find one new study that helped to validate my historian's approach to a subject that, as I've said, might have seemed off‐limits if I had known more about the work of scholars in other disciplines. That book was Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin's The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Trained as sociologists, Van Ausdale and Feagin provide a helpful overview of major theories of child development. Then they challenge the conventional wisdom, associated primarily with the work of Jean Piaget, that young children are too egocentric to think in racial terms. In contrast, Van Ausdale and Feagin offer the results of their own ethnographic, participant‐observer study of a large multiracial preschool in the 1990s, where they regularly found children as young as three or four noticing racial differences and employing racial terms. Sometimes the children "did race" in positive ways that might have been encouraged by the school's multicultural curriculum. At other times, race became a weapon in what can only be described as power struggles over toys, art projects, and games. Van Ausdale and Feagin stress that one key reason the children allowed Van Ausdale to see them talking and acting in these ways is because she worked to divest herself of any adult authority in their eyes. Most child development research, on the other hand, examines children's behavior only in the presence of adults. This is a severe limitation, in Van Ausdale and Feagin's view, and certainly in my own research I saw evidence that children were very sensitive to adult expectations when it came to matters of race. Reading The First R as I worked to turn my dissertation into a book provided welcome validation for my efforts to analyze the kind of evidence I had, which was almost entirely anecdotal. Many of the episodes Van Ausdale and Feagin recorded at the preschool are 21 similar to the everyday social dramas I saw in autobiographical and oral history sources. Beyond this convenient fit, however, one could learn from Van Ausdale and Feagin's rejection of Piaget (and preference for the work of Lev Vigotsky) that the conventional wisdom in other disciplines, as in our own, is subject to change. I think historians of children and childhood can learn useful things from child development theorists and other scholars, but I am skeptical of the notion that any historian needs "a theory" of child development going into his or her work. Neither the singularity of the word "a" nor the seeming rigidity of the word "theory" seems to me compatible with the nature of our discipline, which is so dependent on analyzing what we have for evidence rather than what we might wish we had. Moreover, while it would probably be valuable for historians to gain some sensitivity to the developmental frameworks operating, often unconsciously, in the minds of past actors as well as in our own, I worry that too much sensitivity might prove enervating. Like the poor, like people of color, like women, like gays and lesbians, the children of the past are a group of people who will remain "invisible" and "inarticulate" until historians find creative ways to study them. Our methods might be improved by a broader knowledge of the methods of other disciplines, but they will necessarily be pragmatic because of our disciplinary dependence on sources. History and Theory, and Whose Side We Are On Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania So I'm looking at the current issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and it's hard not to notice how little there is there of children and youth. The first article, on a colonial Virginia baptismal bowl, is about the young only insofar as Mason family infants were passive participants in rituals of refinement and ceremonies of status that concerned adults, not the newborn. All the significances that Lauren Winner sees in the bowl are adult significances, revelatory of religious doctrines, emotional needs, and gentry prerogatives that would have been utterly opaque to the babies who were baptized in it. And I do not even speak of the secular worldliness of the bowl's primary use as a wineglass cooler. The next article, on child deathbed scenes in Anglo‐American literature from the 17th century to the mid‐19th, uses fictional representations of precocious converts to get at real anxieties and ambitions of real adults. Exactly as Diana Pasulka says, the article is about the young only to the extent that their alleged dying scenes were literary tropes that conveyed changing cultural meanings. The next article, on idealizations of youth in British child‐rescue literature a century ago, is entirely about affluent adult images of that ideal and affluent adult analyses of the enemies of that ideal among the poor. As Shurlee Swain admits openly, the essay is an inquiry into the origins of the concept of "the best interests of the child" that underlay 22 much of the 20th century's child welfare law and practice. Her business is with the ambiguities and hypocrisies of the politics of child‐saving. The next three articles, on seashore hospitals in the United States, Belgium, and Sweden at the turn of the 20th century, present intriguing comparisons of national character manifest in divergent dealings with the plague of tuberculosis among children. The focus in all three pieces is on the reformers who built these asylums ‐ their mentalities and motives, their beliefs about poverty and the poor, their attitudes toward urbanization and industrialization, their views of the role of the state in protecting children ‐ and not on the youngsters who actually filled those sanatoriums. As the editor of the essays in this section concedes, children's voices "are hard to hear" in them. The last article, on the uses of ethnic attachment among indigenous people of the Arctic regions, asserts that affiliation with one's culture and awareness of one's ethnic history promote feelings of belonging which foster psychological resilience and well‐being. But Lisa Wexler does not argue that any of this is distinctive to the young. As she says, the benefits of enhanced awareness of cultural identity obtain across all ages. As she might have added, the task of transmitting that heritage is inescapably the province of the elders. And this preoccupation with adults, among historians of childhood and youth, is not confined to the articles. It appears equally in the book reviews. The first review examines a book on the uses of personal narrative in the social sciences and history. The reviewer does not disguise the book's definition of its subject as life stories told in the retrospect of adulthood or the extent to which that definition precludes narratives of children and adolescents. The second discusses a collection on ritual in children's lives. The reviewer dwells on what he calls the "larger" issues of cultural change evident in such rituals and on the ways in which adults adapt rituals to changing circumstances. The third takes up a book challenging the secularization story in American history. The reviewer struggles to tease out implications for children in an argument that is devoted entirely to the discourse of their parents. The fourth surveys a collection on queer youth cultures. It is about youth. It is the only thing of its kind in the entire issue of the journal. The fifth and final review addresses a volume on Japanese‐American beauty pageants. Neither the book, apparently, nor the review, certainly, says anything about the young contestants themselves. The focus of both is on the pageants as arenas of contestation 23 among adult Japanese‐Americans over nationalism, feminism, and racial purity in an increasingly multi‐racial ethnic community. Taken together, these articles and reviews expose our dirty little secret. We may call ourselves historians of childhood and youth, but we do not deal with children as children. The evidence of this issue of the journal is, to be sure, excessive. Some of us, some of the time, do study the young in their own right. But in our preponderant practice, we focus on how the elders treated their offspring and on what such treatment can tell us about the elders. On the whole, children appear in our work as registers of adult views and values or as indices of adult ambivalences and aspirations. We seek their significance as idealizations (or demonizations) that serve adult purposes and projects or reveal adult concerns and conflicts. Developmental theorists do not do any of this. Their theory is naively realistic. It takes children and youth as (it thinks) it finds them. It is in fact preoccupied with the young, for themselves rather than for what they reveal of their environing culture. It is symptomatic of this preoccupation with actual children that all the developmental theorists of consequence ‐ from Rousseau to Freud, from Gesell and Ilg to Erikson to Piaget and Kohlberg ‐ have propounded sequences of stages, from earliest infancy to maturity. They have all had a holistic interest in how character, or health, or intelligence, or cognitive functioning, or moral reasoning, or human completeness, emerges. Historians of childhood simply do not ask the questions that developmental theorists do. Not in the current issue of our journal, and not more generally. If we worry about stages of development at all, we cherry‐pick: a single stage from the entire sequence, a single theory of that stage; something from Erikson, perhaps, if we are studying adolescence, or from Coles, if we are studying youth activism. Rebecca de Schweinitz admits as much quite cheerfully. Children are, for historians, means to an end, as Jennifer Ritterhouse says so disarmingly: a way, in her case, to get at the etiquette of day‐to‐day black‐white relations in the Jim Crow South. Children are, for developmental psychologists, ends in themselves. Experimentalists and theorists alike observe the behavior of the very young in laboratories deliberately designed to facilitate such observation. Even if their specific studies are confined to a single developmental moment or issue, those studies are, tacitly if not explicitly, embedded in far larger theoretical‐sequential ensembles. Historians cannot get at children the way that developmental psychologists can. We have no laboratories or other technologies of direct access to our subjects. The data we do have are simply too scattered and fugitive to support the sorts of ingenious and systematic experiments and interpretations that developmentalists demand as a condition of research and writing in their field. 24 More than that, I doubt that historians would want to get at children that way even if they could. Historians not only see the young refracted through adult accounts but also expect to see them through such uncertain prisms. Historians expect to see everyone that way. When they are attending to their craft, historians are not naive realists. Their business is, ineliminably, with the denials and displacements by which we mortals get through our days, and the prevarications and paradoxes that pervade our lives, and the ironies that condition our existence. The very essence of the historical endeavor is antithetical to the theoretical enterprise. Theorists seek some sphere of control of the vagaries of human life. Insofar as they succeed, they enlarge our precarious purchase on our affairs. Good theory helps us to do better in life, in the world. It grounds the ancient and honorable Baconian ambition to relieve man's estate. Historians do not do that. Not at bottom, anyway. They do not aspire to control ‐ or to the predictions which are the measure and test of control ‐ so much as to understanding. And understanding does not increase our power over nature so much as it augments our appreciation of human diversity and thus militates against control. Understanding enables us to grasp that our social worlds resist generalization and elude the universal predications of theory. It reminds us that the rest of the world ‐ in other times and other places, and by extension even in our own time and place ‐ is not and was not as we ourselves and our own kind are now. Understanding does not enhance our dominion. It moves in a very different direction, toward humility, generosity, and caritas. ~~~ Pedagogy The Interdisciplinary Nature of Childhood Studies Stephen Gennaro, ed. In the last edition of the newsletter, some of my colleagues from York University’s Children’s Studies Program weighed in on how to get students to “do the readings.” One of our findings was that since the field is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, students and teachers of Children’s Studies are often asked wear many academic hats. Building on this theme, Lynne Vallone, Daniel Thomas Cook, and Deb Valentine at the Rutgers‐Camden’s Childhood Studies Program weighed on the interdisciplinary nature of teaching in the field. The program at Rutgers‐Camden is interdisciplinary at its core. 25 The Department of Childhood Studies puts the issues, concepts and debates that surround the study of children and childhoods at the center of its research and teaching missions. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the Department of Childhood Studies aims both to theorize and historicize the figure of the Child and to situate the study of children and childhoods within contemporary cultural and global contexts. The curriculum in the Department is multidisciplinary in scope and purpose and provides students with a strong background in both humanistic and social science perspectives on children and their representations. This approach will prepare students for careers in many areas including academics, public policy, social services, youth programming, and education. (http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/) As Lynn Vallone, the program Chair, explains in her article, the pedagogy and practise of the new Doctoral Program in Childhood Studies is multidisciplinary and constructed to mesh the many academic approaches in the field. Of course, being so “interdisciplinary and open” also has its challenges as Daniel T. Cook, the program’s Director of Graduate Studies explores in his piece “Refusing to Scratch the Itch.” Finally, Deb Valentine, both a graduate student in the program and teacher at the undergraduate level, offers some insight into some of the difficulties (and techniques for overcoming these difficulties) in maintaining an interdisciplinary classroom. The positives and pitfalls of interdisciplinary studies are exactly as Vallone, Cook, and Valentine express. And yet, that is precisely what makes the field of Children’s Studies or Childhood Studies so exciting: the many lenses, approaches, and avenues for insight that if offers to teachers, students, and academics alike. In my own work, it is the mixture of theory and action in studying childhood and children that drives my scholarship and teaching practices. My courses are structured around the philosophy that each course takes focus on the importance of situating children's familial, local, national, and global histories in larger discussions of power relations by making connections between critical theory of race, class, gender, and sexuality with historical and contemporary studies of children and childhood. Each course therefore examines children and childhood from a global perspective and compares the real lives of children to representations of childhood in social institutions and the problems raised by the creation of a universal or generic child profile. As with all courses that draw their base from cultural studies, there is a particular interest in whose voice is represented and whose voice is left silent. And this is backdrop against which I ask my students to read the critical social theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci. As I demonstrated in the last edition of the newsletter, I provide the students with reading questions to help guide them through the material and then follow up with a lecture and activity/task designed to reach students in their own spaces. Here is a copy of the PowerPoint and activity from the accompanying lecture (note that the activity can be found on the last slide). [Ed. note: Access the powerpoint 26 presentation at: http://www.history.vt.edu/Jones/SHCY/Newsletter14/NeedForTheory.pps ] The Need for Theory in Children’s Studies However, the interdisciplinary approach did not end there, course readings included novels, short stories, memoirs, ethnographies, television sit‐coms, critical theory, primary and secondary historical sources, The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, interviews with real children, and articles from the fields of anthropology, education, law, sociology, geography, and media studies (just to name few). And then the question on the final exam asked to engage with all of the material encountered in a way that attempts to deal with the problem of Children’s Studies interdisciplinary nature: One of the goals of the second module was to posit the need for a critical theory of childhood‐ that views age in the same fashion as other social variables. Knowing what you now know about Children’s Studies, what would a theory like this look like? Be sure to use course texts to help make your point. And the results were incredible! So perhaps we can all learn from the folks at Rutgers‐Camden: take the multidisciplinary approach that emanates from your own scholarship and its connection to Childhood Studies and then pass that on to your students. Examining the new Childhood Studies Doctoral Program at Rutgers University,Camden Lynne Vallone In developing a coherent multidisciplinary Childhood Studies doctoral program, faculty members‐typically trained in Humanities or Social Science disciplines‐will face multiple challenges in crossing or erasing seemingly inert and forbidding disciplinary boundaries. Given the discomfort attendant upon such "border crossing," we have found that establishing a firm foundation of trust between faculty members was a crucial precursor to assuaging our concerns over leaving the known behind. The compromises we made in creating the examination structure for the doctoral degree provides a good example of solutions to the kinds of challenges to which I am referring. I will briefly describe one aspect of that exam structure here. We agreed to retain the conventional two‐step examination process of qualifying exam and preliminary exam/proposal hearing. Yet we knew that a "traditional" qualifying exam (in any typical disciplinary usage) would neither satisfy the needs of our students who hail from a variety of scholarly backgrounds, or accomplish our goals of providing an integrative and interdisciplinary program of study. Rather than a timed examination linked to a pre‐determined set of readings and outcomes, we instituted a more personalized dossier review keyed to each students' developing interests. The dossier‐assembled after 18 hours of Childhood Studies coursework‐consists of the transcript, statement of purpose and a substantial writing sample written for a Childhood Studies seminar. A successful review requires 27 the student to create a pre‐professional presentation of self, thoughtful reflection and a demonstration of the growing knowledge base and critical thinking and writing skills necessary for undertaking doctoral‐level work in Childhood Studies. The dossier is read and voted upon by the entire faculty. If the student passes the review, he/she is retained in the program and continues coursework. Although this structure is new and has not been fully tested given that we have not had any graduates from our doctoral program to date, we are pleased with the process so far and believe that this non‐traditional approach to a qualifying "exam" both adequately reflects a student's progress in the program after one year of full‐time study and will predict future success in writing an interdisciplinary dissertation project. Refusing to Scratch the Itch: Keeping Problems Open Daniel Thomas Cook A decisive moment occurred toward the end of the second semester of a two‐semester seminar required for entering Ph.D. students in our newly established Childhood Studies program. The Proseminar introduces students to key debates, topics and approaches comprising that somewhat amorphous, multidisciplinary field of “childhood studies.” As we were discussing and critiquing yet another approach, a student asked, “When are we going to start tying things up?” I was bit transfixed by the implication that all these approaches and paradigms were to be put into some sort of internal coherence with one another, an expectation apparently shared by others. In the ensuing discussion, I endeavored to articulate what I mistakenly thought had been previously explicated— namely, that the point of multidisciplinary scholarship was not to locate the one overarching framework that incorporates all others. The project of childhood studies, rather, centers on creating and maintaining the “child” and “childhood” as problems to be investigated through multiple means. For at least some of these students, studying childhood in a “multidisciplinary” manner did not in itself disrupt their received notion that there must be one underlying truth to be culled from the different perspectives. This presumption of a “best approach”— though not necessarily unique to childhood studies—I believe acquires considerable conceptual heft when children and childhood are at issue because children remain emotionally overdetermined figures in social life, despite the insistence on problematizing them historically and culturally. Students often apply to programs like ours with the idea of finding ways to help children and improve their lives. No doubt necessary and admirable, this impetus can contravene efforts to keep the focus on engaging problems that may be generative of new insights. 28 Reflections on Creating A Safe Place in Childhood Studies Deborah Valentine, Rutgers University‐Camden I came to the doctoral program in Childhood Studies at Rutgers‐Camden with teaching and administrative experience and an abiding interest in issues of race and education. Working as a teaching assistant for an introductory Childhood Studies course, I found that students' presumptions of, and emotional attachments to, idealized views of "the child" compounded the already morally and emotionally charged landscape of race relations. When presented with the opportunity to teach Amanda Lewis' Race in the Schoolyard to a racially/ethnically diverse lecture class of 100 students, I confronted a familiar problem—namely, how can one enable students to learn material that involves letting go of cherished beliefs, memories or ways of understanding the world? In order to address this challenge, I began the lecture series with my own story, then asked students to reflect on their personal experiences related to racial identity and diversity in their early school years. Beginning with these stories allowed students to develop a conscious awareness of their own experiences with and emotions about the topic prior to confronting material that might feel threatening. I then structured my lectures around the stories of children that were presented in the text. I finished the series of class sessions by requiring students to fill out a chart answering the question of how race/ethnicity was being constructed in several of the narratives we had discussed. By making room for student’s personal experiences and emotions first, this method helped diffuse emotional barriers and pre‐empt a good deal of defensiveness that had stand in the way of engaging with the challenges posed by new material. ~~~ Conference Reports . . . . . . .Priscilla Clement, ed. Call for Conference Reporters As budgets in higher education continue to shrink, the Bulletin hopes to keep you informed about the conferences you’d like to attend but can’t afford, and the conferences you miss just because time doesn’t permit. Priscilla Clement is the editor for conference reports. Please contact her to share with SHCY members the exciting work that is regularly being presented at the conferences of national organizations and at smaller specialized meetings you are able to attend. We are especially interested in hearing about the history of children and youth in conferences that take meet outside of North America! Contact Priscilla at p4c@psu.edu 29 Conference Report American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), April 23‐26, 2009 Cara Kinzelman, University of Minnesota The American Association for the History of Medicine held its 82nd Annual Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, in April. Topics related to the history of childhood and childbearing were well represented, which suggests an exciting level of interest in the field among historians of medicine. One of the conference highlights was Katharine Park’s (Harvard University) Fielding H. Garrison Lecture titled “Birth, Death and the Limits of Life: Caesarean Section in Medieval and Renaissance Europe”. Prior to the sixteenth century, caesareans were performed exclusively on women who were already dead or deemed unable to survive labor. Dr. Park used church declarations and legal documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to demonstrate how the fate of unborn children was linked to greater religious and legal considerations. Due to the belief that unbaptized infants were doomed to suffer in the afterlife, parents and religious leaders began to stretch the limits of “life” to save the souls of unborn, stillborn and miscarried children. Their bodies were routinely scrutinized for the slightest signs of life so they could be baptized in haste and offered a Christian burial. To this end French midwives received emergency baptism training. Tellingly, most of the surviving documentation regarding caesareans in this era comes from legal records. If a child survived for even the briefest moment, a widowed husband was entitled to his wife’s inheritance. The absence of a living child meant that the woman’s dowry and her property would automatically revert to her family. Here again the standards for what it meant to have life were often stretched until the legal and religious definitions of life were almost indistinguishable from one another. Shannon Withycombe (University of Wisconsin‐Madison) offered a related paper on miscarriage and notions of death in nineteenth century America. Withycombe used medical journals and the personal letters of women to analyze differing perceptions of fetal death. While physicians tended to use words like dead, death and dying when referencing a miscarriage, women seemed to be more hesitant to describe the experience as a physical death. The idea of fetal life is a modern understanding. Nineteenth century women, sometimes most profoundly, felt the loss of a possibility rather than a life. Neither doctors nor mothers viewed the miscarried material as a corpse. Families did not engage in a formal mourning process and typically passed the fetus to the physician for assessment or experimentation. Jessica Martucci (University of Pennsylvania) discussed infant feeding and motherhood in post‐World War Two America. Between 1945 and 1980 mounting scientific evidence indicated that breast feeding was nutritionally superior to bottle feeding, but American mothers were hesitant to nurse their babies. Martucci presented a fascinating 30 exploration of factors – the sexualization of the breast, the need to simultaneously tend to the father’s sexual needs and the child’s physical needs, the presumed effects of breast feeding on the woman’s figure – that made nursing appear to be at odds with the demands of sustaining a modern, happy family. Other papers presented at the conference that may be of interest to SHCY members included Joy Newman’s (University at Albany) exploration of youth drinking and drinking law debates in the 1950s and 1960s; Debra Blumenthal’s (University of California – Santa Barbara) discussion on the legal authority of wet nurses and midwives in paternity and legal age cases in fifteenth century Valencia; Deborah Doroshow’s (Yale University and Harvard Medical School) work on bedwetting and behavioral conditioning in mid‐ twentieth century America; Lisa Pruitt’s (Middle Tennessee State University) analysis of children’s experiences with disability since the mid‐nineteenth century; and, finally, Wendy Mitchinson’s (University of Waterloo) discussion of childhood obesity in Canada from 1920‐1980. Conference Report Children and War, Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ, April 3‐5, 2009 Patrick Cox, Rutgers University, Camden The Department of Childhood Studies (Rutgers‐Camden) hosted the Children and War Conference in April. This gathering of scholars was a truly interdisciplinary event. Those who presented papers came from a broad range of disciplines and represented various methodologies and from their various papers several common themes emerged. Some scholars historicized children and war, including David Rosen (Farleigh Dickinson University). Rosen traced a shift in representations of child soldiers in popular discourse over the past two centuries from loyal citizens and patriots to a “lost generation.” This shift entailed a change in perception from childhood as agentic to childhood as powerless victimization, and also parallels the abandonment of the use of child soldiers in Western armies and the emergence of “the child soldier” as a social problem endemic to developing countries. Margaret Higonnet (University of Connecticut) examined memoirs and diaries and found children played roles in military service during World War I with surprising frequency. She used girl‐soldiers as the paradigmatic example of the mobilization of children in wartime to call for a rethinking of the role of children and childhood in the shaping of war culture and our understanding of childhood itself. Higonnet’s examination of gender identity formation in the extreme circumstances of war offers possibilities for further development of our thinking on childhood. James Marten (Marquette University) drew on his research into the American Civil War to describe children’s agency in actively seeking ways to participate in war. He used the 31 peculiar and chaotic situation of armed conflict as a window to provide unique and enlightening perspectives on family dynamics, child rearing and childhood. Other scholars conducted ethnographies of children in armed conflict, beginning with keynote speaker Ismael Beah, former child soldier and author of A Long Way Gone. He spoke movingly of his own experiences as a child soldier and his path to becoming an advocate for child soldiers. He has worked on their behalf at UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations Secretary General’s Office for Children and Armed Conflict at the United Nations General Assembly. Jason Hart (University of Oxford) reported his findings on the day‐to‐day experiences of children living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Hart examined what he called “checkpoint education,” the cumulative effect of daily encounters between armed Israeli soldiers and Palestinian children. This study calls into question the efficacy of peace and human rights education in shaping children’s political dispositions in places where children must undergo the humiliation of passing through armed checkpoints going to and from school. Gillian Mann (London School of Political Science and Economics) has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam. She reported on undocumented Congolese refugee children and the psychosocial impact of their clandestine and impoverished lives in Dar es Salaam. Lacey Gale, of Tufts University, drew upon 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork among child refugees in post‐war Sierra Leone in describing informal child fostering during war and post‐war reconstruction. Her research described the active role children play in relationships with caregivers and the responsibilities children take on for their families. Thoughts on the psychosocial effects of armed conflict on children were delivered from varying disciplinary perspectives. Paul Geltman, MD and Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University, assessed mental health counseling and other health services of Sudanese refugee minors in foster care in the US. His study found that refugee minors received high levels of psychosocial support, but neither those with lower functional health nor those demonstrating post‐traumatic stress disorder were more likely to receive mental health counseling than their peers, suggesting an unmet need for mental health diagnostic and treatment services. Dorothy Morgo (Yale) reported on her efforts to assess psychosocial effects of living in armed conflict on children in Sudan. The research team used multiple and unique forms of assessment to uncover widespread post‐traumatic stress disorder, depression and grief among Sudanese children. They also identified the 16 war experiences that proved to be most predicative of traumatic reactions, and delved further into the complex mechanisms of the interactions of the three disorders. Joseph Rikhof (University of Ottawa) brought his expertise as Senior Counsel in the Canadian Crimes Against Humanities and War Crimes Section to the question of the legal status of former child soldiers. Because child soldiers are minors who are sometimes compelled into military service and do not always fully comprehend their own actions, child soldiers pose unique difficulties when determining responsibility for war crimes. Rikhof suggested these circumstances make child soldiers unsuitable for legal punishments given to adult war criminals. He explored the dilemma of punishment 32 for children in war in both a historical context and in the context of his own experience in the Canadian government dealing with child soldiers. Richard Williams, Professor of Mental Health Strategy at the University of Glamorgan and child and adolescent psychiatrist, spoke on psychosocial resilience of children and families involved in armed conflict in the face of post‐traumatic stress disorder. Others spoke on the role of international organizations in working with children both during and after armed conflict. Neil Boothby, child psychologist and Professor of Public Health at Columbia University, spoke on the need among humanitarian workers to provide rapid responses to the immediate needs of children in emergency situations stemming from armed conflict. These necessarily immediate actions often result in palliative measures, which frequently provide little long term protection. He dwelt on the paradox humanitarian workers face in attempting to address immediate needs of discrete groups of children in emergency situations while at the same time strengthening protection for all children. Second keynote speaker Michael Wessells (Columbia University) reported on the failure of reintegration programs to recognize the gendered roles and experiences of girl soldiers. Girl soldiers’ entry into and experience with armed conflict takes different forms from their boy soldier counterparts, they are affected differently by their different experiences, and their integration back into civilian society is influenced differently. Yet disarmament, demobilization and reintegration efforts have ignored these differences. Siobhan McEvoy‐Levy (Butler University) began with children as agentic in war, post‐war violence, and war and post‐war economies, but found both an assumption of, and a desire for, the suppression of that agency when armed conflict ends. The tasks of peacekeeping and rebuilding exclude children from discourses on rights, security and development. McEvoy‐Levy drew on a number of case studies to argue for a productive role for children in peace building. Others dwelt upon the representations of war and childhood in popular culture. Kimberley Reynolds (University if Newcastle) examined both up‐market and populist magazines for boys in the decades leading up to World War I. Previous scholarship has suggested that such publications contributed to a mythos of war as romantic and heroic, thereby contributing to boys’ desires to enlist. She discovered attitudes toward armed conflict and the military as set forth in these publications were much more subtle and multi‐faceted than previous research has suggested. Gary Cross, historian from Penn State, spoke on the development of war toys in the 20th century. Looking at images of toys and toy advertisements, Cross related changes in the design and use of war toys to shifts in adult attitudes to war. Timothy Shary (University of Oklahoma) examined how a particular sub‐genre of films, American teen war movies produced in the 1980’s, exploited Cold War fears and patriotism in their depictions of fictional teens rising to defend the nation and traditional values from outside forces. Adrienne Kertzer (University of Calgary) offered a comparison of the Young Adult novel The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, about a child growing up in the midst of World War II, and recent memoirs of similar experiences. Kertzer examined changes in the representation of the 33 Holocaust as fictional accounts necessarily replace first‐person testimonials as more and more child survivors die. Charles Watters, Director of the European Centre for the Study of Migration and Social Care, University of Kent, offered closing remarks and observed several themes that emerged from the presentations. Among these were a historical perspective on the emergence of a new form of total war different from a professional war, and the emergence of a new form of childhood resultant from that new form of war. Watters was also stuck by the diversity of methodologies represented, and by the frequent synthesis of qualitative and quantitative data. Much of the research struck Watters as research that can bring about change, that matters and that is contextualized in reality. Conference Report Omohundro Institute for Early American History 15th Annual Conference June, 2009, Salt Lake City, Utah Rebecca de Schweinitz, Brigham Young University In June, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History 15th Annual Conference, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, included a panel entitled: Testing the Boundaries: Youth and Authority in Early America. In her paper, “’To Venture a Little Further:’ Freedom, Danger, and Young Female Pedestrians in the Eighteenth‐Century City, Katherine Gray drew on the dairies of elite, white, young women in Philadelphia to argue that young women used city streets to both challenge (to some degree) and reinforce their class and gender identity. They may have even, she suggests, used their walks about town to assert autonomy and define themselves as individuals. SHCY member Caroline Cox’s paper, “Boy Soldiers: Citizenship and Patriarchy in the American Revolution,” used the stories of Revolutionary War boy soldiers to suggest that military service in this period did not, as others have argued, necessarily correspond with increasing independence. Neither did it fit neatly with an earlier history of military service by boys under the age of sixteen. Military service became more common, she argues, for a number of reasons—including the increasing familiarity of military service as the war progressed, family networks, short service options, and rising bounty payments. Cox’s paper reminds scholars to consider boy soldiers on their own terms; and it turns out that the boys themselves stress their dependent status rather than their independence. And in the last paper, “Working Children and their Parents in Rural New England,” Gloria Main traced broad demographic, economic, and social changes—showing that a peculiar set of circumstances led southern New England to build a market‐capitalist industrial economy as reliant on child labor as colonial‐era farming families had been. In some 34 places children made up 71% of the labor force and contributed 53% of a families’ wages . . . but with the big difference that the young people who worked in the region’s new factories had few opportunities (because of a limited tax base for schools and dead‐end, unskilled jobs) to better their lot in life. Conference Report Expanding Literacy Studies: An International, Interdisciplinary Conference for Graduate Students The Ohio State University, April 3‐5, 2009 Shawn Casey, Ohio State University The Expanding Literacy Studies conference drew nearly 250 participants from over 66 institutions and 6 international sites to the Ohio State University in April. The interdisciplinary conference featured research on literacy, children and youth in presentations by graduate students in departments as diverse as Art History, English, Teaching and Learning, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Design, Library Science, and New Media Studies. The wide range of participants and interests evident in the program reflected the conference's aim: To expand the conversation about literacy's disciplinary boundaries and to create a space where graduate students share research and insight into all aspects of literacy. The theme of "expanding" literacy studies also posited an implicit critical question—how can the multiplying approaches to literacy studies be brought together to generate a framework for critical investigation? This theme was reflected in the range of methodologies and disciplines exploring the literacy practices and experiences of children and youth at the conference. For instance, one panel entitled "Youth Literacy & Global/Social Change" explored connections between media literacy, student activism, and literacy ideologies among recent high school graduates. In another session, “Classroom Literacies”, Allison Volz of the Ohio State University School of Teaching and Learning presented a video created in collaboration with former students. The video addressed race and the implication for teaching practices of differences between home and school‐based literacies. In addition to panels and presentations, the conference featured several dissertation workshops where graduate students shared dissertation chapters for peer response. Topics addressed included intergenerational educational literacies, students’ experiences with writing assessment, and literacy skill building with videoconferencing in kindergarten. Dissertation workshops were followed by participatory roundtable sessions designed to fulfill the conference directive to “extend the dialogue” of literacy studies across disciplines. Roundtables included a demonstration of “drama as pedagogy” and a discussion of religion in the writing classroom. The conference closed with interactive workshops that allowed participants to interact with one another while exploring new technologies for literacy learning, new approaches to studying literacy in 35 the classroom, and an arts‐based approach to imagining the “Field and Future of Literacy Studies” with participatory design pioneer Liz Sanders. The keynote panels, consisting of three graduate students and a noted scholar in the field, connected new research in literacy studies to work by leading scholars Harvey J. Graff and Shirley Brice Heath. Patrick Berry (University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign) spoke as part of Harvey J. Graff's Keynote Panel celebrating the 30th anniversary of Graff's The Literacy Myth. Berry presented research on the literacy narratives of educators. He suggested that teachers’ memoirs reveal the tension between personal investment in literacy “myths” and the possibility of forming critical approaches to literacy in education. Maria Bibbs (University of Wisconsin at Madison) explored the origins of the African American literacy myth. And David Olafsson (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) analyzed the function of post‐print scribal culture in the context of some of the legacies and myths of literacy. The keynote panel with Shirley Brice Heath featured three students working in the tradition of sociolinguistics and anthropology and focused on questions of “Youth, Language, and Literacy”. Heather Loyd (University of California, Los Angeles) presented on the role of cultural literacy skills in the construction and decoding of collaborative “moral worlds” among children in Naples, Italy. Enid Rosario‐Ramos (Northwestern University) explored intersections between critical literacy and community among young people attending a Puerto Rican Alternative School. And Darin Bradley Stockdill (University of Michigan) presented research designed to engage the purposeful literate practices of youth outside of school in social studies learning. For more details on the conference, including the full program, visit the conference web site, www.literacystudies.osu.edu/conference. The site features an audio archive of the keynote presentations. Conference Report Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, “History Without Boundaries” Seattle, Washington, March 2009 Leslie Paris, University of British Columbia The Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting took place in Seattle this past spring. I organized and presented on a panel about 1970s childhood, and I was able to attend two other youth‐related panels. Miriam Forman‐Brunell, Ilana Nash, Mary McMurray, and Kelly Schrum led a panel concerning the website which they (and various other contributors) are collaborately developing, Children and Youth in History. The site (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/) provides a range of sources and strategies for incorporating the history of childhood 36 into K‐12 and university teaching, whether by supplementing a survey class with primary childhood texts or by introducing a new course specifically on children. Already the site offers reviews of other websites whose primary sources are useful for scholarship on children; annotated primary sources; and various case studies that model strategies for using primary sources to teach childhood and youth. Near the end of the session we broke into small groups to discuss a few primary documents (such as an ancient Egyptian sock), to consider the process of creating useful documentation, and to help guide the website’s further development. The 1970s childhood panel included three papers. Mine explored the “child‐free” movement of the period, at once a sign of adult liberation ideals, demographic change, and political activism. Joe Austin suggested that black adolescents in American central cities often appeared in news reporting in the more loaded guise of “youth.” Karen Ferguson examined the Ford Foundation’s efforts to steer the course of racial liberalism through its endorsement of “affective” educational philosophy in the 1970s. We appreciated William Graebner’s insightful comments afterwards. Finally, I attended a “State of the Field” panel on School Desegregation and White Flight, with Tracy K’Meyer, Kevin Kruse, Thomas Sugrue, and Brett Gadsden. These papers explored a historiography that has essentially judged the Supreme Court’s 1956 Brown v. Board of Ed. decision to have failed as a civil rights measure. The panelists emphasized the differences between desegregation and integration, explored the range of oppposition to Brown, and suggested some of the ways that schools that were officially desegregated often remained internally segregated along racial lines. In thinking about these three panels collectively, I found it striking how differently they spoke to the field of children’s history and to their somewhat different audiences. At the first panel, I noted a good number of elementary and secondary teachers in the audience, as well as scholars working at post‐secondary institutions. This panel’s papers were practical in emphasis; those who stayed for the small group discussions seemed committed to introducing innovative pedagogy in their classrooms. My own panel drew scholars in children’s history but also scholars of the 1970s more broadly, many of whose current projects have nothing to do with youth. The last panel was the least youth‐focused in terms of its audience and its panelists; here the emphasis was on adult activism and policy, rather than the efforts of children and youth to desegregate or resegregate their schools. Together, these three panels suggest the diversity of ways in which childhood and youth matter to American historical research and teaching. 37 Conference Report The Political Child: Children, Education and the State 15‐16 May 2009, University of Helsinki Karen Stanbridge, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada The University of Helsinki, Finland, was host to a seminar highlighting research exploring the intersection of children and childhood with the political. The purpose of the seminar was to bring together historians, historically oriented social scientists and educators, and cultural scholars working in the field of childhood research to probe the various ways in which children and childhood are and have been affected by political processes and structures. The seminar attracted 26 researchers from 10 countries, all keen to discuss their research and create connections with like‐minded scholars. The synergies emerging from our meetings confirmed the vitality and potential of this area of childhood studies. The seminar began on 15 May with a welcome to participants from Marjatta Rahikainen, Professor with the Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki, and principal organizer (with Saara Tuomaala) of the seminar. The afternoon proceeded with several public lectures delivered by international scholars, including noted childhood historian, Colin Heywood (School of History, University of Nottingham). Karen Stanbridge of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada (and co‐organizer of the seminar) spoke on the neglect of theories of nationalism to elaborate on childhood in her talk Do Nationalists Have Navels? Where is Childhood in Mainstream Nationalism Theory? Susanna Hedenborg Malmö University College, Sweden) discussed the political and historical foundations of the recent growth in popularity of horse riding and stable work among girls in Sweden in her lecture, Children, Sports, Politics and Stable Work in Late Twentieth‐Century Sweden. Jane Gray (National University of Ireland at Maynooth) elaborated on her research that reveals state education in the Irish Republic to be as much a class project as a nationalist project in Lived Experience, Changing Childhood and State Formation in Twentieth‐Century Ireland. Colin Heywood pondered the changing relationship between childhood and the political over la longue dureé in his address, Battles for the Mind: The History of Children in Politics. The lectures were followed by discussion and audience response with a panel comprised of the speakers chaired by Saara Tuomaala of the History Department of the University of Helsinki. Participants then retired to an informal (and rather lively!) gathering and reception for seminar participants hosted by the Department of Social Science History, University of Helsinki. Seminar participants set to work early (9:30 am) the morning of 16 May discussing the 18 papers submitted for the workshop portion of the meetings. Although the papers were mindful of the main themes of the seminar – history, education, the state – they comprised a wide range of topics, from theoretical explorations (an analysis of Rousseau’s Emile in the context of the philosopher’s other writings, for example) to 38 policy analyses (how state policies toward children in Portugal were shaped by successive regimes in that country), from micro investigations (of narratives produced by a classroom of children soon after the Finnish Civil War of 1918) to more macro and longitudinal perspectives (a comparison of political representations of children during Swedish elections in the 1950s, 1980s and 2000s). The breadth of interests and the scholarship and creativity evident in the contributions of seminar participants bodes well for the future of “the political child.” The seminar wrapped up with a relaxed evening of wine, food, and conversation hosted by organizer Marjatta Rahikainen – a lovely end to an absorbing and productive conference. For a complete list of seminar participants and titles, please contact Karen Stanbridge, Department of Sociology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, at kstanbri@mun.ca. Conference Report Breaking the Boundaries: A Peer Reviewed Research Conference on Radical Children's Literature April 25, 2009, University of British Columbia Megan Lankford, University of British Columbia This one‐day interdisciplinary conference brought together the Department of Language and Literacy Education, the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable to create a comprehensive exploration of children's literature. It attracted sixty‐five participants. The conference program included two keynote speakers, concurrent panel sessions, and a Creative Writing poster session. Over the four simultaneous panel sessions, the participants were able to hear twelve papers presented by both current students and alumni. All papers focused on some aspect of radical children’s literature ranging from unconventional research in the field to revolutionary narrative conventions in popular works to the role of cultural authenticity in multicultural children’s literature. Topics ranged from Bryannie Kirk’s paper “Death as a Narrator: Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief” to Karen Taylor’s paper “The Representation of Nature in Vampire Romance for Young Adult Readers: An Ecocritical Exploration of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.” The first keynote speaker, Dr. Gisele Baxter, began the day with an intriguing discussion of the nature of children’s literature and more specifically the inherent problems in teen fiction. In addition to teaching Children’s Literature in the English Department at UBC, Dr. Baxter focuses her research around the representations of near‐future dystopias in literature, the production and reception of popular culture, and the gothic inheritance in literature and popular culture. The afternoon session opened with a keynote presentation by Dr. Eliza Dresang of the University of Washington. Recently appointed 39 the Beverly Cleary Professor in Children and Youth Services at UW, Dr. Dresang focused her presentation on her theory of Radical Change which she explores in her book, “Radical Change: Books for Youth in a Digital Age” (1999). In this work, Dr. Dresang examines books that challenge conventional narrative forms while also creating new spaces for revolutionary literature for children. Conference Report Models of Childhood and their Cultural Consequences, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, June 15, 2009 Afua Twum‐Danso, University of Sheffield Introduction Although the concept of childhood as a social construction is now a familiar concept within the social sciences, the cultural consequences of various social constructions remain an area that has not been sufficiently explored. Thus, on 15th June 2009, the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth (CSCY) at the University of Sheffield (UK) organized a one‐day international workshop, which aimed to explore the practical consequences of different models of childhood for children themselves. To achieve these aims the workshop focused on three contrasting cultural contexts – Norway, England and Wales and Ghana‐ and addressed a range of issues such as responsibility, competence, participation and protection. Professor Allison James, the director of CSCY, chaired the workshop, and presentations were delivered by Dr. Anne‐Trine Kjǿrholt (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), Professor Nigel Thomas (the University of Central Lancashire, UK) and Dr. Afua Twum‐Danso (the University of Sheffield, UK). Childhood in Scandinavia As many childhood researchers believe Scandinavia is an ideal model of childhood due to its focus on ‘children as being’, not as ‘becoming’, Anne‐Trine Kjǿrholt kicked off the presentations section of the day. While talking broadly of Scandinavia, most of the case studies she mentioned focused on Norway, which is predominately a rural country ‐ an important fact when considering how childhood is perceived within this context. Having said this, she made a point to stress early on in her presentation that there is not one model of childhood; instead there are several ways of constituting a good childhood in Norway and in Scandinavia more generally. Another key point raised in this presentation was that as Scandinavia has become known for the strong emphasis it places on children’s rights, there has emerged a dynamic connection between the model of childhood and the way children’s rights are interpreted. This can partly be attributed to the political environment in Norway, which is a social democracy where everyone is seen as being equal – hence the recognition of children as already ‘being’, rather than as ‘becoming’. Thus, this illustrates how local cultural models of childhood influence how rights for this group are interpreted. 40 To demonstrate how the emphasis on children’s rights has influenced the perception of children in Norway, Kjǿrholt put forward two case studies. The first focused on a project that was undertaken in the early 1990s, which sought to highlight children’s own culture and demonstrate the ways in which children are different from adults while at the same time highlighting that children are rights claimers in the same way adults are. The second case study was a project, which focused on children as fellow citizens in a kindergarten. Within this sphere of their lives, children were given the freedom to do what they wanted when they wanted. This meant that children were allowed to decide when they were ready to change their nappies and inform adults. Children were also able to eat when they were hungry rather than being made to eat at specific times of the day. Since 2005 the idea of children as participants has become dominant in various spheres. The Kindergarten Act, for example, stipulates that children’s views should be sought in the way kindergartens are constructed. Thus, children are often consulted in the design of their kindergartens. As children are seen as responsible for their own learning, many kindergartens hold children’s meetings everyday to find out which group children want to participate in for that day. Therefore, freedom and self‐determination have become overarching moral values in the current discourse on childhood in Norway and Scandinavia more generally. However, in concluding her presentation, Kjǿrholt argued that things are changing somewhat. An example she offered to highlight this point was the fact that many early childhood education institutions are moving from a play‐oriented curriculum to a more subject‐oriented one. Whereas previously the emphasis had been on free play and children being responsible for their own learning, there is now an increasing focus on more constructed learning for children. Thus, currently we are witnessing significant change as well as continuity in the discourse on childhood in Scandinavia. Childhood in England and Wales The second presentation, delivered by Nigel Thomas, also sought to stress that although there is a tendency to focus on the dominant discourse on childhood, what is dominant is not dominant in all places. Hence, it is not possible to talk of one model of childhood. Instead, there are competing discourses on childhood. For example, the various discourses in England and Wales tend to focus on children as either angels or devils, further emphasing the fact that there is not one model of childhood. Furthermore, models and discourses on childhood are influenced by variables such as culture and class, which means that society perceives children of the underclass very differently from those from more affluent families. Having established the diversity in models of childhood, Thomas went on to focus the remainder of his presentation on the key themes identified for the workshop – participation, responsibility and protection. With regards to children’s participation, he argued that although there has emerged a discourse that children are competent beings 41 who can engage in dialogue, which has led to a growth in participatory activities in recent years, children’s opportunities for decision‐making are highly variable. At home many children have a significant number of opportunities, but within their local communities they have very few. Within the school environment in particular, children are viewed as objects and, therefore, they have very little autonomy in schools except at break time. In more public spaces, children and young people are seen as a threat and thus they have very few opportunities to organize themselves into groups. This can partly be attributed to the feeling that children should not be seen outside the home, school or some other institution. The participatory activities that have been initiated in other spheres of children’s lives have been mainly initiated by adults and are often very divorced from children’s daily lives. In addition many of these activities are about young people rather than children per se. With regards to responsibility, Thomas argued that children benefit from low levels of trust and high levels of accountability. Hence, it is seen as inappropriate when children are left to their own devices. In addition, children are not seen as having duties – not in terms of having duties to their families – but they are seen as having a duty to work hard at school. In relation to competence, children are, on the whole, seen as incompetent because they do not have sufficient knowledge to contribute to the world. As a result, they need close supervision, which also has an impact on the low levels of responsibility granted to children. In terms of protection, Thomas suggested that children in England and Wales are well protected. Child deaths are relatively few. Legally, children can be beaten only by their parents who are restricted in various ways in their punishment of their children. Children are not allowed to go anywhere without adult supervision, which makes it harder to organize participation in any formal way. This may partly be the reason why many participatory activities focus on young people instead of children. There is also increasing prohibition on touching, which impedes the relationship between adults and children and also prevents children receiving comfort from adults when they need it. Thus, to conclude Thomas suggested that England and Wales are increasingly becoming societies where children are heard and not seen and certainly not touched, which has implications for the realization of their rights. Childhood in Ghana Afua Twum‐Danso ended the morning session with her presentation on the construction of childhood in Ghana and the implications of this construction on the way childhood competence is perceived. By focusing on children’s responsibilities within their families and communities and the lack of opportunities for participation in decision‐making within these spheres, she argued that while children are perceived as sufficiently competent to engage in labour, they are not competent to participate in other areas of family or community life such as decision‐making. This attitude was summed up by a participant in one of the focus group discussions she organised during her PhD fieldwork in Ghana who said: ”Children are born to work, not participate in decision‐making.” As a 42 result of this attitude, children assist their parents in all tasks that will be expected of them as adults – be they in the household, on the farm or at sea. Children themselves identified their responsibilities as running errands for parents and other adults, contributing to the maintenance of the household by sweeping the compound and its interior, washing utensils, helping mother to cook, looking after younger siblings. Although these activities demonstrate that children are competent to engage in various types of labour, Twum‐Danso argued that they are not perceived as being competent enough to participate in other areas of family life such as decision‐making and expressing their opinions even on issues affecting them. In fact, those children who do express their views or show signs of assertiveness are often seen as social deviants, disrespectful and hence are punished. Many children also felt that they did not need to participate in decision‐making and some also expressed their disapproval of those children who are able to express their views as it is thought they are spoilt and hence, are not trained properly in the values of society. To understand this double standard relating to children’s competence, Twum‐Danso argued that we must explore the various ways childhood is constructed and defined in this cultural context. During her research in Ghana she identified five components of the childhood and child‐rearing process, which limit children’s participation in decision‐ making, but facilitate the concept of children’s duties towards their families and communities. These included dependency, ’having sense’, obedience and respect. By focusing on these factors Twum‐Danso was able to show that in the construction of childhood within this context, emphasis is placed on children’s duties and responsibilities while their potential contributions to other areas of family and community life are overlooked or dismissed. Therefore, in her conclusion, Twum‐Danso stated that childhood is perceived as a period of incompetence, if not in terms of children’s ability to work and contribute to the functions of the household, then at least in terms of children being seen as immature, lacking sense, and not having anything valuable to contribute to their families and communities. This perception of children has consequences for the realisation of their rights within this cultural context.. Creating a Space for Participants’ Reflection and Dialogue The afternoon session was structured to enable all participants to reflect and engage in dialogue on the issues raised in the presentations of the morning session. To this end, participants were divided into three groups, each charged with examining one of the key focus themes– responsibility/competence, participation and protection. Each group was then expected to present the key points raised during their discussions in the plenary session. When giving feedback to the plenary, the group which focused on protection, highlighted the following points. Drawing largely on the UK context, they suggested that professionals are increasingly taking away parental rights. The parent‐child relationship has now become about parents, children and also professionals rather than just about parents and children. Part of the reason for this is the fact that children are 43 often constructed as victims, which reinforces the emphasis on protectionism. Instead, this group suggested that if children were seen more as participants, child victims might be able to help protect themselves. Another issue that emerged in this group was the idea that children are often given the freedom to choose as long as they make the "right" choice. Therefore, children’s participation and agency is often constrained, reinforcing the importance of structure in the discourse on childhood. In their feedback to the plenary, the participation group, noted that there was a danger of dichotomising participation. This is because there is not one type of participation and what participation is often depends on context. Key questions they asked were: what is participation for? What types of participation exist? Whose agenda dominates in participatory initiatives? What impact do children have when they participate? And how can we make participation more representative and more meaningful? The final group which had explored two concepts in tandem ‐ responsibility and competence ‐ stressed the following points during their feedback to the plenary. Children have to take on responsibility, but adults have to yield that responsibility. With regard to competence this group felt that there are different types of competence and how a particular competency is privileged depends on the cultural context. This group also put forward a number of points about participation. They argued that it is critical for us to foreground context as participation is different in different contexts – an obvious but often overlooked point. Thus, the key question for us to explore is: how can we take into account different contexts in our theorising of participation? After these group presentations, a wider group discussion followed in which a number of participants expressed the view that we need a more holistic approach to researching childhood. In particular, it was felt that we need to place childhood in a broader context as we cannot transport models of childhood from one context to another. Context is key as the models of childhood presented in the three case studies existed/emerged because of the particularities of their political, social and cultural contexts. In addition, relationality was also seen as important for understanding models of childhood as they can only be understood if we understand the models of adulthood that exist in any particular context. Finally, with regard to participation, it was felt that there is a need to explore very different notions of participation and expand it beyond just ’having a say’. The day concluded with all participants agreeing that they would welcome another day to explore these issues in greater depth through presentations, as well as dialogue, amongst participants. For more details about this workshop or any future workshops at the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth please visit the following website: www.sheffield.ac.uk/cscy 44 News from the Field Member News and News from the Field compiled by Nancy Zey (Sam Houston State University) Member News: Mary Niall ("Molly") Mitchell (University of New Orleans) was on an episode of “History Detectives” talking about The Couvent school for free children of color in New Orleans in the 19th century, and a manuscript that was probably a student copy book written by one of the pupils. The segment was entitled "Creole Poems" and can be viewed online: http://video.pbs.org/video/1162509522/program/1138014438 Nathalie op de Beeck has recently started a new position as Associate Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University. “I'm going to be directing the program in children's literature and childhood studies, which we are in the process of naming and turning into a minor for undergraduates. There will be a strong cultural studies and history component to the minor, and I will let you know more information once I have the program up and running this fall.” This fall, Amanda H. Littauer is starting a new position as an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and History at Northern Illinois University. She will teach historical and interdisciplinary courses on girls and girlhoods. Gail S. Murray (Rhodes College) is trying something new with her History of Childhood in America class this fall. “The child developmental psych. prof and I required co‐ enrollment in our 2 courses, which will meet back‐to‐back in the same classroom. We are not team‐teaching, but we are co‐supervising an experiential learning project in the community. Students will work with children in the children’s program at a local community health center to gather family stories w/ photos and make a short family history book. We two instructors have selected readings for our separate courses that we hope will have the most resonance with the other course. I’d like to end with William Koop’s essay challenging the static view of developmental psychology! I’ll be using _Huck’s Raft_ as my text, Jabbour’s _Major Problems in the History of American Families and Children_ for short essays and documents, Cahn’s _Sexual Reckonings_ , Shor’s _Born to Buy_, and Kozol’s _Shame of the Nation_ and other assorted essays.” E. Wayne Carp (Pacific Lutheran University) has been appointed to the editorial boards of Adoption Quarterly and Adoption & Culture. Susan J. Pearson (Northwestern University) has won the Best Article Prize from SHCY for 2007‐2008 for her article, "Infantile Specimens: Showing Babies in Nineteenth‐Century America," which appeared in the December 2008 issue of the Journal of Social History. 45 Corrie Decker has started a new position in the History Department at University of California, Davis. Heidi Morrison has finished her PhD at UC Santa Barbara and is starting a position in September as an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin (La Crosse). She specializes in children and childhood in the modern Middle East and will be teaching a course called "The Global History of Childhood." Congratulations to all these members! Member Introductions Welcome to new member Frank DiCataldo, who wishes to introduce himself to the society: “I am an assistant professor of psychology at Roger Williams University where I teach the History of Modern Psychology course which devotes an entire section to the history of various psychological discourses on child‐rearing and childhood. My research interests is the history of thought about juvenile delinquency, specifically, the juvenile reform school movement. I am currently working on a book documenting the closing of the juvenile reform schools in Massachusetts in the early 1970s. I have recently released a book at NYU Press entitled The Perversion of Youth, which is not primarily a historical work but does have a few chapters devoted to the history of thought about childhood sexuality. The book may be of interest to some members who are interested in childhood sexuality. An interesting blog that some members might find interesting is Advances in the History of Psychology. It is sponsored by York University in Toronto Canada. They often have really interesting postings on the blog about the history of childhood. For instance, just yesterday they had a few postings about a series of articles and radio webcasts about Harry Harlow and his research on attachment in rhesus monkeys and its effect on child‐rearing practices in America. Excellent stuff. Here is the link: http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/” Susana Sosenski wishes to introduce herself and point members to her website, which lists her articles. She studies the history of childhood in Mexico. http://sosenski.wordpress.com/articulos/ Benjamin Roberts became a member of SCHY this year and says that he “thoroughly enjoyed” the Berkeley conference. He is affiliated with the History Department at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). A historian of childhood and youth in the early modern period, he earned his Ph.D from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) on the dissertation “Through the Keyhole. Dutch Child‐rearing Practices in the 17th and 18th Century” (Hilversum: Verloren Publishers, 1998), and is currently finishing a manuscript entitled “Becoming a Man. Masculinity and Youth Culture in the Seventeenth Century.” He has published in various journals such as the History of Family History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Men and Masculinities. For more information see: http://www.bbroberts.com 46 New Books by Members Hamilton Cravens (Iowa State University) reports two new publications. ABC‐Clio has just published Great Depression: Peoples and Perspectives, which he edited, and for which he did the introduction and all the reference material; two other SHCY members, Kris Lindenmeyer and Ben Keppel, contributed chapters, Kris on adolescents in the 30s, and Ben on what it was like to be an African American social scientist then. Then, in November, Oregon State University Press is publishing Race and Science. Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America, Paul L. Farber and Hamilton Cravens, editors, which includes an introduction by Ham as well as an essay on race and IQ. Lynn Sacco (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) has a new book out: Unspeakable: Father‐Daughter Incest in American History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. For more information, please go to: http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=97808 01893001&qty=1&viewMode=3&loggedIN=false . Miriam Forman‐Brunell (University of Missouri‐Kansas City) has a book just published by New York University Press: Babysitter: An American History. Boris Gorshko (Auburn University) has a new book out: Russia's Factory Children: State, Society, and Law, 1800‐1917 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009). Stefania R. Van Dyke announces a new book from Left Coast Press in November called "Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions," edited by D. Lynn McRainey and John Russick. “While its focus is more about making history accessible FOR minors rather than the history OF minors, it still may be instructive and interesting for your purpose. In fact, there are some case studies of history exhibitions that use historical children and youth to tell the stories the exhibitions are conveying. Here's a link to more information: http://www.lcoastpress.com/book.php?id=222.” The University of North Carolina Press has published a new book by Wendy Rouse Jorae: "The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850‐1920." Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. Jorae challenges long‐held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families‐‐and particularly children‐‐played important roles in its daily life. More information is available at: http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1662 47 Articles and Book Chapters by Members E. Wayne Carp (Pacific Lutheran University) has published “How Tight Was the Seal? A Reappraisal of Adoption Records in the United States, England, and New Zealand, 1851‐ 1955," in International Advances in Adoption Research for Practice, edited by Elsbeth Neil and Gretchen Wrobel (Chichester: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009). Boris Gorshko (Auburn University) has three new articles and book chapters out: "Child Labor in Imperial Russia" in G.K. Lieten and Elise Nerveen Meerkerk, Child Labour's Global Past (Peter Lang Publishers, 2009); "History of Child Labor in Imperial Russia" in Child Labor World Atlas: a reference Encyclopedia (Hugh D. Hindman, ed. M.E. Sharp: New York, 2009); and "Teaching Modern Russian History in European and Global Context" in NewsNet: News of the American Association for the advancement of Slavic Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, March 2009. David Macleod (Central Michigan University) has a chapter in a new edited collection: “Original Intent: Establishing the Creed and Control of Boy Scouting in the United States” in Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century, ed. Nelson R. Block and Tammy M. Proctor (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). It includes fourteen articles on the history of Scouting and Girl Guiding, mainly in Britain, its empire and commonwealth, and the United States. The range is quite broad, tracing the history of ways in which Scouting crossed borders of nationality, culture, religion, and gender. Ellen Boucher (Furman University) has an article coming out in the October issue of the Journal of British Studies titled "The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare, and the Interwar Extension of Child Emigration to Southern Rhodesia." Conference Presentations Luke Springman (Bloomsburg University) delivered the paper in German, taking a new research direction from his 2007 book, Carpe Mundum: German Youth Culture of the Weimarer Republic. The title of the paper was "Die Vermarktung des “dunklen Kontinents” im Afrikabild der Kinder‐ und Jugendliteratur der Weimarer Republik", translated as "Marketing the "Dark Continent" in Images of Africa in Children's Literature of the Weimar Republic". It dealt with the colonial consciousness of the time in Germany, after Germany had lost all its colonies after WWI. There was a campaign to have Germans emigrate to Africa. Almost no research exists in History or in literary studies about colonial movements of this period, even though it had a significant presence in the popular culture (and in politics). News from the Field: 48 News Flash Jeremy Trevelyan Burman (York University) reports that the American Psychological Association has cut its contribution to the funding for the Archives of the History of American Psychology from $60,000 per year to $30,000 per year (in 2009) and $20,000 per year (in 2010 and thereafter). “This will impact all those scholars who rely on AHAP for archival materials, especially those interested in the overlap between the history of minors and the history of psychology.” There are more details here: http://ahp.apps01.yorku.ca/?p=746 Museums / Exhibitions / Archives Andrea Pasztor (Janus Pannonius Museum) has sent word of a school history database and virtual photo album of Pecs, Hungary: http://emu.jpm.hu/iskola/. Marjory O'Toole (Little Compton Historical Society) announces an exhibition: Time to Play traces the history of children's play in Little Compton, RI from the 1600s to the present day with a special emphasis on 1900 to 1950. “We have objects, stories and images on display, exhibit panels and an 80 page exhibit pamphlet with some nice memoires etc. We picked a boy and girl from each decade 1900‐1950 and highlighted them in the exhibit with a display of their childhood belongings, photographs and memories.” For more information, please go to: http://www.littlecompton.org/. a Upcoming Events From Shawn Casey (Ohio State University): LiteracyStudies@OSU has announced its 2009‐2010 schedule of public lectures. October 15, 2009: Fall Lecture David Nord, Journalism and History, Indiana University, will give a talk entitled “Tracking the Readers of Journalism: Elusive Evidence of Ephemeral Reading” that draws on research in the history of reading and readers of American journalism from the 1730s to the 1910s. Nord's research interests lie in the history of American publishing, especially journalism history and the history of the religious press. His recent books include Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspaper and Their Readers (University of Illinois Press, 2001). He has been involved for many years with the Center for the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. http://journalism.indiana.edu/about‐us/faculty‐ staff/bio/?person=164 January 28, 2010 The Ohio State University Lecture in Literacy Studies Wendy Griswold, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, will present a lecture based on her new book, Regionalism and The Reading Class , and related research. Griswold’s research and teaching interests include cultural sociology; sociological approaches to literature, art and religion; 49 regionalism, urban representations, and the culture of place; the Federal Writers’ Project; and comparative studies of reading practices. Her recent books include Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (Princeton UP, 2000), Cultures and Societies in a Changing World 3rd ed. (Pine Forge 2008), and Regionalism and the Reading Class (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She directs the Culture and Society Workshop at the Alice Berline Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. http://www.sociology.northwestern.edu/faculty/griswold/home.html May 6, 2010: Spring Lecture Teresa McCarty, Alice Wiley Snell Professor of Education Policy Studies and Professor of Applied Linguistics, Arizona State University will give a talk that draws from her work in language policy, ethnography, and also new work on “biographies of language revitalization.” An educational anthropologist, McCarty’s research and teaching focus on indigenous/language minority education, language education planning and policy, critical literacy studies, and ethnographic methods in education. Her recent books include Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling (Erlbaum, 2005), A Place To Be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self‐Determination in Indigenous Schooling (Erlbaum, 2002), One Voice, Many Voices ‐ Recreating Indigenous Language Communities (with O. Zepeda, Center for Indian Education, 2006), and To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (with K. T. Lomawaima, Teachers College Press, 2006). ~~~ New Publication, The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion Richard A. Shweder, Editor in Chief Edited by Thomas R. Bidell, Anne C. Dailey, Suzanne D. Dixon, Peggy J. Miller, and John Modell The University of Chicago Press announces publication of The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion. The Child is a one‐volume encyclopedia that brings together for both parents and professionals the best contemporary scholarship on children and childhood from a variety of disciplines. It covers all areas of child‐related study, from pediatrics, child development, and psychology to law, public policy, education, history, religion, sociology, and anthropology. While presenting certain universal facts about children’s development from birth through adolescence, the entries also address the many worlds of childhood both within the United States and around the globe. They consider the ways in which race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and cultural traditions of child rearing can affect children’s experiences of physical and mental health, education, and family. Alongside the topical entries, The Child includes more than forty “Imagining Each Other” essays, which focus on the particular experiences of children in different cultures. In 50 “Work before Play for Yucatec Maya Children,” for example, readers learn of the work responsibilities of some modern‐day Mexican children, while in “A Hindu Brahman Boy Is Born Again,” they witness a coming‐of‐age ritual in contemporary India. The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion is available in both print and electronic editions Hardcover: $75.00/£51.50 ISBN‐13: 978‐0‐226‐47539‐4 For more information visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=400 991 Opportunities: Calls for Papers and Journal Submissions Exploring Childhood Studies, A Graduate Student Conference The Department of Childhood Studies Graduate Student Organization at Rutgers University, Camden, invites submissions for paper presentations for their first formal graduate student conference to be held April 9, 2010 on the Camden, NJ campus. Graduate students from all disciplines who are engaged in research relating to children and childhood are encouraged to submit proposals. The field of childhood studies engages in both theoretical and empirical study of children and childhood within historical, contemporary, interdisciplinary, multi‐cultural, state, national, and global contexts. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is one of its greatest strengths and the core of its remarkable potential for scholarly advancement, but also leaves the field open for exploration and interrogation, and its borders difficult, if not impossible, to define. The Exploring Childhood Studies conference proposes defining Childhood Studies by "doing" childhood studies. We seek papers that investigate childhood as a construct, children as a category, or the child as a real living human as their central focus, providing critical thought and insight while locating them in different contexts, fields, and ideologies. We invite proposals from all disciplines, including education, literature, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, political science, history, criminology, philosophy, medicine, religion, film studies, and cultural studies as well as multi‐ disciplinary scholarly work. The range of possible topics includes: war, health, rights, gender, poverty, wealth, policy, ethics, popular culture, globalization, school, family, home, sexuality, community, social constructions, theorizations and representations of children and childhood in all modes of fiction. 51 Submission: 250‐word abstract plus cover letter with name, current level of graduate study, affiliated university, and email address tom_modica@vfcc.edu. Include the words "conference abstract" in subject line, and include name on the cover letter only. Deadline: October 31, 2009. Accepted presenters will receive notification by January 10, 2010. Contact Patrick Cox at ptcox@camden.rutgers.edu or Anandini Dar at anandini@camden.rutgers.edu if you have questions about the conference, or visit http://crab.rutgers.edu/~bowman/conference/ Visit the Department of Childhood Studies here: http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/ ~~~ Call for submissions to the premier issue of Red Feather Journal, an online, international, interdisciplinary journal of children's media culture. The first issue will be published February 1, 2010. Red Feather Journal facilitates an international dialogue among scholars and professionals of the intersections between the child image and the conception of childhood, children's material culture, children and politics, the child body, and any other conceptions of the child within local, national, and global contexts. The journal invites critical and/or theoretical examination of the child image to further our understanding of the consumption, circulation, and representation of the child throughout the world's visual mediums. The journal welcomes submissions that examine a broad range of medias: children's film, Hollywood film, international film, Television, the Internet, print resources, art, or any other visual medium. Some sample topics include, but are certainly not limited to: studies of images of children of color; child as commodity; images of children in Africa, Asia, Middle East, South America, etc.; political uses of the child image; children in film; children in advertising; visual adaptations of children's literary works; child welfare images; children and war; or any other critical examination of the child image in a variety of visual mediums. Red Feather Journal is published twice a year, in February and September, and adheres to the MLA citation system. Authors are welcome to submit articles in other citations systems, with the understanding that, upon acceptance, conversion to MLA is a condition of publication. Interested contributor's please submit the paper, an abstract, and a brief biography as attachments in Word to debbieo@okstate.edu Deadline for submissions for the premier issue is December 15th 2009. ~~~ 52 Sixth Galway Conference on Colonialism: EDUCATION and EMPIRE 24‐26 June 2010 The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to explore the role of education in shaping, promoting, and challenging imperial and colonial ideologies, institutions and processes throughout the modern world. We invite papers that address the following themes: the role of educational institutions, ranging from primary schools to institutions of higher education such as universities, missionary colleges, engineering and medical schools, and so on, in shaping imperial, colonial and global processes; the relationship between imperialism, colonialism and the development of modern knowledge systems, including new disciplines and new techniques ofrule, particularly in areas such as science; the development of curriculum innovation to meet the needs of empire; education about imperial history (during and after empire); education and imperial and (post‐)colonial models of childhood; education and the creation of professional diasporas; types and patterns of knowledge transfer within the framework of empire, including publications and broadcasting relating to education, science, technology, health and government, both between metropoles and colonies and within and between colonies; the insecurities or failures of imperial and colonial educational and knowledge practices, as well as of resistances to these practices; transitions in educational practice, either from pre‐colonial to colonial or colonial to post‐colonial eras. Since this conference is being in part funded through a grant provided by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences to an inter‐university group to explore the relationship between empire and higher education in Ireland, papers are especially invited for a strand exploring the particularity of Irish institutions of higher education in shaping the above processes, and of the role of higher education in shaping Ireland's ambiguous coloniality. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Please submit an abstract, of not more than 300 words, to Fiona Bateman and Muireann O'Cinneide at www.conference.ie/ before 31 January 2010. ~~~ Call for Papers: Tenth Annual Country School Association of America Conference June 21‐23, 2010 Chickasha, Oklahoma Blazing the Trail: Education Among the Earliest Americans The 2010 CSAA Conference will take place on the campus of The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma on June 21‐22 with an optional bus tour to several one‐room schools in the Oklahoma City area on June 23. Visit a fully restored African American one room school in Chickasha, Oklahoma. You are cordially invited to participate in and/or lead a panel discussion, present a research paper, conduct a workshop, present a play, organize a symposium, or give a demonstration on country schooling. Decide 53 which topic most interests you and submit a brief proposal. The following topics may spark your creativity. Preservation: Envisioning the restored country school, raising money, recruiting and managing volunteers, promoting the project, collecting artifacts, preserving a restored school, preparing for and/or recovering from a natural disaster, etc. Research: Native American and African American one‐room schooling, teachers and the rural community, the process of digging up the history of a school, oral history‐making, the architectural significance of one‐room schools, the supervision of one‐room schools, teacher training for one‐room schoolteachers, the consolidation movement, educational methods (maps, music education, nature study, reading charts), etc. Programs: Stories, camp, holiday celebrations, music schools, musical instruments, dramatic reenactment or living history programs, etc. Videotapes and other resources are welcome. Memory Makers: Come and share your memories, photographs, artifacts, books, facts and fiction related to country schooling, etc. Presentations related to the conference theme will be noted in the program. Proposal Formats Proposals should not exceed three double‐spaced, printed pages. Add a cover sheet with title of the proposal, names and affiliations (if any) of participants, and the address, email address, and phone number of each participant. If you want to discuss your topic before submitting a proposal, contact CSAA Executive Director Lucy Townsend (815‐753‐ 1236 or ltownsend@niu.edu). Proposals are due March 1, 2010. E‐mail your cover sheet & proposal to: Loretta Jackson lyjackson1@suddenlink.net and Richard Lewis richard.lewis@nasa.gov Or send 2 copies of your proposal and two self‐ addressed, stamped envelopes to Loretta Jackson, P.O. Box 2044, Chickasha, OK 73023. For updates on the conference, visit our website at: www.countryschoolassociation.org Fellowship Opportunity Hench Post‐Dissertation Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society Proposals due: Oct. 15, 2009 The American Antiquarian Society has premier collections of American children's books, textbooks, periodicals, and children's diaries issued or created between the 17th through late nineteenth centuries. Scholars who are no more than three years beyond receipt of the doctorate are invited to apply for the Hench Post‐Dissertation Fellowship, a year‐long residential fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. The purpose of the post‐dissertation fellowship is to 54 provide the recipient with time and resources to extend research and/or to revise the dissertation for publication. Any topic relevant to the Society's library collections and programmatic scope, and coming from any field or disciplinary background, is eligible. AAS collections focus on all aspects of American history, literature, and culture from contact to 1876, and provide rich source material for projects across the spectrum of early American studies. The Society welcomes applications from those who have advance book contracts, as well as those who have not yet made contact with a publisher. The twelve‐month stipend for this fellowship is $35,000. The Hench Post‐Dissertation Fellow will be selected on the basis of the applicant's scholarly qualifications, the appropriateness of the project to the Society's collections and interests, and, above all, the likelihood that the revised dissertation will make a highly significant book. Further information about the fellowship, along with application materials, is available on the AAS website, at http://www.americanantiquarian.org/post‐diss.htm. Any questions about the fellowship may be directed to Paul Erickson, Director of Academic Programs at AAS, at perickson@mwa.org The deadline for applications for a Hench Post‐Dissertation Fellowship to be held during the 2010‐2011 academic year is October 15, 2009. Paul J. Erickson Laura Wasowicz Director of Academic Programs Curator of Children's Literature American Antiquarian Society American Antiquarian Society 508‐471‐2158 lwasowicz@mwa.org http://www.americanantiquarian.org ~~~ Recently Completed Dissertations and their Abstracts . . . Colleen Vasconsellos, ed. "’And a child shall lead the way:’ Children's participation in the Jackson, Mississippi, black freedom struggle, 1946—1970,” by Daphne Rochelle Chamberlain, Ph.D., The University of Mississippi, 2009. Guided by common ideals, diverse groups of people and organizations contributed to the success of the modern civil rights movement. African Americans' desire for social, economic, and political equality spawned a massive freedom campaign in the American South. Grassroots activists challenged the system in what African Americans considered the most segregated and most repressive state in the country, initiating the Mississippi 55 movement. Children were at the center of this movement. This dissertation examines the roles of youth as political activists in the Jackson, Mississippi, struggle for civil rights. Although children played a pivotal role in the movement, scholars have marginalized their participation. This dissertation offers a narrative account of youth participation in Jackson, while providing a historical context for their activism. Before the Birmingham "Children's Crusade" in May 1963, before the crisis in Little Rock at Central High School in September 1957, and before the landmark Brown decision in May 1954, black youths in Jackson had already taken the initiative to challenge the system of Jim Crow. Youth activism during the pre‐movement years influenced the development of an organizing tradition in Jackson, which ultimately helped sustain the Mississippi movement. This study treats a youth‐led 1946 bus boycott in Jackson as a precursor movement, highlighting youth leadership in the absence of a significant organizing tradition. Although youth involvement declined in the 1950s, the local branch of the NAACP sought to mobilize children for community activism by forming a Youth Council. In the early 1960s, black children further organized and participated in the first major civil rights demonstrations in Jackson. Even as ideals shifted from nonviolent direct action to militancy, Jackson youths remained politically active until 1970, when the public schools were finally desegregated. Using oral testimonies, manuscripts, video footage, primary, and secondary sources, this dissertation reveals the significant role of children in the Jackson movement. As successful pioneers in 1946 and politically conscious activists in subsequent years, these youths worked to effect positive change for more than two decades. Their sustained involvement demonstrated that children could lead the way to social progress. “Enslaved children in urban and rural Bahia, Brazil, 1822‐1888,” by Charles A. Wash, Jr., Ph.D., Howard University, 2008. The examination of enslaved children in Brazil offers a relatively new and exciting aspect of the study of slavery in the Americas. It provides us with a more complete dimension of the struggle to obtain, exercise and maintain the various forms and niches of relative freedom the enslaved sought and also found, including childrearing and the formation of families. This dissertation posits that enslaved children during the nineteenth century played a very important role in the overall system of slave production in both the rural and urban environs in the city of São Salvador da Bahia in Northeastern Brazil during the period between 1822 and 1888. It attempts to qualify the role of children as workers for the purposes of discipline, socialization and control, as opposed to only producers for the sake of quantifiable profits and returns. It also seeks to outline the everyday lives of children as enslaved people, as well as the issues they faced such as that of diet, disease and even mental health. Included in this 56 analysis is their relationship to the broader enslaved community in terms of the learning, creation and transference of a new Brazilian culture. “Mexican Room: Public schooling and the children of Mexican railroad workers in Fort Madison, Iowa, 1923‐1930,” by Teresa Garcia, Ph.D., The University of Iowa, 2008 . This study examines public schooling and the educational experience of the children of a colonia, or settlement, of Mexican railroad workers and their families at Fort Madison, Iowa. It centers on the years from 1923, when the local district initiated a classroom for Mexican children at Richardson School, until 1930, when officials approved the construction of a detached facility that would ultimately house the classroom. Two questions are considered. First, why did the Fort Madison School District create and maintain a separate classroom for the children of the Mexican railroad laborers during the 1920s? Second, what function did it serve in the lives of students, their families or the broader community? Research for the project entailed the examination and analysis of a wide range of primary sources such as school, church and government records, newspapers and oral history interviews. This study concludes that the negative perceptions, fears and suspicion of Mexicans advanced by government, business, social and civic authorities at the turn of the 20 th century, manifested locally in the decision by school officials far from the U.S.‐Mexico border region to create a separate classroom for Mexican children in Fort Madison, a program the district maintained for more than 30 years. While some students indicate they benefited from instruction offered in the room, it appears the class did not provide Mexican pupils a real opportunity and also seemed to hinder their integration into the school community. A system of in‐class promotions and inconsistent decision‐making regarding the transfer of pupils out of the classroom, for instance, delayed many students' introduction to the broader school environment, as well as their interaction with non‐Mexican schoolmates and the development of language skills necessary to navigate the institution. The existence of the Mexican Room, along with restrictions Mexican students experienced after they left the class reflected broader community relations that supported the social isolation and vocational stratification of Mexican residents. The eventual success of some Mexican Room pupils in graduating from high school may well have contributed to ambivalence about the purpose and success of the program among former students and community members alike. “Reconstruction through the child: English modernism and the welfare state,” by Roy Kozlovsky, Ph.D., Princeton University, 2008 . This dissertation explores the institutionalization of modern architecture in England during 1935‐1955. It focuses on a selected group of buildings and environments that were designed for children, such as playgrounds, schools, community centers and neighbourhood units, as well as discussions of urbanism at C.I.A.M. By examining the architecture of childhood and the architects' discourses of children, it points to a shift in 57 the concept of functionalism in postwar English modernism from objective to subjective definitions of human "needs" as part of the Welfare State's new models of power and conception of citizenship. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that children were the ideal subjects of postwar functional architecture, precisely because of their status as incomplete citizens who by the nature of their immaturity are constituted as in need of observation, guidance, and care. Chapter one analyzes the architecture of the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham in order to relate the emergence of functional architecture in England to a new model of power designed to alter the everyday habits and notions of the self of the population. Chapter two historicizes the English appropriation of the adventure playground in the context of postwar reconstruction and slum rehabilitation policies. It frames the rise of the theme of play in architectural discourse in the psychologization of citizenship as a response to the failure of liberal citizenship during the interwar period. Chapter three examines the architecture of the postwar school. It links the attempt to redefine architectural practice in terms of an environmental science to educational techniques that incited and observed the interaction of children with their surroundings as a way of modulating their physical and mental growth. Chapter Four examines Team 10's employment of photographs of children's urban play in C.I.A.M. presentations. It links the postwar critique of the Functional City to a sociological discourse of urban subjectivity that was appropriated by the Welfare State for social reconstruction “Contested innocence: Images of the child in the Cold War,” by Margaret Elizabeth Peacock, Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 2008. This dissertation examines the image of the child as it appeared in the propaganda and public rhetoric of the Cold War from approximately 1950 to 1968. It focuses on how American and Soviet politicians, propagandists, and critics depicted children in film, television, radio, and print. It argues that these groups constructed a new lexicon of childhood images to meet the unique challenges of the Cold War. They portrayed the young as facing new threats both inside and outside their borders, while simultaneously envisioning their children as mobilized in novel ways to defend themselves and their countries from infiltration and attack. These new images of the next generation performed a number of important functions in conceptualizing what was at stake in the Cold War and what needed to be done to win it. Politicians, propagandists, and individuals in the Soviet Union and the United States used images of endangered and mobilized children in order to construct a particular vision of the Cold War that could support their political and ideological agendas, including the enforcement of order in the private sphere, the construction of domestic and international legitimacy, and the mobilization of populations at home and abroad. At the same time, these images were open to contestation by dissenting groups on both sides of the Iron Curtain who refashioned the child's image in order to contest their governments' policies and the Cold War consensus. 58 What these images looked like in Soviet and American domestic and international discourse, why propagandists and dissent movements used these images to promote their policies at home and abroad, and what visions of the Cold War they created are the subjects of this dissertation. This project argues that the domestic demands of the Cold War altered American and Soviet visions of childhood. It is common wisdom that the 1950s and 60s was a period when child rearing practices and ideas about children were changing. This dissertation supports current arguments that American and Soviet parents sought more permissive approaches in raising children who they perceived as innocent and in need of protection. Yet it also finds substantial documentation showing that American and Soviet citizens embraced a new vision of idealized youth that was not innocent, but instead was mobilized for a war that had no foreseeable end. In the United States, children became participants in defending the home and the country from communist infiltration. In the Soviet Union, the state created a new vision of idealized youth that could be seen actively working towards a Soviet‐led peace around the world. By using the child's image as a category for analysis, this project also provides a window into how the Cold War was conceptualized by politicians, propagandists, and private citizens in the Soviet Union and the United States. In contrast to current scholarship, this dissertation argues that the Soviet state worked hard to create a popular vision of the Cold War that was significantly different from the "Great Fear" that dominated American culture in the 1950s and 60s. While in the United States, the conflict was portrayed as a defensive struggle against outside invasion, in official Soviet rhetoric it was presented as an active, international crusade for peace. As the 1960s progressed, and as the official rhetoric of the state came under increasing criticism, the rigid sets of categories surrounding the figuration of the Cold War child that had been established in the 1950s began to break down. While Soviet filmmakers during the Thaw created images of youth that appeared abandoned and traumatized by the world around them, anti‐nuclear activists took to the streets with their children in tow in order to contest the state's professed ability to protect their young. In the late 1960s, both the Soviet Union and the United States struggled to contain rising domestic unrest, and took the first steps in moving towards détente. As a consequence, the struggle between East and West moved to the post‐colonial world, where again, the image of the child played a vital role in articulating and justifying policy. Visual and rhetorical images like that of the child served as cultural currency for creating and undermining conceptual boundaries in the Cold War. The current prevalence of childhood images in the daily construction and contestation of public opinion are the legacies of this era. “Creating consumers and protecting children: Radio, early television and the American child, 1930‐1960,” by Amanda Lynn Bruce, Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2008. 59 This dissertation examines the cultural production of children's radio and television programming, as well as social responses to broadcasters' practices in the United States between 1930 and 1960. Commercial broadcasters, advertisers, women's organizations, listener groups, and child experts vied with one another to shape children's radio and television programming during this seminal period of American broadcasting. These groups debated radio and television's effect on children, and advocated different goals for children's programming, based upon conflicting views about children. Broadcasters and advertisers had the upper hand in this cultural contest, and successfully utilized radio and television to socialize children as consumers. However, national women's organizations, such as the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, and the National Association for Better Radio and Television, a listener group, criticized the crime‐laden nature of many children's programs. Women's organizations largely supported children's introduction to consumer culture, but argued that broadcasters should protect children from violent content and offer more educational and uplifting fare. Child experts, including the parent educators of the Child Study Association, stressed children's psychological resilience, and argued that children's programs need not always shield children, but should instead introduce them to issues like war, as well as racial, ethnic and religious intolerance. This study examines the gender tensions that influenced women's organizations' reform strategies, and largely divided child experts and women's organizations. The dissertation argues that this division, coupled with a lack of funding, stymied reformers' efforts to significantly change children's programming. However, women's organizations and librarians enjoyed some success at the local level, where they cooperated to produce educational radio and television programs for children. Moreover, the dissertation illuminates the formation of a national children's culture, the growing influence of child experts on the construction of childhood, and parental attempts to impact children's media production. “The war inside: Child psychoanalysis and remaking the self in Britain, 1930‐1960,” by Michal Shapira, Ph.D., Rutgers The State University of New Jersey ‐ New Brunswick, 2008. My research concerns the socio‐cultural effects of war and the development of expert culture in the twentieth century. My dissertation studies this problem by exploring the impact of the Second World War on the conceptualization and practice of selfhood in Britain. The war elevated psychoanalysis to a position not enjoyed anywhere else in the world. Britain was a secure destination for psychoanalysts fleeing Nazi persecution and a cosmopolitan laboratory for the development of new theories on the far‐reaching meanings of total war. Under the shock of bombing and evacuation, émigré analysts like Anna Freud and Melanie Klein and native analysts like John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott were called upon to help treat men, women, and especially children of diverse social backgrounds. These children were key. On the one hand, they came to be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection; on the other hand, as anxious, aggressive 60 subjects requiring control. This moment turned out to be a decisive one both for the history of psychoanalysis and for expectations for gender roles, citizenship, and the welfare state. My research has made extensive use of the unexplored archives of British psychoanalysts, nurseries, women's groups, clinics, courts, government committees, and the BBC to trace the war's unknown intellectual heritage. It shows the importance of thinking about ideas on the self in their historical contexts and looking at experts' practice alongside its social effects. Psychoanalytic experts, my work argues, had a profound role in making the understanding of children and the mother‐child relationship key to the successful creation of democratic citizenry. The study shows the extent to which these experts informed understandings not only of individuals, but also of broader political questions in the age of mass violence. By demonstrating a link between a real ' war outside ' and an emotional ' war inside ' they contributed to an increase in state responsibility for citizens' mental health. Historians have seldom looked at psychoanalysts other than Sigmund Freud as social actors in their cultures, leaving the histories of psychoanalytic movements' influence on European societies understudied. My research traces the work of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud to the horrors of total war and explores its decisive postwar impact on both citizens and state officials. It revises the characteristic view of psychoanalysis as an elite discipline confined to the clinic, and adds to interdisciplinary and comparative studies of history, gender, human sciences, war, and social democracy. “Transitioning: The history of childbirth in Puerto Rico, 1948‐1990s,” by Isabel M. Cordova, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2008. This dissertation documents and analyzes the dramatic transformations in birthing practices that accompanied broader economic, political and cultural shifts in Puerto Rico during the latter half of the twentieth century. Birthing changed from being a home‐ based event assisted by midwives to a hospital‐based procedure, attended by medical experts, in fewer than 20 years. In 1950 the number of registered midwives was double that of registered doctors and they attended well over half of all deliveries. The Puerto Rican government grew after the 1950s and established itself as a colonial welfare system looking to uplift and remake itself following an industrial model, informed by rational, scientific planning, which ideally included even the most remote sectors of the island. These forces coalesced with the development of medical education, new medical technologies, significant improvements in the overall quality of life on the island, the urbanization of Puerto Rico, and a new faith in science, and moved labor and deliveries into the hospital while redefining childbirth and its practice altogether. I argue that as families ventured out of their more isolated, home‐based daily lives to access basic needs, became active in public, urbanized spaces, and bought into a system based on colonial state panning, led by scientifically trained experts and organized by bureaucratic institutions, they also restructured their birthing practices. Midwives accepted these changes. They quietly stepped aside as the next generation delivered their babies in hospitals. Doctors came to hold the authoritative knowledge about the 61 female body and its path towards birthing children and by the late 1970s midwifery disappeared. By the 1980s and 1990s, as a technocratic model of birth predominated obstetrics in Puerto Rico and cesarean rates skyrocketed, five newly trained midwives began delivering babies at home once again. The practice of these new midwives was the only birthing alternative to medicalized childbirth available to women on the island after the 1980s. “The children of Catalhoyuk: Examining the child's role in Neolithic ritual life through burials, wall art, and material culture,” by Sharon Kay Moses, Ph.D., Cornell University, 2009. This dissertation examines the role of children in sacred symbolism and ritual practices at Çatalhöyük during the Anatolian Neolithic. By analyzing differential treatment of child versus adult burials, considering multivocal interpretations of material culture based upon contextual deposition and wall art defining the house with sacred narrative, this thesis will demonstrate that children held a special place in the negotiation of sacred spaces and rituals. This analysis incorporates ethnographic analogy rather than presenting a purely statistical study. Native American views regarding the spiritual relationship between human beings and their environment were applied in the interpretational process in order to provide an alternative, non‐Western perspective to this prehistoric, pre‐literate society. Symbolism, ritual and visual mnemonic devices were treated as part of the religious language of the site and ultimately, as a means of insight into the daily world of children. “The banning of international adoption in Romania: Reasons, meaning, and implications for child care and protection,” by Carolyn Lisa Norris, Ed.D., Boston University, 2009. After the 1989 fall of Communism in Romania, the world became aware of the plight of the country's thousands of institutionalized children, and an international adoption system saw the adoption of many of these children to other countries. Thousands of children, however, remained in institutions as the newly Democratic Romania struggled with the legacy of its Communist era. During the process of applying to join the European Union, Romania in 2000 initiated the eventual banning of international adoption. Using a qualitative approach that relies on interviews, document review, and observation, this study finds both positive and negative interpretations of the ban, with subjects pointing to Romania's desire to join the EU as a supposed major factor in its decision to ban international adoption. The implications of the ban include the emergence of a foster care system and domestic adoption, efforts to reunify families and to prevent the abandonment, relinquishment, and removal of children from their biological families, and the development of alternative forms of care in tandem with a new deinstitutionalization initiative “Children of the Mexican Miracle: Childhood and modernity in Mexico City, 1940‐ 1968,” by Eileen Mary Ford, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign, 2008. 62 During the post‐1940 period, a public discourse focusing on the well‐being and protection of children emerged in Mexico within a complex web of relations between the state, the church, and civil society. Through an analysis of state‐designed educational programs, church programs, and cultural productions made for children, I demonstrate that various sectors of society recognized the importance of children to the future of the nation. The presence of children and discussions of childhood in print media attest to the widespread belief that children needed and deserved a period of innocence and protection, despite the differing socioeconomic circumstances in which children lived. The circulation of discourses about childhood facilitated social cohesion in the postrevolutionary decades. My analysis of civil society, church‐state relations, and popular culture through the lens of childhood reveals the delicate balance of state power. During the era labeled the "Mexican Miracle," the child population grew each decade, in sheer numbers and as a percentage of the total urban population. The city was affected by the increasingly large presence of children and the urban milieu informed the generation of children raised in the decades leading up to the important watershed moment of 1968. State education‐‐through the kindergarten movement and its social outreach programs, new school construction campaigns, and the development of standardized obligatory textbooks‐‐increased the presence and power of the Mexican state. Yet, the state was forced to share power with the church and with the influence of various domestic and foreign cultural productions for children. The church reached children through lay organizations and children's magazines as it adapted to the increasing presence of secular culture. Mass entertainment designed specifically for children, like Walt Disney films and Cri‐Cri radio broadcasts, educated children and, in the process, expanded the definition of childhood to include more sectors of society. Finally, print media provided a forum to discuss the rights and needs of children in Mexican society. This discourse of childhood allowed room for dissent and for critiques of the Mexican state and, by extension, the ruling party. Dissertations in Progress Dissertator: Sheila Marie Aird, Howard University Dissertation title: “The Forgotten Ones: Enslaved Children and the Formation of a Labor Force in the British West Indies” Advisor: Selwyn H. H. Carrington Dissertator: Amanda Brian, University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign Dissertation title: “Bonds of Empire: Growing Children in the Kaiserreich, 1871‐1918” Advisor: Peter Fritzsche Dissertator: Kathryn Bridge, Victoria University Dissertation title: “A Whole New Voice: The Pioneer Child in Western Canada, 1849‐ 63 1920” Advisor: Lynne L. Marks Dissertator: Tarah Brookfield, York University Dissertation title: “'Our Deepest Concern Is for the Safety of our Children and Their Children': Maternal Solutions to Cold War Fears in Canada and Abroad, 1950‐80” Advisor: Kathryn McPherson Dissertator: Michael Carriere, University of Chicago Dissertation title: “'I Now Pronounce You Children of a New Age': Columbia University, Democracy, and Economy in New York City, 1960‐98” Advisor: Neil Harris Dissertator: Jessa Chupik, McMaster University Dissertation title: “The Institutional Confinement of 'Idiot' Children in 20th‐Century Canada: The Case of the Orillia Asylum, 1900‐35” Advisor: Kenneth Cruikshank Dissertator: Caroline Collinson, The Ohio State University Dissertation title: “'The Littlest Immigrants': Adoption, Migration, and Exploitation of Border Crossing Children in the Americas” Advisor: Judy Tzu‐chun Wu Dissertator: Julie Kay De Graffenried, University of Texas‐Austin Dissertation title: “Becoming the Vanguard: Children, the Young Pioneers, and the Soviet State in the Great Patriotic War” Advisor: Charters Wynn Dissertator: Jia‐Chen Fu, Yale University Dissertation title: “Society's Laboratories: Mapping Children's Health in Republican China, 1928‐49” Advisor: Jonathan D. Spence Dissertator: Diana Georgescu, University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign Dissertation title: “'Ceausescu’s Children': Ideological Scripts and Remembered Experiences of Childhood in Socialist Romania, 1965‐89” Advisor: Maria Todorova Dissertator: Kevin L. Gooding, Purdue University Dissertation title: “For the Children’s Souls: Interdenominational Competition and the Religious Education of Children in Indiana, 1801‐50” Advisor: Franklin T. Lambert 64 Dissertator: David Greenspoon, Pennsylvania State University Dissertation title: “Children's Mite: Juvenile Philanthropy in America, 1815‐65” Advisor: Lori D. Ginzberg Dissertator: Justus G. Hartzok, University of Iowa Dissertation title: “Children of Chapaev: The Russian Civil War Cult and the Creation of Soviet Identity, 1918‐82” Advisor: Paula Michaels Dissertator: Maria Alexandria Kane, College of William and Mary Dissertation title: “Training Up Children: Gender, Sexuality, and Race among Evangelical Youth, 1970‐2000” Advisor: Maureen Fitzgerald Dissertator: Daniel Lee, University of California, Berkeley Dissertation title: “Children of African American Soldiers and German Women Post‐ World War II” Advisor: None given Dissertator: Karen Lucas, University of California, Berkeley Dissertation title: “The Immigration of Unaccompanied Children to the U.S. between the End of the Civil War and the Immigration Restrictions of 1924 and 1925” Advisor: None given Dissertator: Helen E. McLure, Southern Methodist University Dissertation title: “'I Suppose You Think Strange the Murder of Women and Children': White‐Capping and Lynching in the American West, 1870‐1930” Advisor: Sherry L. Smith Dissertator: Leslie Miller, University of Georgia Dissertation title: “The Power of the Privileged: The Model of the White Middle Class Family and the Education of American Children, 1820–1920” Advisor: Bryant Simon Dissertator: Valerie H. Minnett, Carleton University Dissertation title: “The Prescription and the Cure: Children’s Bodies and Ideal Health in Canada, 1908‐50” Advisor: James Opp Dissertator: Joselyn C. Morley, Carleton University Dissertation title: “'Mother Dead, Father Living, A Very Useless Man': Children in Need, the Protestant Orphan's Home, and Municipal Welfare in Ottawa, 1915‐29” Advisor: Dominique Marshall 65 Dissertator: Heidi Morrison, University of California, Santa Barbara Dissertation title: “The Development of the Concept of Childhood in Modern Egyptian History” Advisor: Nancy E. Gallagher Dissertator: Sarah Mulhall, The Johns Hopkins University Dissertation title: “Treated as a Child Should Be: New York City Orphan Asylums and 19th‐Century Conceptions of Childhood” Advisor: Toby Ditz Dissertator: Rachel Neiwert, University of Minnesota Dissertation title: “Savages or Citizens? Children, Education, and the British Empire, 1899‐1950” Advisor: Anna K. Clark Dissertator: Jessica Nelson, Purdue University Dissertation title: “Policy and Sentiment: Attitudes and Institutions Concerning Abandoned Children in 17th‐ and 18th‐Century France” Advisor: James Farr Dissertator: Wee Siang Margaret Ng, McGill University Dissertation title: “Childbirth in Late Imperial China: Medical Texts and Social Realities” Advisor: Robin D.S. Yates Dissertator: Claire O'Brien, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale Dissertation title: “'A Credit to Their Race': White Authors Look at African American Children, 1930‐60” Advisor: Kay J. Carr Dissertator: N'Jai‐An Patters, University of Minnesota Dissertation title: “Deviants and Dissidents: Ideologies of Children's Sexuality, Boston, 1972‐86” Advisors: Elaine Tyler May and Kevin P. Murphy Dissertator: Stacey Patton, Rutgers University Dissertation title: “Why Black Children Can't Grow Up: The Construction of Racial Childhood, 1896‐1940” Advisor: Virginia Yans Dissertator: Jessie B. Ramey, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertation title: “Contested Childhood: Black and White Orphans, Poor Families, and Institutional Childcare in Pittsburgh, 1877‐1939” Advisor: Tera Hunter 66 Dissertator: Johanna Ransmeier, Yale University Dissertation title: “'No Other Choice': The Sale of Women, Children, and Laborers in Late Qing and Republican China” Advisor: Jonathan D. Spence Dissertator: Andrew Ruis, University of Wisconsin, Madison Dissertation title: “School Foodservice, Children's Nutrition, and Public Health in 20th‐ Century America” Advisor: Judith W. Leavitt Dissertator: Carrie T. Schultz, Boston College Dissertation title: “'Let the Little Children Come to Me': Catholic Children's Moral Development in the United States, 1920‐65” Advisor: James O’Toole Dissertator: Jennifer Sovde, Indiana University Dissertation title: “Les enfants du paradis: Child Performers and Delinquency in the French Third Republic” Advisor: Carl Ipsen Dissertator: Laurel Spindel, University of Chicago Dissertation title: “From Institution to Community: Changing Child‐Caring Practices in Chicago, 1930‐Present” Advisor: William Novak Dissertator: Andrew K. Sturtevant, College of William and Mary Dissertation title: “Onontio's Children: French Detroit's Native Community” Advisor: James L Axtell Dissertator: Jennifer Tappan, Columbia University Dissertation title: “A Healthy Child Comes from a Healthy Mother: Mwanamugimu and Nutritional Science in Uganda, 1935‐73” Advisor: Marcia Wright Dissertator: Alexis Tinsley, Brandeis University Dissertation title: “Liberty’s Children: The Changing National Identity of Children in New England, 1700‐1827” Advisor: Jacqueline Jones Dissertator: Kelly Whitmer, British Columbia University Dissertation title: “The World of the Pietist Orphanage: Child‐Centered Philanthropy, Science, and Schooling, 1680‐1769” Advisor: Christopher R. Friedrichs 67 Dissertator: Cari Williams, Emory University Dissertation title: “A Nation with a Child's Face: Images of National Identity and Childhood in Brazil, 1922‐54” Advisor: Jeffrey Lesser Dissertator: Angela Thomas Winkler, University of Iowa Dissertation title: “Can German Youth Be Saved? Re‐Educating 'Hitler's Children' in British Occupied North Rhine‐Westphalia, 1945‐55” Advisor: Elizabeth D. Heineman Dissertator: Cassandra Woloschuk, Guelph University Dissertation title: “Cities of Children: Pediatric Medicine in Canada, 1950‐90” Advisor: Catherine Carstair Dissertator: Marjorie Wood, University of Chicago Dissertation title: “Children in the Clutches of Capital: Child Labor Reform, the Child Consumer, and the Moral Legitimation of American Consumer Culture, 1870‐1930” Advisor: Thomas C. Holt Dissertator: Mary Wunnenberg, University of Wisconsin‐Madison Dissertation title: “The Lost Children of Europe: Images of Child Shoah Survivors, 1944‐ 60” Advisor: Mary Louise Roberts 68 Contributors to the Bulletin #14 Jim Block teaches political theory at DePaul University. He is author of A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (2002); The Crucible of Consent: American Child‐Rearing and the Forging of a Liberal Society is forthcoming. Priscilla Ferguson Clement edits the conference reports for the SHCY Bulletin. She is the author of several books and articles on the history of American children in the 19th Century. She is retired from Penn State and is currently completing a novel in which the history of teens in the 1950s figures. She can be reached at p4c@psu.edu. Daniel T. Cook, is Director of the Graduate Studies Program, Associate Professor of Childhood Studies, adjunct in Sociology and an Associate in the Center for Children and Childhood Studies at Rutgers‐Camden. He serves as editor for Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research, has authored The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer and Children's Consumer Culture (2004), and edited Symbolic Childhood (2002) and The Lived Experiences of Public Consumption (2008). Rebecca de Schweinitz teaches history at Brigham Young University and is the author of If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality 2009). Stephen Gennaro edits the Bulletin’s pedagogy column is a cultural historian of media and youth at York University in Toronto. His main areas of interest is “perpetual adolescence” which examines the many ways that the culture industries market “youthfulness” to young and old consumers alike. Steve has over 10 years of teaching experience (teaching all levels from kindergarten to graduate students) and almost 15 years of experience in curriculum development. Steve's email: sgennaro@yorku.ca Harvey J. Graff directs the Program in Literacy Studies and is a member of the Departments of English and History, The Ohio State University. He is author of Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (l995); and editor of Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences, editor (1987) Julia Grant is professor of history and public affairs at James Madison College, Michigan State University. She is currently writing a book on the origins of the “boy problem” in urban America for Johns Hopkins University Press. Her email address is grant@msu.edu Patrizia Guarnieri is associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Florence, Italy, where she is also member of the Equal Opportunity Committee. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard; Nato‐CNR Fellow at The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London; Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, and lecturer in the Overseas Program of Stanford University. Her publications 69 include Bambini e salute in Europe 1750‐2000/Children and Health in Europe 1750‐2000 (ed., Polistampa 2004) and In scienza e coscienza. Maternità nascite e aborto (ed., Carocci 2009 ) Patrizia and Kathleen were the conference photographers. Contact her at patrizia.guarnieri@unifi.it Colin M. Heywood teaches history at the University of Nottingham. He is author of A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (2001) and Growing Up in France: From the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (2007). Kathleen W. Jones is associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Taming the Troublesome Child; American Families, Child Guidance, and the Limits of Psychiatric Authority (Harvard University Press, 1999). Her current project is a history of youth suicide in the United States, 1870 to the present. She also edits the SHCY Bulletin and can be reached at kjwj@vt.edu Julia Mickenberg is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States (Oxford UP, 2006), which won the Grace Abbott prize from SHCY for 2005‐2006. Steven Mintz, after many years as the Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston, became the Director of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center at Columbia University in 2008. The creator of the Digital History website, he is a member of Columbia's History Department and serves on the Board of Advisors of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Film & History, the History Teacher, the Journal of Family Life, and Slavery & Abolition. His 13 books include Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood and Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. He is currently writing a history of American adulthood. Email: sm3031@columbia.edu Tamara Myers teaches history at the University of British Columbia. Her book, Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869‐1945, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2006. Jennifer Ritterhouse teaches history at Utah State University. She is author of Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (2006) Deborah Valentine is a PhD Candidate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers‐Camden. She comes to Rutgers‐Camden from her recent position as Research Associate at St. Joseph University's Child Development Lab. Lynne Vallone, Professor of Childhood Studies, is Chair of the Childhood Studies Department at Rutgers‐Camden. She also teaches in the English Department and is an 70 Associate in the Center for Children and Childhood Studies. Her research and teaching interests include children’s literature and culture, the visual and material cultures of childhood and girlhood, and the Victorian Age. She is the author of Disciplines of Virtue: Girls‚ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1995) and Becoming Victoria (2001) and the co‐editor of The Norton Anthology of Children‚s Literature (2005). Colleen A. Vasconcellos is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of West Georgia. In addition to being co‐editor of the SHCY Newsletter, Colleen is also an editor of H‐Africa and H‐Caribbean and an Advisory Board member of H‐Childhood. Her forthcoming book with Jennifer Hillman Helgren entitled Girlhood: A Global History, is scheduled for publication in early 2010 with Rutgers University Press. Email: cvasconc@westga.edu Nancy Zey is Assistant Professor in History at Sam Houston State University. In May 2007, she completed her PhD in History from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently working on a manuscript looking at child welfare in early republic Natchez, Mississippi. She has recently authored two publications relating to the history of children: "Children of the Public: Poor and Orphaned Minors in the Southwest Borderlands," in James Marten, ed., Children and Youth in a New Nation, New York University Press (2009) and "'Every Thing but a Parent's Love': The Family Life of Orphan Asylums in the Lower Mississippi Valley," in Craig Thompson Friend and Anya Jabour, eds., Family Values in the Old South, University Press of Florida (2009). Contact Nancy at nancyzey@shsu.edu. Michael Zuckerman teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co‐editor with Willem Koops, of Beyond the Century of the Child: Cultural History and Developmental Psychology (2003 ) among other writings about American childhood. 71 72