NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Websightings

Sean Martin, ed.

“Children and Youth in History”: Review of New Comprehensive Website from George Mason University

 Sean Martin, Western Reserve Historical Archive

The Center for New History and the Media at George Mason University launched its new, free website, Children and Youth in History (http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/), in December 2008. This extremely well designed site has the potential to be the web’s most important resource for scholars and teachers with an interest in the history of children and childhood. Created in cooperation with the University of Missouri-Kansas City and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Children and Youth in History provides historians ready access to resources that might otherwise be difficult to locate and offers many suggestions and ideas for the instructor teaching about the history of children. 

Visually, the site is designed simply, with attractive photographs and surprisingly few words of text, just enough to guide the reader through the site. The primary links on the homepage are simply Home, About, Introduction (forthcoming) and Search. The “About” link takes us to a brief introduction to the project and provides biographical information of project directors Kelly Schrum and Miriam Forman-Brunnell and the many project team members and scholars responsible for the site’s content. These include the most prominent members in the field and many active members and officers of the Society for the History of Children and Youth. In its own words, the project aims to provide information “about the lived experiences of children and youth from multiple perspectives as well as changing notions about childhood and adolescence in past cultures and civilizations.” Though launched in 2008, the project will not be complete until 2010.

The offerings at Children and Youth in History fall into four categories: website reviews, primary sources, case studies, and teaching modules. Reviewing these categories, it is clear that this is still a website in development; while some topics for case studies or teaching modules are already listed, the links are not active or simply lead to pages with announcements that the page will be developed later. Still, there is already much information available, along with a clear outline of the kinds of materials the site will provide.

Website reviews are divided by chronological period, beginning with “The Beginnings of Human Society”. The websites reviewed represent many different kinds of projects and institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Adoption History Project, and the Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art. When relevant, the same review is crosslisted under other chronological periods.

Primary Sources are divided by region. Though many sources are already available, none are yet available for the Middle East and North Africa and only two are listed under South and Southeast Asia (and, oddly, one of these concerns Turkey). In addition to more usual sources such as correspondence, the primary sources listed here include images of artifacts and all kinds of works of art. A brief annotation accompanies each source, along with information on the proper format for citation. The subjects of the sources seem to have been chosen randomly. As sources are added, those using the site will need to search carefully for sources relevant to their interests.

Eleven of nineteen case studies are currently available, on such diverse topics as Roman Children’s Sarcophagi and Maasai Murran as Rebellious Youth. Each case study was prepared by a specialist in the field and includes the following sections: “Why I Taught These Sources”, “How I Introduce These Sources”, “Reading the Sources”, and “Reflections”. Links to the primary sources on the Children and Youth in History site are listed on the right. The case studies offer the instructor firsthand information about another’s experience with a specific source and so could be very useful in making decisions about materials for classroom use.

Seven of eleven teaching modules are now available, and they, too, show the diversity of topics represented on the site. Topics covered include Children in the Slave Trade and New Zealand Childhoods (18^th-20^th c.). Each teaching module is accompanied by an introductory text, sometimes with several subtopics, and links for primary sources, teaching strategies, a lesson plan, a document based question, a bibliography, and credits. Compiled by scholars in the field, the teaching modules offer more extensive discussion of the topics and primary sources than the case studies and will be especially useful to those instructors seeking information about these specific topics. 

Children and Youth in History clearly aims to be a comprehensive site for anyone interested in this history, whether an elementary or secondary school teacher, a college level instructor, or a member of the general public interested in primary sources. Because the site is still in development and many planned links are not yet active, Children and Youth in History often seems to focus on unrelated topics; the casual visitor to the site may very well not be able to find something from a country or period of special interest. While the project directors have made an impressive and successful effort to reflect the histories of many countries and regions outside the United States, one looks forward to the site’s continued development and the inclusion of additional primary sources, case studies, and teaching modules.

Review of “Children in Africa,” Library and Documentation and Information Department, African Studies Centre, Leiden, Netherlands

Brett L. Shadle, Virginia Tech

In September, 2008, the Netherlands African Studies Association sponsored a conference on  “African Children in Focus: a Paradigm Shift in Methodology and Theory?”  Attendees converged on Leiden, home of the African Studies Centre, one of the leading such centers in Europe.  The ASC library, also outstanding, prepared a ‘dossier’ on its website geared toward the conference topic.  After a short introduction, the dossier provides a select bibliography of books, chapters, and articles held at the library, grouped into six headings: Children and Society; Children and Law, Children’s Rights; Children and War, Child Soldiers; Children and Work, Child Labour, Street Children; Children and Health;  Child Care, Orphanhood.  Each entry links to the appropriate entry in the library catalogue, which includes helpful abstracts.  Geared as it was to conference attendees, the dossier’s value is limited to those not intending to use the ASC library.  It is certainly not an exhaustive bibliography, and illustrates the anthropological and interventionist orientation of many Scandinavian centers.  While the library holds numerous works on AIDS and child soldiers, it apparently lacks one of the few historical works on childhood in Africa, Beverly Grier, Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann, 2006).  On the other hand, the library does hold or provides links to African-based journals (such as Journal of Eritrean Studies and the East African Journal of Peace and Human Rights) that generally are not widely available nor catalogued in most online databases.  The dossier includes links to eight other web resources on children in Africa, at least half of which are child-rights groups based on the continent.  The number of organizations and resources on the web partially or fully focused on Africa is much larger than this, of course.

The ASC library website will be of limited value to most readers of this newsletter.  For those who have completed a search of traditional bibliographical sources, a quick review of the ASC site might be worth a few minutes of browsing.

 http://www.ascleiden.nl/Library/Webdossiers/ChildreninAfrica.aspx#Selected_web_resources_

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