NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Launching the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth
Martha Saxton

The editors and the Society are delighted to offer the first issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth featuring an array of most distinguished scholars engaged in the study of children and childhood.  (Subscribe  to the Jounal.)

Our first issue opens with Paula Fass’s invitation to participate in a broadly expansive field that she describes as global in scope and breathtakingly interdisciplinary, drawing not only on history’s traditional allies like sociology, anthropology, and psychology, but fields like neurobiology.  In keeping with these ambitions, a variety of distinguished contributors like Peter Stearns, Bianca Premo, and Hsiung Ping-chen provide assessments of the state of the field in the U.S. and abroad, its progress and its challenges. 

A roundtable of thoughtful scholars from a recent SHCY conference assess the ways in which age as a category of analysis opens possibilities for analyzing history that produces unique and otherwise unattainable insights, both about children and childhood but also about society, its values and conflicts.

In addition, we have included policy pieces by legal and immigration expert Jacqueline Bhabha, and by anthropologists Alcinda Honwana on child soldiers and Pamela Reynolds on the shortcomings of the  South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission on documenting the enormous role of children in the overthrow of apartheid.

Finally, we inaugurate a permanent feature of the new Journal: the object lesson.  In this issue, we are proud to present Wendy Ewald’s haunting photographs of a refugee boy from the war torn Democratic Republic of Congo hoping for a new life free of violence and chaos in United Kingdom.

The Journal  is to be launched on February 9, 2008 by five public presentations at GENERATION, a one-day conference at Amherst College.  The launch event is sponsored collaboratively by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, Smith College, and the Five College Childhood Studies Faculty Seminar.