NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

News from the Field, Recent Publications
Compiled by David Pomfret, University of Hong Kong

This column provides a brief introduction to recent English-language publications potentially of interest to scholars working on the History of Childhood and Youth.

A recent survey of newly published work reveals the continued strong output of memoirs and autobiographies relevant to the History of Childhood and Youth. Amongst the latest works of note to appear are Chameleon days : an American boyhood in Ethiopia by Tim Bascom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), which provides a personal narrative of events which impacted upon the author’s childhood and youth, notably the revolution of 1974. Also on Africa, this time Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), Lauren St. John’s, Rainbow’s end : a memoir of childhood, war and an African farm (New York: Scribner, 2007) provides a first hand account of a white girl’s experience during the Chimurenga (civil) war in the late 1970s.

On the United States in the early twentieth century Little heathens: hard times and high spirits on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression by Mildred A. Kalish has recently been published (New York: Bantam, 2007). Another first hand account, also dealing with Iowa is Dwight W. Hoover’s, A good day’s work: An Iowa farm in the Great Depression (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007). Hoover’s is an account of social life, customs and coming of age in Mahaska County in the depression years.

In Europe, David Gur’s, Brothers for resistance and rescue: the underground Zionist youth movement in Hungary during World War II (Jerusalem ; New York : Gefen, 2007) is an insider’s account of anti-fascist resistance in Eastern Europe. Also covering the Second World War in Europe is Beatrice Ost’s, My father’s house : a childhood in wartime Bavaria, which has been translated from the German (New York : Helen Marx, 2007). Benno Benninga’s, In hiding : surviving an abusive ’protector’ and the Nazi occupation of Holland (London/Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007) is another recent addition to the Library of Holocaust Testimonies Series.

Recent noteworthy contributions to the field of the History of Childhood and Youth by professional historians include Luke Springman’s Carpe Mundum: German youth culture of the Weimar Republic (Frankfurt am Main : P. Lang, 2007), a welcome addition to studies of youth culture in interwar Europe, focusing upon literature and other media. A pioneer in the field of the History of Childhood in modern France, Colin Heywood has recently contributed a new and valuable study, Growing up in France : from the Ancien Régime to the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Postwar era is continuing to attract attention from Historians of Childhood and Youth and, staying in France, Richard Ivan Jobs,’ Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007) is an admirable example. His contribution to this relatively understudied field covers themes such as politics, reconstruction, delinquency, and cultural representations of youth in film and comic strips. Jaimey Fisher’s Disciplining Germany : youth, reeducation, and reconstruction after the Second World War (Detroit : Wayne State University Press, c2007) meanwhile looks at some similar issues, while tackling the question of German Youth’s role in Nazism afresh, discussing issues of guilt and memory, reconstruction and pedagogy into the Cold War epoch.

On the premodern period, Growing up in the Middle Ages is a new book published by Paul B Newman (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2007). Meanwhile offering some interesting insights into the burgeoning area of childhood and youth in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe is Mary Hilton’s, Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain, 1750-1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Finally, a potentially valuable resource for the students of those teaching courses on childhood and youth is a new work with an interdisciplinary focus, edited by Vibiana Bowman, entitled, Scholarly resources for children and childhood studies : a research guide and annotated bibliography (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007). The book contains a chapter on ‘Defining the Field of Childhood Studies’ and also covers issues of research and writing in this field with contributions from the methodological perspectives of anthropologists, art historians, educationalists, historians, psychologists, and sociologists.