Skip to main content
  • 175 Accesses

Abstract

The history of children is a relatively new field compared to the history of education, gaining its original impetus from the work of social historians and psychohistorians in the 1960s. When I first encountered the history of children in the early 1970s, it was a nascent field, full of promise, but undeveloped and scattered across a variety of disciplines and specialties. Today, more than thirty years later, the field has emerged as a robust, multidisciplinary enterprise with its own professional organization and a new scholarly journal. In 2001, after initial support from the Benton Foundation, a group of scholars established the Society for the History of Children and Youth. In 2007, the Society will hold its Fourth Biennial Conference in Sweden. In June 2007, the first issue of the new Journal of the History of Children and, Youth is scheduled to appear.1

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Paula Fass is also the Editor in Chief of the three-volume Encyclopedia- of Children and Childhood in History and Society (New York: Macmillan, 2004). For the most comprehensive collection of original documents on the history of children and youth, see Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970–74). This collection is being made available online; see Society for the History of Childrren and Youth (http://www.h-net.org/~child/SHCY/useful_links.htm). For an excellent review of recent scholarship,

    Google Scholar 

  2. see Julia Grant, “Children Versus Childhood: Writing Children Into the Historical Record,” History of Education Quarterly 45 (Fall 2005): 468–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. For reviews of the historical scholarship on children and youth that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, see N. Ray Hiner, “The Child in American Historiography: Accomplishments and Prospects,” The Psychohistory Review vol. 7. (Summer 1978): 13–23;

    Google Scholar 

  4. Barbara Finklestein, “Incorporating Children into the History of Education,” Journal of Educational Thought 19 (April 1984): 21–41;

    Google Scholar 

  5. Bruce Bellingham, “The History of Childhood Since the ‘Invention of Childhood’: Some Issues of the Eighties,” Journal of Family History 13 (November 1988): 347–58; Peter Petschauer, “The Childrearing Modes in Flux: An Historian’s Reflections,” Journal of Psychohistory (Summer 1989): 3–15;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. and Hugh Cunningham, “Histories of Childhood,” American Historical Review 103 (October 1998): 1195–1208

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Among those recognized are: Stephen Mintz (Merle Curti Award) for Huck’s Raft: A History Of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004);

    Google Scholar 

  8. Elliott West (Caroline Bancroft Award) for Growing Up With The Country: Childhood On The Far-Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989);

    Google Scholar 

  9. Wilma King (Outstanding Book Award) for Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth In Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);

    Google Scholar 

  10. Marie Jenkings Schwartz (Julia Cherry Spruill Award) for Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000);

    Google Scholar 

  11. James Marten (Choice Outstanding Book Award) for The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998);

    Google Scholar 

  12. Michael Grossberg (Littleton-Griswold Award) for Governing The Hearth: Law And The Family In Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985);

    Google Scholar 

  13. Leroy Ashby (Choice Outstanding Book Award) for Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, And Abuse In American History (New York: Twayne, 1997);

    Google Scholar 

  14. William Tuttle (New York Times Outstanding Book) for “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);

    Google Scholar 

  15. and Linda Gordon (Bancroft and Beveridge Awards) for The Great Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

    Google Scholar 

  16. For example, see the Summer 2005 issue of the Journal of Social History, which is devoted to a consideration of “Globalization and Childhood.” See also Peter Stearns’s new survey, Childhood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006),

    Google Scholar 

  17. and Paula Fass, Children of a New World: Culture, Society, and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Paul Fatout, ed., Mark Twain Speaking (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976), 131.

    Google Scholar 

  19. For a notable exception to this generalization, see Barbara Beatty’s Preschool Education in America: The Culture of Young Children From the Colonial Era to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  20. James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 95.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Barbara Finkelstein, ed., Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psy-chohistorical Perspective (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979), 1–2.

    Google Scholar 

  22. See the following two recent historiographical essays: Ellen Lagemann, “Does History Matter in Education Research? A Brief for the Humanities in the Age of Science,” Harvard Education Review 75 (Spring: 2005): 9–24;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. and Rubin Donato and Marvin Lazerson, “New Directions in America Educational History: Problems and Prospects,” Educational Researcher 29 (November 2000): 4–15. These essays are very insightful and well written, but give little explicit attention to children.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Became Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 34;

    Google Scholar 

  25. John Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” William and Mary Quarterly 49 (April 1992): 298–320;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Russell Thornton, “Aboriginal North American Population and the Rates of Decline, ca. A.D. 1500–1900,” Current Anthropology 38 (April 1997): 310–15. For a somewhat different perspective that considers factors in addition to disease that contributed to population decline,

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. see Massismo Livi-Bacci, “The Depopulation of Hispanic America After the Conquest,” Population and Development Review 32 (June 2006): 199–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Larry Jones et al., “Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered: Demographic Crisis in Western North America During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly,” Current Anthro-pology 40 (April 1999): 137–70;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Robert Jackson, Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687–1840 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993),

    Google Scholar 

  30. and Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage and Sexuality in New Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

    Google Scholar 

  31. For descriptions of this disaster, see Dobyns, Their Number Became Thinned; Jackson, Population Decline; David Stannard, “Disease and Infertility: A New Look at the Demographic Collapse of Native Populations in the wake of Western Contact,” Journal of American Studies 24 (December 1990): 325–50;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Dobyns, “Puebloan Historic Demographic Trends,” Ethnohistory 49 (Winter 2002): 170–204; and Livi-Bacci, “The Depopulation of Hispanic America After the Conquest.”

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Margaret C. Szasz, “Native American Children,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook, ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 311–42; and Gutierrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away. For an insightful study of how whites interpreted epidemics among Native Americans,

    Google Scholar 

  34. see David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

    Google Scholar 

  35. Jim Potter, “Demographic Development and Family Structure,” in Colonial British America: Essay in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. John Greene and J. R Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 123–56;

    Google Scholar 

  36. and Ross W. Beales, “The Child in Seventeenth-Century America,” in American Childhood: A Research Guide and Hitorical Handbook, ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 3–56;

    Google Scholar 

  37. see also Douglas H. Ubelaker, “Patterns of Disease in Early North American Population,” in A Population History of North America, ed. Michael R Haines and Richard H. Steckel (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51–98; Henry A. Gemery, “The White Population of the Colonial United States, 1670–1790,” in A Population History of North America;

    Google Scholar 

  38. and Robert Wells, Revolutions in American’s Lives: A Demographic Perspective on the History of Americans, Their Families, and Their Society (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982).

    Google Scholar 

  39. Daniel M. Scott and Bernard Wishy, eds., America’s Families: A Documentary History (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 4.

    Google Scholar 

  40. Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, “Now Wives and Sons-in-Law: Parental Death in a Seventeenth-Century Virginia County,” in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Norton, 1979), 173.

    Google Scholar 

  41. Ubelaker, “Patterns of Disease”; Gemery, “White Population of the Colonial United States”; Schulz, “Children and Childhood in the Eighteenth Century”; and Jim Potter, “Demographic Development and Family Structure” in Colonial British America-: Essay in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. John Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 123–56

    Google Scholar 

  42. Lorena Walsh, “The African American Population of the Colonial United States; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love: Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985);

    Google Scholar 

  43. Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986);

    Google Scholar 

  44. and Jim Potter, “Demographic Development and Family Structure,” in Colonial British America: Essay in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. John Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 123–56.

    Google Scholar 

  45. Walsh, “African American Population of the Colonial United States”; Russell R Menard, “The Maryland Slave Population, 1685 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties,” William and Mary Quarterly 32 (January 1975): 29–54 and Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  46. For assessments of children in slavery during the antebellum period, see Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001);

    Google Scholar 

  47. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);

    Google Scholar 

  48. and J. C. Stone, Slavery Southern Culture, and Education in Little Dixie, Missouri, 1820–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also the August 2006 issue of Slavery and Abolition, which is a special issue devoted to “Children in European Systems of Bondage.”

    Google Scholar 

  49. Marcus Jernegan, Laboring and Dependent Classes in Colonial America (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1931);

    Google Scholar 

  50. Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985);

    Google Scholar 

  51. and Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  52. Nancy S. Dye and Daniel B. Smith, “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750–1920,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 329–53;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. and Daniel B. Smith, “The Study of Families in Early America: Trends, Problems, and Prospects,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (January, 1982): 3–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Peter Slater, “From the Cradle to the Coffin: Parental Bereavement and the Shadow of Infant Damnation in Puritan Society,” The Psychohistory Review 6 (1977–78): 32–51.

    Google Scholar 

  55. Cotton Mather, Victorina (Boston: B. Green, 1717). See also Maris A. Vinovskis and Gerald F. Moran, Religion, Family, and the Life Course (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 109–40, 209–31.

    Google Scholar 

  56. For an excellent recent collection of original essays on children in colonial America, See James Marten, ed., Children in Colonial America (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  57. Also see Peter Benes, ed., The Worlds of Children, 1620–1920, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (Boston: Boston University, 2002).

    Google Scholar 

  58. Sterling Fishman, “The Double Vision of Education in the Nineteenth Century: The Romantic and the Grotesque,” in Regulated Children/Liberated Children, 96–113; Barbara Finkelstein, “Casting Networks of Good Influence: The Reconstruction of Childhood in the United States,” in American Childhood, 111–52; Jacqueline S. Reinier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York, Twayne, 1996), 72–124;

    Google Scholar 

  59. and Priscilla S. Clement, Growing Pa-ins: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850–1890 (New York: Twayne, 1997), 150–85.

    Google Scholar 

  60. Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 1, 7.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Also see Gail S. Murray, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood (New York: Twayne, 1998), 51–116;

    Google Scholar 

  62. Charles Strickland, Victorian Domesticity: Families in the Life and Art of Louise May Alcott (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985);

    Google Scholar 

  63. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); and Judith A. Plotz, “The Perpetual Messiah: Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development,” in Regulated Children/Liberated Children, 63–95.

    Google Scholar 

  64. Wells, Revolutions in American’s Lives, 92. J. David Hacker argues that the major decline in general American fertility did not occur until after 1840, and that marital fertility remained high until after the Civil War. See J. David Hacker, “Rethinking the ‘Early’ Decline of Marital Fertility in the United States,” Demography 40 (November 2003): 605–20. By the late twentieth century, the number of children dropped below two per couple.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Also see Gloria L. Main, “Rocking the Cradle: Downsizing the New England Family,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (Summer 2006): 35–58.

    Google Scholar 

  66. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child; Donald H. Parkerson and Jo Ann Parkerson, “Fewer Children of Greater Spiritual Quality: Religion and the Decline of Fertility in Nineteenth-Century American,” Social Science History 12 (1988): 49–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Maris Vinovskis, “Family and Schooling in Colonial and Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987): 19–37;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  68. Susan B. Norton, “The Evolution of White Woman’s Experience in Early America,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 593–619;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  69. Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activitism: New York and Boston: 1790–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002);

    Google Scholar 

  70. Jane Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003);

    Google Scholar 

  71. and Julia Grant, “A ‘Real Boy’ and Not a Sissy: Gender, Childhood, and Masculinity, 1890–1940,” Journal of Social History 37 (Summer 2004): 829–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, “From Apron Strings to ABC’s: Parents, Children, and Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 39–80; Gerald Moran and Maris Vinovskis, “The Great Care of Godly Parents: Early Childhood in Puritan New England”;

    Google Scholar 

  73. and Charles Strickland, “Paths Not Taken: Seminal Models of Early Childhood Education in Jacksonian America,” in Handbook of Research in Early Childhood Education, ed. Bernard Spodek (New York: Free Press, 1982): 321–40.

    Google Scholar 

  74. Daniel S. Smith, “Child-Naming Practices, Kinship Ties, and Change in Family Attitudes in Hingham, Massachusetts, 1641–1800,” Journal of Social History 18 (Summer 1985): 541–66;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  75. and J. David Hacker, “Child Naming, Religion, and Decline of Marital Fertility in Nineteenth-Century America,” The History of the Family: An International Journal 4 (September 1999): 339–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  76. Charles Strickland, Victorian Domesticity, and Charles Strickland, “A Transcendentalist Father: The Child Rearing Practices of Bronson Alcott,” Perspectives in American History 3 (1969): 5–73.

    Google Scholar 

  77. William McLoughlin, “Evangelical Child-Rearing in the Age of Jackson,” Journal of Social History 9 (1975): 21–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  78. Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984);

    Google Scholar 

  79. and Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

    Google Scholar 

  80. Michael R. Haines, Lee A. Craig, and Thomas Weiss, “The Short and the Dead: Nutrition, Mortality, and the ‘Antebellum’ Puzzle’ in the United States,” Journal of Economic History 63 (June, 2003): 382–413;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991;

    Book  Google Scholar 

  82. Richard Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Wells, Revolutions in American’s Lives, 91–208.

    Google Scholar 

  83. For example, see Maris Vinovskis’ analysis of “The Crisis in Moral Education in Antebellum Massachusetts,” in his Education, Society, and Economic Opportunity: A Historical Perspective on Persistent Issues (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 45–72; and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Street-Rats and Gutter-Snipes: Child Pickpockets and Street Culture in New York City, 1850–1890,” Journal of Social History 37 (2004): 853–82.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  84. Roland Berthoff, An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).

    Google Scholar 

  85. Paul Gilje, “Infant Abandonment in Early Nineteenth-Century New York,” Signs 8 (1983): 580–90; Priscilla F. Clement, “The City and the Child, 1860–1885,” in American Childhood, 235–72; Ronald D. Cohen, “Child Saving and Progressivism, 1885–1925,” in American Childhood, 273–309;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  86. Selma Berrol, Growing Up American: Immigrant Children in America, Then and Now (New York: Twayne, 1995);

    Google Scholar 

  87. and Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 147–78, 213–44.

    Google Scholar 

  88. Joseph M. Hawes, Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971);

    Google Scholar 

  89. LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890–1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984);

    Google Scholar 

  90. Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mother’s Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000);

    Google Scholar 

  91. William Carp, ed., Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2002);

    Google Scholar 

  92. and Lori Askeland, ed., Children and Youth in Adoption, Orphanages, and Foster Care: A Historical Handbook and Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006)

    Google Scholar 

  93. N. Ray Hiner, “Children’s Rights, Corporal Punishment, and Child Abuse: Changing American Attitudes, 1870–1920,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 43 (1979): 233–48; Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny;

    Google Scholar 

  94. Barbara Finkelstein, “A Crucible of Contradictions: Historical Roots of Violence Against Children in the United States,” History of Education Quarterly 40 (Spring 2000): 1–21;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  95. and Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

    Google Scholar 

  96. Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);

    Google Scholar 

  97. William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to ‘No Child Left Behind’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2005);

    Google Scholar 

  98. James Marten, Childhood and Child Welfare in the Progressive Era: A Brief History With Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2004);

    Google Scholar 

  99. Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1980);

    Google Scholar 

  100. Patricia Rooke, “The Child Institutionalized in Canada, Britain, and the United States,” The Journal of Educational Thought 11 (August 1977): 156–71; Ronald D. Cohen, “Child Saving and Progressivism,” in American Childhood, 273–309;

    Google Scholar 

  101. Joseph M. Hawes, The Children’s Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection (Boston: Twayne, 1991);

    Google Scholar 

  102. Mary Ann Mason, From Father’s Property to Children’s Right: The History of Child Custody in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Richard Meckel, Save the Babies.

    Google Scholar 

  103. William J. Reese, “The Origins of Progressive Education,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Spring 2001): 1–24; Clement, “The City and the Child”; Cohen, “Child Saving and Progressivism”;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  104. D’Ann Campbell, “Judge Ben Lindsey and the Juvenile Court Movement,” Arizona and the West 18 (Spring 1976): 5–20; and Ashby, Saving the Waifs.

    Google Scholar 

  105. Clement, “The City and the Child”; Cohen, “Child Saving and Progressivism”; Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protesting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995);

    Google Scholar 

  106. Michael Katz, Reconstructing American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Dominick Cavallo, “The Politics of Latency: Kindergarten Pedagogy, 1860–1930,” in Regulated Children/Liberated Children, 158–83;

    Google Scholar 

  107. Barbara Finkelstein, Governing the Young: Teacher Behavior in Popular Primary Schools in Nineteenth-Century United States (New York: Falmer, 1989); Berrol, Growing Up American;

    Google Scholar 

  108. David Wolcott, Cops and Kids: Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005);

    Google Scholar 

  109. and David Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and Border School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

    Google Scholar 

  110. For a perceptive assessment of the lives of children in the rural Midwest, see Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). In her recent book, Karen Sanchez-Eppler emphasizes the role children played in creating their own social meaning: Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  111. Also see Marilyn Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Katz, Reconstructing American Education;

    Google Scholar 

  112. Susan Tiffin, In Whose Best Interest: Child Welfare Reform in the Progressive Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982);

    Google Scholar 

  113. Sherri Broder, Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children: Negotiating the Family in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002);

    Book  Google Scholar 

  114. Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999);

    Google Scholar 

  115. and Steven Lassonde, Learning to Forget: Schooling and Family Life in New Haven’s Working Class, 1870–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  116. Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Wishy, Child and the Republic; and Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  117. Also see Bernard Mergen, Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982),

    Google Scholar 

  118. and Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  119. See especially Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and Julia Grant, eds., When Science Encounters the Child: Perspectives on Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare in Twentieth Century America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  120. Also see Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Child Rearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2004);

    Google Scholar 

  121. Julia Grant, Raising Baby By the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998);

    Google Scholar 

  122. Hamilton Cravens, Before Head Start: The Iowa Station & America’s Children (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993);

    Google Scholar 

  123. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977);

    Google Scholar 

  124. Charles Strickland and Andrew M. Ambrose, “The Baby Boom, Prosperity, and the Changing Worlds of Children,” in American Childhood, 533–85; Nancy P. Weiss, “Mother, the Invention of Necessity: Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child CareAmerican Quarterly 29 (1977): 519–46;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  125. and Murray Levine and Adeline Levine, Helping Children: A Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

    Google Scholar 

  126. Elaine May, Born in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995);

    Google Scholar 

  127. Margaret Walsh and Wanda Ronner, The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child; and Wells, Revolutions in American’s Lives, 230–38, 241–62.

    Google Scholar 

  128. The large number of induced abortions can obviously be used as counter argument to this view. However, the number of legal abortions in the U.S. peaked in 1990 and slowly declined thereafter. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), 78–82.

    Google Scholar 

  129. Also see E. Brady Hamilton and Stephanie J. Ventura, “Fertility and Abortion Rates in the United States, 1960–2000,” International Journal of Andrology 29 (February 2006): 34–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  130. See especially Section 31, “20th Century Statistics,” in Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, 867–89; and Robert V. Daniel, The Fourth Revolution: Transformation in American Society from the Sixties to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2005). Also see Wells, Revolutions in American’s Lives, 211–85;

    Google Scholar 

  131. and John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

    Google Scholar 

  132. Charles King, Children’s Health in America: A History (New York: Twayne, 1993);

    Google Scholar 

  133. David Cutter, “The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advance: The Twentieth-Century United States,” Demography 42 (February 2005): 1–22;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  134. Alexandra M. Stern and Howard Markel, eds., Formative Years: Children’s Health in the United States, 1880–2000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002);

    Google Scholar 

  135. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States From Colonial Times to the Present (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); and Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000, 63–104, 874–79.

    Google Scholar 

  136. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, 65, 78, 88; and Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Children and Their Families: Current Conditions and Recent Trends (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989), 247.

    Google Scholar 

  137. Peter Uhlenberg, “Death and the Family,” Journal of Family History 5 (1980): 313–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  138. Walter Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970)

    Google Scholar 

  139. Hugh Hindman, Child Labor in American History; Jacqueline Jones, A Social History of the Laboring Classes From Colonial Times to the Present (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999);

    Google Scholar 

  140. Barry Franklin, From “Backwardness” to “At Risk”: Childhood Learning Difficulties and the Contradictions of School Reform (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994);

    Google Scholar 

  141. David Nasaw, Children of the City at Work and at Play (Garden City: Doubleday, 1985);

    Google Scholar 

  142. David I. Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890–1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998);

    Google Scholar 

  143. Joseph M. Hawes, Children Between the Wars: American Childhood, 1920–1940 (New York: Twayne, 1997); and Elliott West, Growing Up in the Twentieth Century, 220, 290–304.

    Google Scholar 

  144. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2000, 155–58; Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);

    Google Scholar 

  145. Ruben Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Era (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1997);

    Google Scholar 

  146. James D. Anderson, “The Jubilee Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education: An Essay Review,” History of Education Quarterly 44 (Spring 2004): 149–57;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  147. Victoria M. MacDonald, “Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or ‘Other’?: Deconstructing the Relationship Between Historians and Hispanic Cultural History,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (Fall 2001): 365–413;

    Article  Google Scholar 

  148. and Maris Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start: Pre School Education Policies in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  149. Roberta Wollons, ed., Children at Risk in America: History, Concepts, and Public Policy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  150. Carol K Coburn, Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 136–46, 148–51;

    Google Scholar 

  151. Kristi Lindenmeyer, The Greatest Generation Grows Up: American Childhood in the 1930s (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2005);

    Google Scholar 

  152. William M. Tuttle, Jr., “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of American Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);

    Google Scholar 

  153. and Michael Scheibach, Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945–1955 (Jefferson, NC: McFar-land, 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  154. Lisa Jacobson, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005);

    Google Scholar 

  155. David T Cook, The Commodification of Children, the Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004);

    Google Scholar 

  156. and Miriam For-manek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

    Google Scholar 

  157. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994);

    Google Scholar 

  158. Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994);

    Google Scholar 

  159. Margaret O. Steinfels, Who’s Minding the Children: The History and Politics of Day Care in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973);

    Google Scholar 

  160. LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne, 1997);

    Google Scholar 

  161. and John L. Rury, “Democracy’s High School? Social Change and American Secondary Education in the Post-Conant Era,” American Educational Research Journal 39 (Summer 2002): 307–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  162. See Alberto Palloni, “Reproducing Inequalities: Luck, Wallets, and Enduring Effects of Childhood health,” Demography 43 (November 2006): 588–615.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  163. Children’s Defense Fund, The State of America’s Children (Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund, 1991), 143, 148; and Statistical Abstract of the United States 2000, 58.

    Google Scholar 

  164. Ashby, Endangered Children, 150–78; James A. Chu, Rebuilding Shattered Lives (New York: John Wiley, 2001);

    Google Scholar 

  165. James A. Chu and Elizabeth C. Bowman, eds., Trauma and Sexuality: The Effects of Childhood Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Abuse on Sexual Identity (New York: Haworth Medical Press, 2003);

    Google Scholar 

  166. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Penquin Books, 1988);

    Google Scholar 

  167. and Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  168. Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Ashby, Endangered Children, 179–185.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  169. Henry Dwight Chapin, “The Rights of Childhood,” Good Housekeeping 69 (December 1919): 39–40.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Copyright information

© 2008 William J. Reese and John L. Rury

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hiner, N.R. (2008). Children in American History. In: Reese, W.J., Rury, J.L. (eds) Rethinking the History of American Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610460_7

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics