Children in Colonial America, ed. by James Marten.  New York University, 2007.  253p bibl index afp ISBN 0-8147-5715-4, $70.00; ISBN 0814757162 pbk, $22.00; ISBN 9780814757154, $70.00; ISBN 9780814757161 pbk, $22.00. Reviewed in 2007dec CHOICE.
45-2207 E162  2006-19831 CIP
 
Marten (Marquette Univ., The Children's Civil War (CH, Jan'99, 36-2942); editor, Children and War, 2002) has edited 12 essays on the many diverse childhoods in Colonial America. Part 1, "Race and Colonization," looks at childhood in Mexico, New England, and Jamaica, and how Europeans used schools, churches, and slavery to reshape the lives of children there. Part 2, "Family and Society," focuses on sibling relationships in Philadelphia, child abuse in New Netherlands, and family networks in South Carolina. Part 3, "Cares and Tribulations," spotlights the high price that Pilgrim children paid for immigration in the 1620s, the continuing threats to Puritan children's health in the mid-18th century, and legal, familial, and religious problems of Quaker children's mental disability. Part 4, "Becoming Americans," examines the experiences of German Catholic girls who immigrated to the French Gulf South, the education of youth in 18th-century Philadelphia, and the politicization of children during the American Revolution. The volume contains illustrations and primary documents that complement and expand on the themes and arguments introduced in the essays. Because of their short length, many of these essays are suggestive, not definitive. Nevertheless, Marten is superbly successful in meeting his stated purpose of emphasizing the diversity of Colonial American childhoods. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All libraries. -- E. W. Carp, Pacific Lutheran University

Constructions of childhood in ancient Greece and Italy, ed. by Ada Cohen and Jeremy B. Rutter.  American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2008 (c2007).  429p bibl index afp (Hesperia, 41); ISBN 9780876615416 pbk, $75.00. Reviewed in 2008nov CHOICE.
46-1641 DE61  2007-27062 CIP
 
German scholarship of the 1920s discussed at length children in Classical and Hellenistic Greek societies. Mark Golden's Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (CH, Dec'90, 28-2299) created a subgenre of historical study by its close analysis of literary texts informed by material evidence. This volume, the fruit of a Dartmouth November 2003 conference, extends Golden's discussion in time (from the second millennium BCE to the seventh century CE), space (Greece to Etruscan and Roman Italy), and method (gender studies, literary analysis, osteology). Discussion of literary texts is scarcely scanted (including a fine survey of medical writers discussing teenage women), but the focus of most contributions is on material/artistic remains: frescoes, vase paintings, and funerary (especially Etruscan and Roman) art. Read as a whole, this volume significantly informs the understanding of how childhood was perceived (and experienced) in the ancient Mediterranean world. A volume of this sort demands, and receives, extensive illustration in black-and-white photographs, as well as in lucid line drawings. The editors offer thoughtful, insightful introductions, and warrant praise for a coherent volume. Overlap among contributions is minimal. A comprehensive bibliography and superb index make this economically priced volume attractive. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- P. B. Harvey, Jr., Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus

Honeyman, Katrina.  Child workers in England, 1780-1820: parish apprentices and the making of the early industrial labour force.  Ashgate, 2007.  340p bibl index afp ISBN 0-7546-6272-1, $99.95; ISBN 9780754662723, $99.95. Reviewed in 2008jun CHOICE.
45-5786 HD6250 2007-5525 CIP
 
This well-documented study is the first full account of pauper apprentices, the children bound most often to factory work by parishes anxious to reduce poor relief. Cotton manufacturers took particular advantage of such labor in the late 18th century. They received cash premiums from the parish and got young, nimble workers in exchange for promising maintenance and a modicum of education. Honeyman (Univ. of Leeds, UK) finds the practice widespread and not confined primarily to the shipment of London children north, as once thought. Contemporary testimony is hard to interpret since officials, employers, and even the children had motive to deceive. But Honeyman has evidence that weaker firms were the more negligent and that some parishes took a continuing interest in the apprentices, even if intervention seldom changed the grim conditions. Life in the workhouse was little better, but children in the cotton mills could face 14-hour days, night shifts, inadequate diet, corporal punishment, sexual abuse, and the prospect of earning no wages for half their working lives. Many apprentices ran away; to deter flight, others were denied shoes. Summing Up: Essential. Libraries supporting academic and research programs in history, upper-division undergraduate and up. -- G. F. Steckley, Knox College

Hsiung, Ping-chen.  A tender voyage: children and childhood in late imperial China.  Stanford, 2005.  351p bibl index afp ISBN 0-8047-4164-6, $70.00. Reviewed in 2006jan CHOICE.
43-2948 HQ792  2004-5497 CIP

Using exhaustive fictional and nonfictional Chinese sources, Hsiung (National Central Univ., Taiwan) examines the Chinese normative concept of childhood and its reality in three roughly equal-length sections: prenatal and infant care, social environment and childhood, and comparison of children and childhood in China and the West. In an ostensibly patriarchal society, tender mothers (tz'u-mu) performed an all-important and complex role that included emotional support, which stern fathers (yen-fu) could not or would not provide, according to Confucian normative standards. Hsiung concedes that the focus on gentry families (as dictated by the sources) limited any meaningful discourse on peasant families, who constituted more than 90 percent of the population in imperial China. Missing in the bibliography is Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber), a late imperial classic that best characterized the dynamics of a gentry family and the feminization of a boy whose childhood company was limited to female relatives and servants. Twenty-four Stories of Filial Piety, which Hsiung cites frequently, has long been superseded by Seventy-two Stories of Filial Piety, published in Taiwan. Ten pages of glossary add clarity to Chinese words and phrases. Forty-seven illustrations support the text. A definitive work. Summing Up: Essential. Highly recommended for all levels/libraries. -- H. T. Wong, emeritus, Eastern Washington University

Hunter, Jane H.  How young ladies became girls: the Victorian origins of American girlhood.  Yale, 2002.  478p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-09263-6, $40.00. Reviewed in 2003sep CHOICE.
41-0514 HT690  2002-6675 CIP

In this sophisticated, deeply researched study, Hunter (Lewis & Clark College) successfully challenges older interpretations of urban, middle-class, adolescent, Victorian girls as self-sacrificing dependents of their families. Skillfully using the manuscript diaries and letters of adolescent girls, Hunter discovers that even in such activities as reading and writing, they constructed interior lives that led to a "self conscious sense of individuality" that in turn "helped to construct the modern self." But it was above all through their attendance at female seminaries or coeducational high schools--at which they won awards for perfect attendance, exemplary behavior, or academic achievement activities--that these girls found "alternative sources of identity which subverted and helped to transform middle-class female culture." Going to high school also pulled them into the larger urban world where they participated in a peer culture of fun and made them into "new girls," a direct progenitor of the New Women of the next century. This important book should be read by everyone interested in the history of childhood, women, gender, and the Victorian US. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division and above. -- E. W. Carp, Pacific Lutheran University

Kelly, Catriona.  Children's world: growing up in Russia, 1890-1991.  Yale, 2008 (c2007).  714p index afp; ISBN 9780300112269, $45.00. Reviewed in 2009jan CHOICE.
46-2833 HQ792  2007-12118 CIP
 
Kelly's opus tells the "history of daily life as experienced by Russian children" in the 20th century. Her encyclopedic coverage includes theories of child raising, pedagogy, and the state's propaganda about children; the history of schools, orphanages, and cultural institutions; and the actual experiences of raising and being a child. Kelly (Oxford) demonstrates that the social history of children conforms to broader themes in Soviet history: prerevolutionary efforts at reform amid tradition and poverty; radical experimentation in the 1920s; increasing rigidity and conservatism in the 1930s-40s; and rising material opportunities and optimism in the 1950s-60s, followed by disillusionment in the 1970s-80s when the system could not deliver the anticipated goods and cynicism undermined official ideology. The author's exhaustive research, based largely on archival sources, oral interviews, and memoirs, is extremely impressive. However, readers may sometimes feel lost amid the overwhelming detail. The book would have benefited from tighter editing and perhaps from a less repetitive organizational structure, since each of the three sections begins in czarist Russia and ends in the 1990s. Nevertheless, this text is an important resource for anyone interested in Soviet social or cultural history, and essential for scholars of Soviet family life, education, and childhood. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. -- K. D. Slepyan, Transylvania University

King, Wilma.  African American childhoods: historical perspectives from slavery to civil rights.  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.  232p index ISBN 1-4039-6250-2, $75.00; ISBN 1403962510 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2006nov CHOICE.
44-1721 E185  2005-48688 CIP

These essays focus on the impact of major events in US history (e.g., the transatlantic slave trade, Civil War, Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement) on the lives of African American children. The papers shed light on African American groups not covered by traditional research, such as slave children raised in the households of doctors and lawyers, children who lived on plantations owned by free blacks, and children adopted by Indians and sent to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in the first decades of the 20th century. The collection also challenges the commonly held view of children's lives during the Depression, and offers insight into the bravery of children during the Civil Rights Movement. The book is divided into two parts. The first describes the period up to emancipation and the other depicts the lives of children during the 20th century. King (Univ. of Missouri-Columbia) has gleaned information from a variety of sources and supports her often-surprising findings with credible data and fine analysis. The only weak essay in this excellent collection is the afterword, which discusses contemporary African American children's lives. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. -- N. Zmora, Hamline University

Lindenmeyer, Kriste.  The greatest generation grows up: American childhood in the 1930s.  I.R. Dee, 2005.  394p index afp ISBN 1-56663-660-4, $27.50. Reviewed in 2006sep CHOICE.
44-0528 HQ792  2005-17643 CIP
 
The Great Depression was so devastating to most families that it truly acted as a watershed event in the lives of most children in the US. Lindenmeyer (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) demonstrates the growth of the idea that the federal government was responsible for promoting children's well-being. For the first time, the federal government, with its New Deal program, intervened in children's lives on a significant scale, enacting laws to end child labor and instituting financial aid to schools, foster care, public health, and dependent children. At the local level, compulsory attendance made high school a way of life for most adolescents. Lindenmeyer also covers children's play and entertainment and the Depression's commercialization of childhood. Her deeply researched history of US childhood escapes the distortions of "decade history" by deftly contextualizing these topics from their origins in the Roaring Twenties through their development in WW II. The analytic narrative is clear and concise, peppered with examples of the activities and behavior of children as seen through their own eyes. The result is a portrait of this remarkable decade that witnessed teenage tramps, sharecropper children, Nancy Drew, and Superman. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All libraries. -- E. W. Carp, Pacific Lutheran University

Minor omissions: children in Latin American history and society, ed. by Tobias Hecht.  Wisconsin, 2002.  277p afp ISBN 0-299-18030-1, $45.00; ISBN 0-299-18034-4 pbk, $21.95. Reviewed in 2003may CHOICE.
40-5373 HQ792  2002-3993 CIP

For anyone whose heart has ever ached for the legions of impoverished children crowding Latin American cities, this slim volume offers an explanation for the phenomenon, if not a panacea. In a thought-provoking collection of mostly academic essays on the subject of children from the colonial period to the present, which also includes a short story and a firsthand account of living on the streets, Hecht convinces us that studying how a society has treated its children gives insight into the broader problems and politics of that society. The themes raised in these essays range from indigenous peoples being treated as children by the colonizers, to differing colonial parental rights depending on gender, to the harsh realities of discrimination against children of illegitimate birth, a reality only recently (1998) declared illegal in Chile, for example. Race as well as gender is discussed. In one of the most interesting contributions, Ondina E. González (Gonzalez) suggests that, in Cuba, while abandoned white children were adopted by the state, and thus legitimized through a fictional 'noble' parentage, cast-off children of color were not afforded the same privileges. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- R. M. Delson, American Museum of Natural History

Mintz, Steven.  Huck's raft: a history of American childhood.  Belknap, Harvard, 2004.  445p index afp ISBN 0-674-01508-8, $29.95.  Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2005jul CHOICE.
42-6703 HQ792  2004-42220 CIP
 
Mintz (Univ. of Houston, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life, CH, Jan'89, 26-2866) has written an original interpretative synthesis, grounded in primary sources, of the history of childhood. He distinguishes three overlapping historical eras: the Colonial era (premodern childhood), when the young were viewed as adults in training; the mid-1750s to the 1950s (modern childhood), when children were viewed as innocent, malleable, and needing to be sheltered; and the 1950s to the present (postmodern childhood). The current era marks a superficial return to premodern childhood in that children are no longer considered innocent or naive, but differs radically because children are now independent consumers who participate in a semiautonomous youth culture. Within this periodization, Mintz skillfully emphasizes a number of important themes, especially the diversity of childhood in the US, which depends on a child's class, race, gender, ethnicity, or region. In doing so, he deflates numerous myths about the history of childhood, including the notions that childhood was carefree, families were stable, childhood was the same for all children, and that the US was particularly child friendly. This work will be indispensable to scholars and will enlighten the general public. Summing Up: Essential. All libraries. -- E. W. Carp, Pacific Lutheran University

Nicholas, Lynn H.  Cruel world: the children of Europe in the Nazi web.  Knopf, 2005.  632p bibl index ISBN 0-679-45464-0, $35.00. Reviewed in 2006apr CHOICE.
43-4896  D810   2004-57745 CIP 

Recently, this reviewer translated a December 1957 carbon copy of a colleague's aunt's German report about her efforts to rescue men and children in Holland in the late 1930s. In this book, Nicholas (The Rape of Europa, CH, Nov'94, 32-1695) properly places in context that aunt's efforts to save ordinary people from National Socialist abuse and the consequences of WW II. National Socialist racial policies affected every country from Spain to the Soviet Union and from Norway to Italy and Greece; hardly a corner of Europe was spared from their excesses. Aside from dastardly policies (sometimes exaggerated by local ethnic rivalries), intense warfare affected children. They were dislocated, imprisoned, shot at, bombed out, deprived of homes and parents, starved, and killed. Even those whom these horrors barely touched (in this reviewer's case, on a farm in the Dolomites where his father wisely placed his two sons) can never fully recover or forget. Nicholas places children's experiences in the context of the unspeakable violence Europeans endured for nearly 20 years. Her exceptional book ought to be read by every policy maker as a reminder that children are the ones most likely to suffer, inexcusably, from ethnic intolerance and war. Summing Up: Essential. Most levels/libraries. -- P. Petschauer, Appalachian State University

Palmer, Rosemary Gudmundson.  Children's voices from the trail: narratives of the Platte River road.  Arthur H. Clark, 2002.  336p bibl index afp  (American trails series, 20) ISBN 0-87062-313-3, $39.50. Reviewed in 2003mar CHOICE.
40-4208 F596   2001-47474 CIP 
 
This insightful, exhaustively researched, methodologically sophisticated book has a subtitle that may keep it from the wider readership it deserves. The "Platte River Road," a term used by the emigrants themselves, refers to the central trail that followed the Platte River and eventually divided into three trails destined for California, Oregon, and Utah. "Narratives" suggests an edited volume of primary sources; instead, Palmer provides a critical analysis of first-person accounts, including 23 children's diaries, letters, and journals and 430 memoirs of adults who were children when they traveled the Platte River Road. What sets Palmer's book apart from others of this genre, such as Elliott West and Paula Petrik, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950 (1992), is her success in telling the story from the child's viewpoint. Palmer accomplishes this by comparing contemporary children's sources with the memoirs of adults looking back to understand better what children actually understood on the overland trip West. The book covers a myriad of subjects, including children's relationships with parents and siblings; their perceptions of fellow emigrants; and reading matter, games, and etiquette, always careful to make age and gender distinctions. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels and libraries. -- E. W. Carp, Pacific Lutheran University

Rawson, Beryl.  Children and childhood in Roman Italy.  Oxford, 2003.  419p bibl indexes afp ISBN 0-19-924034-5, $99.00. Reviewed in 2004jun CHOICE.
41-6065  DG91   MARC 
 
Rawson (emer., Australian National Univ.) is well-known among classicists and historians for her well-researched, highly readable expert studies on various aspects of the ancient family. This new work focusing on children is no simple narrative: Rawson is as concerned to discuss exactly how ancient literary sources (and modern scholars) view children as she is to attempt a largely successful narrative of the "life course" (birth to premature death or the transition to adolescence) of children in ancient Roman Italy. That geography is specific and appropriate: the evidence in Roman provinces might (and does) offer distinction. Her focus is primarily on the well-documented era 100 BCE to c. 225 CE (the equally well-documented fourth century CE offers abundant material for yet another work). Rawson has profitably mined modern scholarship (e.g., Garnsey, Saller, Golden), and has incorporated a wealth of source material that many analysts have passed over lightly, such as inscriptional evidence and legal sources. For a text that covers so much so well, it may be unfair to single out a particular chapter. Nonetheless, Rawson's discussion of education stands out as a necessary supplement and revision to the old standard studies by Bonner and Marrou. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- P. B. Harvey, Jr., Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus

Remembering childhood in the Middle East: memoirs from a century of change, comp. and ed. by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea.  Texas, 2002.  354p afp ISBN 0-292-72546-9, $65.00; ISBN 0-292-72547-7 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2003jun CHOICE.
40-5978  DS615  2002-4651 CIP 
 
There are not many books on children in the Middle East. To remedy this, Fernea (Univ. of Texas, Austin) brings together 36 autobiographical notes from men and women of Middle Eastern origins, representing eight ethnic groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Palestine, Israel, Iran, Tunisia, Morocco, Kuwait, and Sudan. Authors were asked to write about their childhood as they wished, thus producing a variety of styles and topical coverage. All contributions reconstruct the childhood experiences of a generation of well-educated and successful men and women who were either educated in the West or had close contact with it (a third have had some connection with author's institution). They all have witnessed the transitions of their native countries to modern societies over the past century. The century-long coverage and prominent roles of some of the subjects result in historical documentation of key events, helpful to both general readers and historians. Fernea's periodization and introduction to each period help to contextualize these autobiographies. Though not as representative as it could have been, this is an excellent collection by a scholar who has spent her lifetime learning about women and children in the Middle East. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All libraries. -- A. Mahdi, Ohio Wesleyan University

Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela.  Childhood on the farm: work, play, and coming of age in the Midwest.  University Press of Kansas, 2005.  300p bibl index afp ISBN 0-7006-1388-9, $34.95. Reviewed in 2005nov CHOICE.
43-1799  F354   2005-911 CIP 
 
Riney-Kehrberg (agricultural history and rural studies, Iowa State Univ.) adds to the growing field of childhood studies with this discussion of themes of work, school, play, and child welfare protection in four states (Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa), plus the eastern halves of Nebraska and Kansas. Photos are a particular strength of the work, and there is a balance between general observations and local stories. A photo essay between chapters 4 and 5 is taken from the Krueger Papers in Dodge County, WI. After utilizing voices and sources from the late 19th and early 20th centuries as much as possible, the author in the epilogue gives herself over to historical memory in memoirs and family histories written by rural authors recalling their childhoods. Thus, the book will be useful not only to historians of childhood, but also to rural and agricultural historians and those engaging in extensive discussions of memory in US history. Riney-Kehrberg supplements histories of the Midwest by Jon Gjerde, Mary Neth, David Danbom, and others by listening to the stories of rural children and youth. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- S. D. Reschly, Truman State University

Savage, Jon.  Teenage: the prehistory of youth culture, 1875-1945.  Penguin, 2007.  551p bibl index; ISBN 9780140254150 pbk, $17.00.  Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2008oct CHOICE.
46-1102 HQ796  2006-36229 CIP 
 
There are now three recent, solid histories of the teenager: Thomas Hine's The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (1999), Grace Palladino's Teenagers: An American History (1996), and this comparative study, by a skilled writer with a deep knowledge of music and popular culture. Presented in 30 chapters that treat the German, British, and French experiences as well as the US, the book focuses on the world wars and the years between. Although some of the material and interpretative frameworks are by now familiar--the role of G. Stanley Hall in conceptualizing adolescence, the rise of the teenage consumer, the countercultural importance of jazz and swing music, juvenile delinquency, the pre-WW II origins of teenage culture, the impact abroad of US mass culture--Savage's emphasis on the callous indoctrination and exploitation of youth by governments and older people (a form of generational warfare), and on the response of teenagers to these efforts, sets this book apart. The chapters on Nazi Germany are exceptionally powerful, but the author presents every topic in an engaging and thoughtful way. Undergraduates will be fascinated. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.. -- W. Graebner, emeritus, SUNY Fredonia

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