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Society for the History of Children and Youth

Recently Completed Dissertations and Dissertations in Progress
Compiled by Colleen A. Vasconcellos

The dissertation citations and abstracts contained here are published with permission of Proquest Information and Learning.  Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.  Copies of dissertations may be obtained by addressing your request to ProQuest Information and Learning, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, P.O.Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346.  Phone: 1.800.5211.3042;  web page: http://www.proquest.com.products_umi/dissertations.individuals.shtml

Completed Dissertations

Rural residents of the United States aided two types of dependent children after the Civil War, those who came from rural areas and those who came from cities. Urban orphanages and the famed orphan trains have received attention from scholars while rural dependent children languish in the background. What happened to the urban children who went to live in rural areas also receives little attention. This project explains why thousands of children went to live with farmers in the Midwest and how rural people cared for their own dependent children while being bombarded with dependents from elsewhere. This study uses the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as examples because their institutional system differed markedly from the established pattern of dependent child care. All three states opened state-funded children's homes after the Civil War. These Soldier's Orphans' Homes became the first, and only state funded institutions for dependent children. While neighboring states such as Michigan and Wisconsin made dependent children a state issue, their Midwestern neighbors preferred to leave the care of dependent children to counties and townships.

The result proved disorganized. County children's homes and county poor farms cared for a majority of children in rural areas. These facilities varied in quality and purpose. Some institutional managers indentured children to reduce operating costs while others believed keeping children institutionalized earned them more income. Almost all children's institutions placed out children. This study establishes correct terminology for the indenturing and placing of dependent children. These children were seldom adopted nor did they "board" with foster families. Children paid for their keep through their work, the main reason labor-starved farmers accepted thousands of children both locally and from eastern cities. Using institutional records, correspondence from children and placement families, and state reports, this study provides a clarification of commonly used terms and a more complete picture of the vital exchange between dependent children and Midwestern farmers.

This dissertation charts the rise and fall of modern child emigration, a charity-administered, government-sponsored reform movement that permanently resettled poor British children in the settler empire. Based on primary research in government and philanthropic archives as well as oral history interviews, it follows the circulation of dominant conceptions of childhood, welfare, and empire--alongside the movement of children themselves--across an imperial network connecting Britain, Australia, and Southern Rhodesia.

Using the lens of juvenile resettlement schemes, the thesis illuminates the close intersection between the origins of modern British welfarism and the culture and politics of empire. It traces the turn-of-the-century emergence of child emigration as an "imperial social policy," which united the interests of needy British children with the developmental aims of the rural settler empire, and enabled reformers to conceive of poor boys and girls as imperial citizens-in-the-making. It then examines how the gradual devolution of the empire during the middle decades of the twentieth century weakened the ideological union between welfare and imperialism. The thesis highlights three main forces that contributed to this process: the changing politics of racial hegemony within the settler empire, the advent and dissemination of child psychology, and the development of settler nationalism. The combined impact of these forces, it demonstrates, increasingly led British, Australian, and Rhodesian policymakers to conceptualize the needs of children and the aims of social assistance in more explicitly national terms. By illustrating this shift from empire to nationhood in British child welfare, this dissertation challenges characterizations of the twentieth century as an era when the ideals of childhood grew standardized across political and cultural boundaries. Rather, it reveals how the forces of imperial devolution led to the steady fragmentation of models of childrearing and welfare across the Anglophone world.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 resulted in a massive population loss that revolutionary officials sought to replace with a generation of active citizens. This dissertation demonstrates that the child's role from 1920 to 1940 transformed from that of an individual bounded by the family to that of a member of the community, the nation, and a transnational generation. Children entered the historical record in unprecedented numbers. Due to the impressive expansion of public education and the increased civic engagement that it yielded, children produced a rich cache of documents--letters, drawings, plays, and speeches--that provide a measure by which to gauge their responses to revolutionary programs.

First, I explore adult-produced rhetoric and policies that placed children at the center of plans for creating new revolutionary citizens. Lawmakers, professionals, and governors attempted to construct a homogeneous generation of citizens through the balanced application of sound pedagogy, firm ideology, and modern medicine. Adults transformed public space and assumed new rhetorical styles that refashioned the child as a metaphor for the nation's future.

Second, I measure children's responses to government and popular efforts to construct a universal childhood, and I demonstrate the uneven process of cultural dissemination. Unexpected reactions by younger children to itinerant educational puppet shows revealed age as a factor in reception. Children's letters to radio officials demonstrated that middle class children had greater access to the new media. Contributions to the art magazine Pulgarcito suggested a romanticization of rural children.

Third, I reveal the ways that participation in civic activities expanded children's social networks and allowed them to imagine themselves as part of a national and international community of their peers. Children's conferences, literacy campaigns, and anti-alcohol marches, allowed children to sample national political culture and gain exposure to its hierarchies and bureaucracy. Pan-American exchanges between schoolchildren meant that Mexican youth saw themselves as part of a hemispheric family, united by a common race and common colonial heritage. The children growing up during these decades learned skills, gained a sense of political awareness, and absorbed and created cultural expressions that became recognized the world over as being distinctly Mexican.

This study examines the suffering of children and the unimaginable indignities wreaked on them by their fellow man through acts of human aggression. Studying the atrocities of the German Holocaust and the system of American slavery, this dissertation explores various ways by which children became victims of hostile acts. Also, it analyzes the ways in which these wars and campaigns of murder affected youth survivors both physically and mentally, and it elaborates methods children adopted that enabled them to survive the events. It then explores how young survivors were able to continue to function in the aftermath of the cataclysmic events. I argue that, through specific historical acts of aggression, children were victimized by distinct representations of nihilism where moral truths were rendered futile; traditional social practices and cultural beliefs ceased to be valid; and existence itself became useless and devoid of meaning. By studying eye-witness accounts, autobiographies, films, novels, and slave narratives, this dissertation advances the argument that groups of children throughout the world were victimized by men in dictatorial positions of leadership and, indeed, entire societies who had no regard for the sanctity of human life. Furthermore, evidence supports the proposition that these men and their societies held the irrational political beliefs that racially, morally, and intellectually superior (or "enlightened") men possessed the natural right to subjugate and dehumanized weaker groups of human beings.

This study considers the intersection of locality with international security through the lens of one of the larger manpower drivers of recent African wars--child soldiers. Local norms and networks in child soldiering illuminate two aspects of international security--the problem of war contagion and the challenges of international regime efficacy.

First, is the relationship between local capabilities and the expansion of war. In sub-Saharan Africa, regional conflict and child soldiering are intertwined. A theoretical concern with porous borders and weak states contends the role of locality can serve as a stimulus and momentum for expanding war. This study compares the border regions of the Namibian Kavango with the Mano River and Kailahun regions of Sierra Leone as war began to cross over from Angola and Liberia, respectively. It dissects local configurations and finds that border localities are not endemically dangerous. Instead, expected and unexpected pathways of local action can make a difference in both in the degree of war's spread and the extent of children's participation.

Second, what could be called a global anti-child soldiering regime, an international configuration strongly linked to the protection-based theoretic in human security, emerged and flourished over the past 15 years. Programmatic actions against child soldiering, accompanied by international legal norms shunning child soldiering, have escalated dramatically. Yet, international estimates of child soldiers active in combat did not diminish. On the contrary, child soldiering grew from 250,000 children a year in 1998, to more than 300,000 in 2005. Why haven't these actions halted child soldiering growth?

In the details of local involvement and resistance to cross-border child soldiering, distinct gaps between the conceptual and substantive factors of import in prevention locally, and those stressed by anti-child soldier networks globally, come to light. The findings in this study provide needed political specificity for the human security literature and the global anti-child soldiering regime. The concrete conditions and localized ideas where efforts to thwart child soldiering have had some success (Namibia) and where they have not (Sierra Leone) concretize human security through the concept of capabilities, for use in conflict zones. A framework for evaluating conflict conditions, and an analytic for targeted support to elements that push away from violent involvement on the whole--and involvement of children specifically--flow from the study's findings.

This dissertation analyzes the relationship of the home to child rearing and family life between 1900 and 1950. This study explores the ways in which parents used their homes to nurture their children, and the reasons why different options were available and attractive. Specifically, this project tours the middle class family house and investigates the construction and use of the many spaces of childhood: the small child's bedroom; the household spaces, inside and out, where the child played; and the places utilized for education and discipline. The sources include design treatises, medical literature, advice manuals, government publications, trade literature, poetry and fiction, works of art, photographs, autobiographies, and personal writings in letters and baby books. Through this research, it becomes clear that evolving theories of child rearing, the realities of parenting, and the activities of children shaped the ideology, function, and material culture of middle-class homes. Focusing on the material culture of childhood reveals much about middle-class Americans' views of the past, their hopes for the future, and the ways in which people used objects as a response to cultural transformations and dislocations. Additionally, by analyzing the family home and the young child's place and spaces therein, this project produces a nuanced portrait of "modern" America. It points to the importance of young families as contributors to critical trends in twentieth century history, as they drove suburbanization, consumer culture, professionalization, medical advances, a national media, and a nuanced middle-class identity. This dissertation contributes to historiographical discussions about the nature of childhood and child rearing in history, agency and causality in design and suburbanization, consumerization, nature, memory and modernization, and the role of material culture in creating and contesting identity. Finally, this dissertation illuminates the interplay among experts and parents, and highlights the power of both parents and children in the negotiation of the home and the greater culture.

Throughout her more than six decades of artistic expression, Elizabeth Catlett continuously examines and re-examines the relationship between the Black mother and her child. Catlett renders the image of a mother and child in an intimate and reflective manner as she visually explores the intrinsic bond between mother, child, and the poignancy of reunion. Her own experiences and the recounted stories of her relatives who endured slavery empower her compositions to speak clearly to the issues of separation and reunion.

This dissertation presents a critical interpretation of Elizabeth Catlett's sculptural portraits of the mother and child. It examines Catlett's use of style in the context of her personal experiences. Moreover, Catlett's work spanning the period 1940 to 2000 receives particular attention. Overall, this dissertation shows Catlett's ingenious ability to marry medium with message.

Additionally, this dissertation examines critical aspects of the African American mother and child which addresses cultural identity and survival of the Black community. Catlett and other artists render positive images to challenge racial stereotypes designed to misinterpret the Black experience. In essence, this study reveals a personal perspective of visual art used as a vital tool to correct and enhance general public knowledge of the African American heritage.

This dissertation is the first full-length study to concentrate on American genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer's images of children, which constituted nearly one half of her saleable production during the height of her artistic career from 1848 to 1869. At this time, many young parents received advice regarding child rearing through books and other publications, having moved away from their families of origin in search of employment. These literatures, which gained in popularity from the 1830s onward, focused on spiritual, emotional, and disciplinary matters. My study considers four major themes from the period's writing on child nurture that changed over time, including depravity and innocence, parent/child bonding, standards of behavior and moral rectitude, and children's influence on adults. It demonstrates how Spencer's paintings, prints, and drawings featuring children supported and challenged these evolving ideologies, helping to shed light not only on the artist's reception of child-rearing advice, but also on its possible impact on her middle-class audience, to whom she closely catered. In four chapters, I investigate Spencer's images of sleeping children as visual equivalents of contemporary consolation literature during a time of high infant and child mortality rates; her paintings of parent/child interaction as promoting separation from mothers and emotional bonding with fathers; her prints of mischievous children as both considering changing ideals about children's behavior and comforting Anglo-American citizens afraid of what they saw as threatening minority groups; and her pictures with Civil War and Reconstruction subject matter as contending with the popular concept of the moral utility of children. By framing my interpretations of Spencer's output around key issues in the period's dynamic child-nurture literature, I advance new comprehensive readings of many of her most well-known paintings, including Domestic Happiness , Fi, Fo, Fum! , and The Pic Nic or the Fourth of July . I also consider work often overlooked by other art historians, but which received acclaim in Spencer's own time, including the lithographs of children made after her designs, and the allegorical painting Truth Unveiling Falsehood . Significantly, I provide the first in-depth analysis of a newly rediscovered Reconstruction-era painting, The Home of the Red, White, and Blue .

Although the corpus of work on Congressional history is impressive, there is one aspect of life inside the Capitol that has been neglected for over 200 years. Young messenger boys, or Pages, have worked for Congress since its early sessions but have never received much attention. This dissertation traces the evolution of Capitol Page School and by doing so, also follows the evolution of the larger Page system. The purpose of the study is to find out what the historical record can reveal about the history of Capitol Page School. Once that story is told, conclusions can be drawn about things like institutional inertia in Congress, preserving tradition, unusual childhood occupations and informal civic education, among others.

Using both a documents review and an oral history approach allowed for a rich description of the evolution of Capitol Page School. Chapter Two reports on Page culture before 1926, concentrating on the relationships between Members of Congress and the boys, and how Pages formed their own culture and community as adjuncts of the Congress. Chapter Three examines the social conditions that were present in the 1920s which forced the formation of a school specifically for Pages inside the Capitol, run as a private enterprise by an individual teacher, and the subsequent attempts to continue the school. Chapter Four describes how Senator Harold Burton intervened to improve conditions at Capitol Page School, and also includes a previously unknown cache of information and behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Chapter Five explains the physical move of the school and then traces the substantial legislation that Congress failed to pass in order to give Pages an official residence to live in, and describes the precarious nature of the school. Chapter Six gives special attention to three noteworthy subcultures within the Page system: girls, African-Americans and Supreme Court Pages, and describes how each group began and received special consideration. Chapter Seven reports on how Capitol Page School was forced to dissolve in the early 1980s and how two new schools were formed to replace it. Chapter Eight discusses what can be learned from the historical record.

The 'ideal' Victorian child was a construct but not a possibility within Victorian culture though the imperfect child was attainable. The ideas of children and childhood developed rapidly over the Victorian era and along with it literacy and reading material for the emerging mass reading public. Children's Literature was one of the developing areas for publishers and readers alike, yet this did not stop the reading public from bringing home works not expressly intended for children and reading to their family. Within the idealized middle class family circle, authors such as Charles Dickens were read and appreciated by members of all ages. The upper and working classes also found pleasure and delight in the reading of Dickens's work but nonetheless he did not write expressly for children. Dickens's work, much of which focuses on children and childhood, was admired and read by many authors that came after him, some of who knew him personally and even others who did not. Nevertheless, his work influenced others and their writing and children read his works. By examining Dickens's works Oliver Twist , The Old Curiosity Shop , A Christmas Carol , Bleak House , Dombey and Son , Little Dorrit , all of which contain the imperfect child and placing them alongside Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies and George MacDonald's At The Back of The North Wind , The Princess and the Goblin , The Princess and Curdie , Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer , Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Sing Song , and E. Nesbit's House of Arden and Harding's Luck this work considers the construction, romanticizing and socializing of the Victorian child within work read by and for children during the Victorian Era and early Edwardian period and how that has impacted children's literature contemporarily.

This dissertation is an investigation into the history of Soviet childhood, and the evolution in the relationships between the state and children, between children and parents, and among children themselves. While examining childhood as a crucial site for the development of Soviet identity from the Russian revolution through the early phases of the post-Stalinist thaw, my dissertation also analyzes the process of accommodation and negotiation that took place in the process of the development of that identity, particularly its transformation through each successive generation in the period from 1918 to 1958. The dissertation shows, among other things, that by the 1930s the Soviet state was consciously creating a class system in some ways reminiscent of tsarist Russia; that it created a rural-urban schism and used World War II to codify that class system; that it deviated from its own revolutionary creed by increasingly emphasizing gender divisions; that after the 1920s the state realized it must accept the existence of families, then attempted to use children to inculcate and control parents; and it helped create and perpetuate poverty but blamed amoral, unpatriotic, and impoverished citizens for their plight while refusing to admit poverty's existence. The examination of four decades of childhood's institutions--specially families, school systems, detdoms , and the Young Pioneers--demonstrates that state officials were fairly consistent in altering the Revolution's populist goal for their own ends. But while that might be an unsurprising revelation, the fact that children and parents were aware of doctrinal changes and negotiated and protested them shows a surprisingly complex citizenship. This dissertation uses children- and parent-created sources to illustrate their responses to the various troublesome dictates, from letters to children's books writers to records of local party meetings to childhood memoirs. The dissertation's title, "Growing Up Soviet," is a reference to the complexity of the negotiation process--children were maturing and seeking to define themselves at the same time the Soviet Union, an entity that lasted only a full human lifetime, was coming of age.

Radical Relations: A History of Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children in the United States, 1945 to 2003 charts the changing experiences of lesbian and gay parents in the United States from the Second World War to the present and chronicles their struggle for recognition in American society. It argues that by forging new kinds of family and childrearing relations, gay and lesbian parents successfully challenged legal and cultural frameworks that defined the family as heterosexual and paved the way for the contemporary focus on family and domestic rights in lesbian and gay political movements.

Based on archival research in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, complemented by over a hundred interviews, Radical Relations traces five decades of gay and lesbian family history. The first chapter looks at the pressure on lesbians and gay men in the pre liberation era to marry and have children, the double lives many lesbian and gay parents lived, and the constant threat of estrangement from their children faced by those who left their marriages. Chapter Two shows that this period of intense fear and repression nonetheless held the promise of changes to come. It looks at lesbian mothers raising children in butch/femme and bohemian communities and at the roots of lesbian and gay parental activism in the homophile groups of the era.

Chapter Three examines the court battles that erupted in the gay and lesbian liberation era as lesbian mothers and gay fathers left previous heterosexual relationships and faced difficult custody battles. Chapters Four and Five look at lesbian mother activist groups and gay father groups of the 1970s, and chapter six explores the experiences of lesbian mothers and their children growing up in lesbian feminist communities of the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter Seven looks at the expansion of lesbian and gay parental relationships in the 1980s and 1990s facilitated by insemination, adoption and surrogacy and the vibrant growth in LGBT family rights groups. It shows how lesbian and gay parenting came to be a central focus of the modern LGBT civil rights movement by the 1990s.

My dissertation, "Ishii Juji, the Okayama Orphanage, and the Chausubaru Settlement: A Vision of Child Relief Through Communal Labor and a Sustainable Local Economy, 1887-1926," traces the transformation of radical political action following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, into an ethical practice of child relief during the Meiji period. Through the life work of Ishii Juji, a young Christian convert who founded the Okayama Orphanage in 1887, I seek to illustrate the historical shift of compassion and empathy ( aware ) into motivating forces for social action, social reform, and ultimately, plans for social renovation during the early industrial society. For the network of social activists that came to surround Ishii during the early 1890s, he and the Okayama Orphanage reflected the possibilities of compassionate action--action that led not only to Ishii's own utopian cooperative in Miyazaki, but that also inspired the Christian socialism of Abe Isoo, the juvenile reform work of Tomeoka K osuke, and the Marxist investigation of the "social problem" by Ohara Magosaburo. Although the Okayama Orphanage is now placed at the center of Japan's modern welfare system by historians, during the last two decades of the Meiji period, Ishii Juji rejected the influence of the state and moved the institution and his activism to the peripheries of the nation, where he sought to construct a utopian model of the ideal industrial society--a model in which the profits reaped for future generations (i.e., youths and children) would be social, cultural, and religious, rather than those of monetary gain and military might.

Japan's modernization changed the way in which Japanese writers, educators and moralists viewed children and childhood. Although Edward Morse and other Western visitors in the 1870s saw Japan as "the paradise for children," Japanese reformers, such as Ueki Emori and Fukuzawa Yukichi, criticized 'traditional' childhood and family life, and turned to the West for alternative models. The resulting 'modern ideology of the child' in Japan is a product of discourse and debate that was motivated by the search for a national identity between 1868 and 1945. Meiji-period (1868-1912) advocates for the protection of children were seeking liberation from the perceived backwardness of Tokugawa (1600-1868) family values and the patriarchal family system. Taishô-period (1912-1926) intellectuals used the image of the child as a trope to criticize statism and call for individual rights. Prewar Shôwa (1926-1945) revisionists rediscovered Tokugawa family values to argue for a modernity that was culturally Japanese, not Western. Over time, government policy and community attitudes changed towards childrearing, education, adoption practices, child labor and child prostitution. This dissertation tracks the changing image of the child, mainly through children's literature, or the literature of the 'childlike mind' ( dôshin ), but also through Romantic literature and treatises on early childhood education, child welfare, family structure and family law. Thinkers discussed in this work include Philippe Ariès, Karatani Kôjin, Kaibara Ekken, Nakae Tôju, Kitahara Hakushû, Ogawa Mimei, Wakamatsu Shizuko, Yanagita Kunio, Hatano Kanji and others.

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: Jonathan Anuik, University of Saskatchewan
Dissertation title: “Métis Children and the Christian Educational Agenda--The Formation of a Métis Childhood in the West”
Advisor: James R. Miller

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, 1849-1920”
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: Daphne R. Chamberlain, University of Mississippi
Dissertation title: “'...And a Child Shall Lead the Way': Children’s Participation in the Jackson, Mississippi, Freedom Struggle, 1947-67"
Advisor: Charles K Ross 

Dissertator: Robin Chapdelaine, Rutgers University
Dissertation title: “1929 Women’s War:  Child Pawnship in Southeastern Nigeria, 1920s”
Advisors: Temma Kaplain  and Carolyn A. Brown 

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

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: 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

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: 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: Margaret Peacock, University of Texas, Austin
Dissertation title: “Contested Innocence: Images of Childhood in the Cold War”
Advisor: Mary C. Neuburger

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

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: Michal Shapira, Rutgers University
Dissertation title: “Subjects of Care: Reconstructing the Child and Psychology in War and Postwar Britain, 1940-60s”
Advisor: Bonnie G. Smith

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: Rachel Villarreal, University of Arizona
Dissertation title: “Gladiolas for the Children of Sanchez: Revolutionary Rhetoric and Urban Renewal in Mexico City, 1946-68”
Advisor: William Beezley

Dissertator: Charles Wash, Howard University
Dissertation title: “Childhood in Brazil: Free and Enslaved Children in Salvador da Bahia, 1822-88”
Advisor: Selwyn H. H. Carrington

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

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

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