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Newsletter of the Society for the History of Children and Youth
Number 3 | Winter 2004 |
| Exhibits:US. . .Exhibits:Europe. . .New Book Series. . .Calls for Papers. . .Upcoming Conferences. . .Publications News from the Field News of Members: Paula Fass wants members to know that the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society of which she is editor-in-chief has just been published by Macmillan Reference. This 3-vol. set presents the social and cultural history of childhood from antiquity to the present. Children and Childhood examines this history through articles on education, parenting, child labor, economics, images of childhood, children's literature, play, toys and games, health, physiology, law, the criminal justice system and social welfare. Comparative articles include information about childhood in cultures throughout the world. It has 250 photographs representing the visual images of childhood. Mary Niall Mitchell's article "Rosebloom and Pure White, Or So It Seemed," American Quarterly 54 (September 2002), on 19th-century photographs of white-looking slave children, won the Constance Rourke Prize from the American Studies Association for best article in American Quarterly for 2002. Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, edited by Steven Noll and James W. Trent, Jr.(2004) contains many articles that will be of interest to SHCY members, including "Education for Children with Mental Retardation: Parent Activism, Public Policy, and Family Ideology in the 1950s" by Kathleen W. Jones. Children at Risk: Protecting New York City's Youths 1653-2003 at the New-York Historical Society, Nov. 4, 2003 - April 4, 2004. This exhibits documents the efforts made over the past three hundred and fifty years by New York Philanthropists, journalists, reformers, missionaries, government officials and ordinary citizens to improve the lives of their most vulnerable fellow New Yorkers--impoverished children. To document the city's historic role in confronting the problem the exhibition will showcase approximately 500 paintings, prints, drawings, maps, original documents and photographs from the Society's own collections as well as rare materials on loan from other institutions. The New-York Historical Society, located at West 77th Street and Central Park West, is open to the public from Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For general information, the public can call (212) 873-3400 or visit the website: http://www.nyhistory.org/ The exhibition “Archaeologies of Childhood: The First Years of Life in Roman Egypt,” Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Nov. 14, 2003-Sept. 15, 2004. This exhibit looks at material from Egypt under Roman rule and tries to show what childhood was like 2,000 years ago. Representations of children, juxtaposed with remains of what children wore, give an idea of what children looked like. An assortment of protective images and amulets shows the kinds of dangers children faced and strategies the Egyptians adopted for dealing with them. The education of children, neither widespread nor compulsory, is illustrated through toys and artifacts of learning. A large display of toys and games shows the range of pastimes open to children in Roman Egypt and examines the serious aims that often lay behind simple “child’s play.” For more information go to www.lsa.umich.edu/kelsey "Made By Loving Hands: Amish Children's Clothing, Toys and Quilts From the Thomas and Marsha French Collection" is on display at the Kent State Museum until July 25, 2004. For information, hours, and directions to the museum, which is located in Kent, Ohio, please visit the webpage: http://dept.kent.edu/musuem/general/general.html Invention at Play is a traveling exhibit from the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. The exhibit focuses on the similarities between the way children and adults play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology. From February 1 through April 30, 2004 you can see the exhibit at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis; from October 1 through December 31, 2004 you can view the exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. For more information please visit http://www.si.edu/lemelson The town museum of Deggendorf, Germany is planning an exhibition about the "first year." The exhibition is called: "Baby, Säugling, Wickelkind - das erste Jahr." It will start in April 2004. Hurry up and catch "Little Princes: Portraits of Children from the 16th to the 19th Century" at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in Bonn. The exhibit features 83 portraits from Central and Western Europe, Italy and Spain and offers and exciting view of the world of noble and upper class children in past centuries. The exhibit closes January 4, 2004. Northern Illinois University Press is launching a new, interdisciplinary list on family and child studies. The list will address current issues affecting children and families, broadly defined, across the nation and around the globe. The book will target scholars and policy makers, although they should be accessible to educated general readers. A few titles on the list, on such topics as summer camp and children's literature, will have more general appeal. Interest authors should contact the press. The History of Adolescent Sexuality: The editor of a proposed volume in Greenwood Press' "Children and Youth: History and Culture" series invites proposals and/or finished manuscripts on aspects of the history of adolescent sexuality. Chapters are to be about 5-6000 words each, synthetic, topical, and historically comprehensive. Some possible topics might be, but are not limited to: contraception/abortion/pregnancy, portrayals of adolescent sexuality in various media, gay/lesbian, bisexual, transgendered teens, juvenile delinquency, or a broad comparative study of trends in adolescent sexuality between the U.S. and other countries. Jim Martin is soliciting contributions for an anthology on children in colonial North America, which is to initiate a new series, "Children and Youth in America," to be published by NYU Press. Essays will examine the unique experiences of European, African, and Native American children and youth in North America between the early 16th and mid-18th centuries. Proposals will be considered on topics related to the British colonies as well as to the Spanish colonies in Florida and the Southwest and to the French colonies in Canada and the Great Lakes region. Acceptable topics will include but will not be limited to: raising, educating, and caring for children; children as slaves and as workers; the intersection of racial and ethnic cultures; differences and similarities in the experiences of girls and boys; and coming of age. Whenever possible and appropriate, the points of view of children and youth should be presented. Although interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed and, indeed, encouraged, the essays need to be framed with a historical sensibility. Final essays will run an estimated 6-8000 words, including notes. Culled from H-Childhood: The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (JGAPE) has asked Jim Marten and Kris Lindenmeyer to post a call for manuscripts to H-Childhood subscribers. This is a great opportunity to showcase some of the best work by historians of children and youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in an exciting journal that is now part of the History Cooperative (http://www.historycooperative.org and http://www.historycooperative.org/jgaindex.html). Professors Marten and Lindenmeyer will then submit three or four of the most appropriate articles to the JGAPE editor, Alan Lessoff, for possible publication. The Social Science History Association will hold its 29th Annual Meeting, November 18-21, 2004 , at the Palmer House in Chicago . Proposals for individual papers are due on February 2, 2004 and for complete sessions on February 16, 2004 . Prior discussion with network representatives is encouraged. For more information visit the SSHA website at www.ssha.org. When SSHA met in Baltimore in November 2003, among the sessions on the program devoted to childhood were "Children Bound to Labor: Race, Ethnicity, and Apprenticeship in Early America," and "Youth and Demographic Change: Intra-and Inter-Generational Demographic Change." A number of other papers in individual sessions dealt with the history of children and youth. A number of forthcoming conferences and symposia with links to the history of Childhood and Youth are currently being organised. One example is the Avignon Conference on Slavery and Unfree Labour: Children and Slavery, due to take place from 20 to 22 May 2004. The aim of organisers is to provide a forum for the examination of the role of children in slavery in different regions from Antiquity to the present day, including the systems involved (indigenous and ‘imported’), the means employed to enslave children, and the child slave’s tactics of survival and ‘resistance.’Call for Papers Deadline: 2004-03-01. For more informatiom see http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=133345 On October 9-11, the Cotsen's Children's Library at Princeton University hosted the conference "Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War." Although most of the presentations dealt with literary representations of children's wartime experiences, several of the papers were of particular interest to historians of children, including: Mathew Grenby's, "'Surely there is no British boy or girl who has not heard of the battle of Waterloo!' Childhood, War and Literature in the age of Napoleon"; Margaret Higonnet's "Picturing War Trauma" (on images of the First World War in French children's literature); and Gary Dickson's "Massacre of the Innocents?: Sacral Violence and the Paradox of the Children's Crusade." This is the most recent of the Cotsen's Library's annual conference series; last year the library hosted a conference on medieval children. Abstracts of all of the papers presented at the 2003 conference can be accessed at www.princeton.edu/~cotsen/research/conferences.html Youth, sport and leisure has formed a focus for vigorous scholarly debate in the past, and scholars interested in the way these themes intersect in African culture may be interested in Youth, Sports and Africa, a symposium to be held at Ohio University on 20 February 2004. The symposium’s website is at http://www.ohiou.edu/afrchid/sportsafrica/ Scholars who have worked in the field of the History of Education will doubtless know the publications of Professor Brian Simon, for many years the leading British scholar in this field. The History of Education Society will be holding its annual conference at Cambridge University (exact date to be announced) and the theme for plenaries and paper streams will be the life and work of the late Professor Simon. More details are at: http://www.historyofeducation.org.uk/index.html Those teaching History of Youth/Childhood courses covering the late twentieth century or working on contemporary youth cultures might be interested in a forthcoming conference entitled Digital Generations: Children, Young People and New Media to be held from 26 to 29 July 2004, at the Institute of Education, University of London. Deadline for submission of proposals for papers, workshops or symposia is 31 December 2003. The conference website is at http://www.ccsonline.org.uk/mediacentre/main.html Recent newsletters have highlighted the important new work being done in studies of young people and space. In this connection one publication (which predates the establishment of the Newsletter but which readers may be interested in) is a volume edited by Roberta Wollons, Kindergartens and Cultures : The Global Diffusion of an Idea (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000). The volume contains very useful essays on the emergence and evolution of the institution of the ‘kindergarten’ in many different countries. A new publication that should be brought to the attention of those whose interests include the early modern period is Ira Clark’s, Comedy, Youth, Manhood in Early Modern England (Newark/London: University of Delaware Press/Associated University Presses, 2003). An important new work on cultures of childhood and youth in modern Germany edited by Marc Cluet has emerged from the presses. It is, Le culte de la jeunesse et de l'enfance en Allemagne : 1870-1933 (Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003) On youth culture and race the following is worthy of note. The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe (Pittsbugh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) edited by Zvi Gitelman includes a chapter by Gershon Bacon “Jewish politics and youth culture in interwar Poland: preliminary evidence from the Yivo autobiographies.” On the China side, a recent addition to the small but growing corpus of work on youth is Pan Yihong’s Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace : China's Youth in the Rustication Movement (Lanham, Md. ; Oxford : Lexington Books, c2003) The already substantial body of work on the Hitler Youth continues to grow, with Michael Buddrus’s Totale Erziehung für den totalen Krieg : Hitlerjugend und nationalsozialistische Jugendpolitik (München : K.G. Saur, 2003) the latest addition. Juvenile delinquency is still attracting much interest, as evidenced by Sarah Fishman’s The Battle for Children : World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2002)
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