NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

News from the Field, II

Compiled by David Pomfret, University of Hong Kong

This column provides a brief introduction to recent publications potentially of interest to scholars working on the History of Childhood and Youth.

Books

A newly-published memoir dealing with themes relevant to the study of the history of childhood and youth is Philippe Joseph Margosches, A World Apart: A Memoir of Jewish Life in Nineteenth Century Galicia (Academic Studies Press, 2007).

One new addition to scholarship dealing with the Second World War period include Luis Alvarez’s, The Power of Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II  (University of California Press, 2008).

Nadya Zimmerman’s Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on the Late Sixties San Francisco, has recently been published by University of Michigan Press (2008). Also working at the interstices of history and culture, Denis Denisoff has published The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture (Ashgate, 2008).

Turning to Europe, Anthony Fletcher’s, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood, 1600-1914 has recently been published with Yale University Press (2008), while Marta Gutman and Ning de Coninck-Smith have published an edited collection of essays developing from contributions to a conference held at the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, entitled, Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and the Material Culture of Children (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

New research dealing with Asia has been published, including, Jessie G. Lutz’s, Karl F.A. Gutzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827-1852 which covers children and the history of Christian missions, and the topic of Gutzlaff’s own youth in Germany. The book has been published with the William B. Eerdmans press (2008). China has attracted attention from other historians working on themes related to the history of childhood and youth, and an example of such recent work is Anna Saunders,’ Drowning Girls in China: Female Infanticide since 1650 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007).

On the early modern period readers may be interested in Gerd-Dietmar Peschel’s recent edited volume containing essays entitled, Beziehungsknoten: sieben Essays über Kindschaft und Liebschaft und Herrschaft in mittelalterlicher Literatur (Palm & Enke, 2007). P.J.P. Goldberg, meanwhile, has recently published Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages (McFarland and Company Inc., 2007).

Articles

Recent articles of note addressing the field itself include, Margaret L. King’s, “Concepts of Childhood: What We Know and Where We Might Go,” Renaissance Quarterly 60, 2 (2007): 371-407. This article reflects on the state of the field, with a special emphasis upon research in the pre-modern era. Patrick J. Ryan has published, “How New is the ‘New’ Social Study of Childhood?: The Myth of a Paradigm Shift,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, 4 (2008): 553-576.

On Europe recent work includes, Efi Avdela, “‘Corrupting and Uncontrollable Activities’: Moral Panic about Youth in Post-Civil-War Greece,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, 1 (2008): 25-44; Alan McDougall, “‘A Duty to Forget?’: The ‘Hitler Youth Generation’ and the Transition from Nazsm to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c.1945-9,” German History 26, 1 (2008): 24-46; Ludivine Bantigny, “Que jeunesse se passe? Discours publics et expertises sur les jeunes après mai 68” Vingtième Siècle 98 (2008): 7-18; John Komlos, “‘On English Pygmies and Giants’: The Physical Stature of English Youth in the Late 18^th and Early 19^th Centuries,” Research in Economic History 25 (2008): 149-168; Nelleke Bakker, “Sunshine as Medicine: Health Colonies and the Medicalisation of Childhood in the Netherlands, c.1900-1960,” History of Education 36, 6 (2007): 659-679; and Ian Grosvenor, “‘Seen But Not Heard,’: City Childhoods from the Past into the Present,” Paedogogica Historica 43, 3 (2007): 405-429.

On Europe in Asia a recent article of note is Henrietta Harrison, “‘A Penny for the Little Chinese’: The French Holy Childhood Association in China, 1843-1951,” American Historical Review 113, 1 (2008): 72-92.

Australian Feminist Studies 23:57 (2008) has rpublished a special issue on “The Child.”  Articles include Mary Spongberg, “The Child;” Barbara Baird, “Child Politics, Feminist Analyses;” R. Danielle Egan & Gail Hawkes, “Girls, Sexuality and the Strange Carnalities of Advertisements;” Abigail Bray, “The Question of Intolerance;” Kerry H. Robinson & Cristyn Davies, “She’s Kickin Ass, That’s What She’s Doing!” Steven Angelides, “Sexual Offenses against Children, and the Question of Judicial Gender Bias; Damien W. Riggs, “Towards a Non-Indifferent Account of Child Protection;” Rachel Kendrick, “We Can Change the Fact of This Future;” Jackie Cook & Wilson Main, “What is a Princess?” and Rosslyn Prosser, “Inventory of Childhood.”