Websightings

Eds. note: "Websightings" is a regular feature of the SHCY Newsletter. Those interested in reviewing sites for the next issue should contact Jim Marten.

Websightings
E.Wayne Carp

The Campaign to End Child Labor (at http://www.boondocksnet.com/labor/index.html), edited by Jim Zwick, is a superb Website containing numerous primary sources investigating the origins and goals of the movement to end child labor from 1906 to 1938. The site is handsome and well-designed, organized into seven subject pages: cartoons, photographs, poems, organizations, occupations, legislation, and postcards. One of the best pages, “legislation” contains 49 links to primary sources dated 1902 to 1941 that reviewed child labor legislation and conditions at the state and national level. It includes many full-text articles from Charities, Charities and Commons, and the Literary Digest, testimony from Senators and urban and child reformers, such as Jane Addams and Homer Folks, and child labor legislation, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938). The “cartoon” page, which contains 26 political cartoons spanning the period 1906 to 1922, is also quite impressive. Zwick not only writes a short introduction but also offers links to contemporary biographies of the cartoonists and contemporary histories of political cartoons.

All of the subject pages have an accompanying section entitled, “Related Resources” which provides some surprises and some of the best offerings. For example, on the “cartoon” page, the reader will discover four full-text books, including Edwin Markham, Benjamin B. Lindsey, and George Creel, Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor -- Its Causes, its Crimes, and its Cure (1914); Lewis W. Hine, Child Labor Photographs (1912); Child Labor and the Republic (Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the National Child Labor Committee, December 1906); and Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909). The surprise comes when the reader clicks on the Addams link and discovers that in addition to Spirit of Youth there are four other full-text Addams works (one book and three essays) plus a bibliography. And when the reader clicks on one of these links, a fifth Addams work appears. But Zwick is not done. If the reader keeps clicking, the next level will bring up an entirely new section, labeled “More Women’s History,” which includes full-text books on the women’s labor movement. The site also maintains a discussion list. It should be mentioned that this site is part of the award-winning, commercial Website <BoondocksNet.com> and that it contains much self-referent advertising, i.e., the selling of many of these same texts, photographs, postcards, etc. Nevertheless, this is a very worthwhile, comprehensive, and useful Website that scholars interested in the history of childhood and youth and teachers of the Progressive era will definitely want to bookmark.

Nineteenth Century American Children & What They Read (at http://www.merrycoz.org/kids.htm), edited by Pat Pflieger, is an extremely rich Web resource for nineteenth-century American children’s books and magazines. It is particularly strong in the works of Samuel Griswold Goodrich (1793-1860), author of the Peter Parley stories and Robert Merry’s Museum, a popular children's magazine that ran for 32 years. The Website is divided into ten subject pages, the first two – a title index and subject index of the approximately 475 items - - incredibly useful for quickly informing the reader of the site’s contents. The other major subject pages are: Children, Magazines, Papers & Analyses, and Books and authors. The “Children” page contains links to short excerpts from adults child-rearing manuals (1824-1863) as well as links to a child’s scrapbook, two children’s exercise books, and photos of young children. Each item is concisely annotated. The “Magazines” page contains links to excerpts from 13 magazines (1841-1872), including The Youth Companion, Parley’s Magazine, and The Slave’s Friend. The excerpts, concisely described, vary in length from short poems to "Uncle Hiram's Pilgrimage" (1857-1860) by William C. Cutter, a 30-part look at 19th-century New York City that appeared in Robert Merry's Museum. The page also has a link to “Magazine covers,” which contains an extensive collection of 27 children’s magazine covers from 1815 to 1872. The “Papers & Analyses” page consists of four of Pfieger’s unpublished American Culture Association conference papers exploring children’s fiction and a published introduction to the 2001 exhibition catalog of the Barbara Loftus Perrone Collection of editions of "A Visit from St. Nicholas." His essay, "An 'Online Community' of the Nineteenth Century," is a fascinating discussion of "[Robert] Merry's [Museum] Monthly Chat with His Friends" as an early example of an online community. The “Book and Authors” page is further subdivided into four categories. The most significant are “article and reviews written at the time,” a compilation of comments by adults on the effects of fiction on children, and “texts of some of the books,” which number some 21 books, including Daniel Webster, The American Spelling Book (1783), Samuel Goodrich, Peter Parley's Winter Evening Tales (1829), and Jacob Abbott, Rollo's Travels (1855). The site also includes a timeline, a theme for the month, and bibliographies of nineteenth-century individual authors, children’s fiction, and social history. Overall, Nineteenth Century American Children & What They Read is a comprehensive, high-quality, up-to-date Website that will pay great dividends for anyone interested in the history of childhood and youth history. (Ed.'s note: Jim Marten also reviewed this website, in the Summer 2003 issue of the Newsletter. Obviously this is a site that will interest many historians of nineteenth-century childhood.)

The New Zealand Digital Library at the University of Waikato (at http://www.sadl.uleth.ca/nz/cgi-bin/library) contains a subject web page, “Youth oral history,” a 50 interview collection of an on-line version of the Hamilton, Waikato, Public Library Youth Oral History Project. In 1995, the Library interviewed local citizens aged between 50 and 75 years old, about their lives as young adults in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. The front page is spare with only a search engine and instructions for its use. But the instructions are clear, and the interviews can be searched by title, author, or a particular word. The reader can also read the interview by sections that have been clearly labeled or in its entirety. The one drawback is that the interviews are not verbatim. They are abstracted with snippets of direct quotations. Photos accompany many of the interviews. Also frustrating to the researcher is that there is an audio accompaniment of the interviews but it will not work online. A note states that the recording must be listened to on the Library’s premises. Still, it is to be hoped that other libraries and archives will follow the University of Waikato’s innovative lead and put more youth oral histories online.