News from the Field I: Conferences and Exhibits
Janet Golden and David Pomfret, Contributing Editors
Conference News:
The annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) featured a number of panels and individual papers on the history of child health including Jessa Chupik, "'Is He Crying for Home?': The Relationship between Families, Confined Children and the Orillia Asylum, 1900-1930," Ann S. Blum, "Medicine and Motherhood: Infant Feeding in Mexican Public Welfare, 1898-1910," Jeffrey P. Brosco, "More than the Names Have Changed: The Prevalence of Mental Retardation in the United States," "Stephen G. Pemberton, "'Normality Within Limits': Making Hemophilic Boys into Men," Sharra Vostral, "From Girl to Young Woman: Media, Material Culture and Menstruation in the Post-War United States," and Jeffrey P. Baker, "The British Whooping Cough Epidemics of 1978 and 1982: Debating the Impact of a Vaccine Revolt." Information about the AAHM can be found at www.histmed.org
Exhibits:
Visit: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/orphans/english/ to see Open Hearts Closed Doors: the War Orphans Project, produced by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The exhibit includes orphan's stories, personal artifacts, audio and visual. Teachers, students, and interested visitors will find the material to be printed for classroom or personal use.
Invention at Play: This exhibition, developed by the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Behring Center, in partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota brings a fresh perspective to the topic of invention. It explores the marked similarities between the ways children play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology. Next stop for this traveling exhibit is the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix, June 1-August 31, 2003. After that the exhibit travels to COSI Columbus in Columbus, Ohio from October 1 - December 31, 2003.
Ellen Sue Blakey of the Dancing Bear Folk Center in Thermopolis, WY reports that this new children's museum, 120 miles southeast of Yellowstone always has on exhibit model trains, teddy bears, dolls, children's and doll's china and furniture, toys,games, etc. Check out the webpage: http://server1.dancingbear.org/
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany currently has an exhibit called "Schauplätze der Kindheit" about the history of childhood from 1800 to 2000. The exhibit includes clothes of children, toys, and photographs. For more information visit: http://www.mkg-hamburg.de/
The Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal has a new 2,500 square-foot national traveling exhibit available: Children Just Like Me. It showcases the diversity of the world's children while also exploring their common bonds. For more information visit the website: http://www.cincymuseum.org/cmc/information/exhibits.html
The next stop for Kid Size - The Material World of Childhood will be the Centro de Exposiciones de Benalmadena, in Spain, beginning in December of this year. After that it goes to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and then the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. This exhibition aims to explore and critically illuminate the changing relationships between children and adults as expressed by their immediate, everyday material environments in societies in and beyond the Western world.
Cross-cultural patterns of adult provision for children are traced through a geographically diverse selection of furniture and other daily artefacts. A comprehensive catalogue has been published in English, German and Japanese. The exhibit was developed at the Vitra Design Museum in Berlin.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem will be opening an exhibition on Hidden Children in the fall of 2003. For more information visit the website: http://www.ushmm.org/
A note from "News" editors, Janet and David: if you see any of the exhibits noted above or other exhibits relating to the history of children and youth, please send us a brief review and we'll include it in the next issue of the newsletter. You can contact David Pomfret at pomfretd@hkucc.hku.hk and Janet Golden at jgolden@camden.rutgers.edu
