Recent Publications

A steady stream of articles and books on the history of youth and childhood have continued to appear in the period since the last column. The ever expanding range of sub-fields and focuses make it quite a challenge to organise any review of this output. Here, I have attempted to group a selection of books, articles and chapters that I hope readers may find interesting into thematic and area-related clusters.

Several scholars have been active in developing the still under-researched links between young people and commerce. In 2004 Gary S. Cross published The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's ulture (New York : Oxford University Press), which deals with the commercial transformation of childhood in the US during the last century. Lisa Jacobson has also examined connections between childhood and commerce in the US in her recent book, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York : Columbia University Press, 2004). Douglas Brode’s, From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture (Austin: University of Texas Press, c2004) includes one chapter on “Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll: Disney and the Youth Culture” and another entitled, “Hell, No! We Won't Go!": Disney and the Radicalization of Youth.” Lesley Whitworth, meanwhile, in a volume from Ashgate also published in 2004 (entitled An Affluent Society?: Britain’s Post-War ’Golden Age’ Revisited) provides a study of youth and the practices of consumption in the British context in her chapter, “Selling Youth in the Age of Affluence.” A volume edited by Neil Campbell, (previously published by Exeter University Press in 2000 with the title The Radiant Hour: Versions of Youth in American Culture has been re-published under a new title, American Youth Cultures (by Edinburgh University Press). The book contains chapters on punk (by Simon Philo), and on the concept of generation (by Charles R. Acland and Krista Comer).

The twentieth century entanglements of youth in the realm of politics have been the subject of a number of useful recent contributions. Mark Kurlansky has added to the burgeoning field of study of youth protest in the sixties with his book, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York : Ballantine Books, 2004). Quite a bit of material on youth and politics has emanated from the French academe, and edition number 74 of the journal Matériaux pour l'Histoire de Notre Temps in 2004 offers us four articles dealing with this theme, including Robi Morder’s “Années 1960: Crises des jeunesses, mutations de la jeunesse,” Cédric Meletta’s study “Une Biennale de l'engagement militant: Le Front populaire de la jeunesse de Paris (1935-1937),” François Audigier’s “Malaise et divisions des jeunes gaullistes durant la guerre d'algerie” and Jérôme Cotillon’s, “Jeunesses marechaliste et collaborationniste dans la France de Vichy.” With reference to Spain, Sandra Souto Kustrín also discusses the interwar era in her article, “Taking the street: Workers' Youth Organizations and Political Conflict in the Spanish Second Republic,” which appeared in the European History Quarterly (2004 34(2): 131-156). The politics of youth in Africa forms the focus for discussion in Insa Nolte’s article “Identity and Violence: The Politics of Youth in Ijebu-Remo, Nigeria” in another British-based journal, Journal of Modern African Studies (2004 42(1): 61-89).

The roles of the young, in the realm of representation or lived experience during wartime have begun to be analysed more intensively in the European context in recent years. Two new examples of this kind of work are a chapter by Michael Paris, “The Youth of Our Nation in Symbol: Making and Remaking the Masculine Ideal in the Era of the Two World Wars,” published in a book entitled History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, edited by Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and a book by Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which contains a chapter on the mobilisation of Austrian children for total war.

Significant new contributions to the study of youth and childhood in the medieval and early modern eras have been made in the form of Lorenzo Polizzotto’s Children of the Promise: The Confraternity of the Purification and the Socialization of Youths in Florence, 1427-1785 and P.J.P Goldberg and Felicity Riddy Woodbridge’s edited work, Youth in the Middle Ages (Rochester, N.Y. : York Medieval Press, 2004). The latter contains some introductory reflections on the development of this field in the wake of Philippe Ariès’s contribution, and a range of new studies of pre-modern childhood and youth. Another new work on the medieval period is Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, and Children, which has been edited by Carol Neel and published by the University of Toronto Press.

A number of studies of the social history of young people in the North American context have appeared in recent months, with a notable emphasis upon the variables of race and ethnicity. Katharine Capshaw Smith has written a book entitled Children's Literature of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2004) which examines the ways in which the themes of youth and childhood were key focuses for many of the writers who made essential contributors to The New Negro Renaissance. A book edited by Benson Tong, Asian American Children: A Historical Handbook and Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004) provides a social history of Asian young people. Another notable recent contribution to the corpus work on North American childhoods is Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood by Steven Mintz (published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).

Valuable biographies and autobiographies also continue to appear. In the field of US history, Clara Silverstein’s White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation provides one example (published by the University of Georgia Press). Interesting recent contributions on childhood experiences of the Third Reich have continued to emerge, with Nazi racial policy receiving more attention. A recent book entitled Let Me Go, by Helga Schneider (published in London by Heinemann) is one example. Sue Vice’s, Children Writing the Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) is another. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich by Tina Campt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004) builds on recent work detailing the coming of age of black people living in the Third Reich. Wilhelmina Harris discusses the impact of Nazi policy on her childhood in Brave Little Dutch Girl : Memories of a Small Child in Holland during the German Occupation 1940-45.( Penzance : United Writers, 2004).

The understanding of the history of childhood and youth from a legal perspective has produced a number of outstanding works in recent times. In 2004 a second edition of David Archard’s Children: Rights and Childhood appeared (published by Routledge).

Nancy Steenburg’s Children and the Criminal Law in Connecticut, 1635-1855: Changing Perceptions of Childhood is another welcome addition to this field. The apparent vigour and vibrancy of youth cultures and concern about youthful delinquency in Japan has, it seems, not been sufficient to produce more than a few works on the history of youth (and youth criminality). David R. Ambaras, however, provides us with a contribution to this area in the form of his article “Juvenile Delinquency and the National Defense State: Policing Young Workers in Wartime Japan, 1937-1945” in the Journal of Asian Studies 2004 63(1): 31-60.

Similarly, until recently little had been published (at least in English) on youth and childhood in China. However, this field is also now beginning to generate new scholarship. Hsiung, Ping-chen’s, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2005) is a welcome addition. Ange Zhang has published, Red Land, Yellow River: A Story from the Cultural Revolution. In 2004 Anne Behnke Kinney’s, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) also appeared, tracing the movement of children and childhood toward the centre of intellectual debate during Han times (206 BC-AD 220).

Girls and girlhood in the modern European context are discussed in two recent book chapters and an article. In Women in the Khrushchev Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), edited by Melanie Ili, Susan E. Reid and Lynne Attwood, Kristin Roth-Ey discusses “'Loose Girls' on the Loose?: Sex, Propaganda and the 1957 Youth Festival.” In the same volume Michaela Pohl analyses the experiences of “Women and Girls in the Virgin Lands.” In the December edition of the American Historical Review, in an article entitled “‘A Muse for the Masses’: Gender, Age and Nation in France, Fin de Siècle“ David Pomfret highlights the issue of age, arguing that this became an important component in the representation of the nation in France, fin de siècle, and was crucial to the success of a new national icon, the ‘Muse,’ who was embodied in public by young working class girls.

In the compilation of this column doubtless numerous relevant articles have been omitted. If readers have any suggestions relating to new publications that they might like to see included in this column in future please contact me at pomfretd@hkucc.hku.hk.