News from the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

 

The JHCY has entered its second year!  Volume 2, issue 1 is on the shelf. 

 

Our upcoming issue, vol.2, issue 2, focuses on varying social responses to disease and death among children. A series of three essays looks at the development of seaside hospitals at the turn of the twentieth century in three countries: the U.S., Sweden, and Belgium.  Separately, the authors give us fascinating pictures of differing national responses to the plague of tuberculosis among children. Together, these sometimes overlapping and sometimes contrasting ideas about what constituted proper treatment and a salubrious environment for afflicted children offer a comparative perspective on Progressive Era thinking on childhood, modernization, philanthropy, medicine, and psychology.

 

Working in the same period, Australian scholar Shurlee Swain shows how constricted a view British reformers had of  what should constitute childhood for poor children in their  responses to infant mortality. And Diane Pasulka writes on the history of narrative depictions of the dying child in North America.  She demonstrates important thematic similarities over three centuries and gives useful historical context to the famous nineteenth-century literary images of child death, like the famous demise of  Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lauren Winner, writing on eighteenth-century America, introduces this issue’s object lesson: an elegant, silver baptismal bowl from Virginia that also doubled as a vessel for cooling wine glasses. Professor Winner helps us understand how an object that was designed to welcome children to this life and to insure their entry into a better one could also double as an aid to that most secular of pursuits, drinking wine, and what that suggests about the role of children in eighteenth-century gentry life.