Publishers
Nurture the History of Childhood
New Book Series Join Recent Reference and Textbook Publications
Kathleen
W. Jones
If “coming of age” is marked by the willingness of
publishers to undertake projects in a new field of study, then
the history of children and youth has passed puberty! The young
adulthood of the field is particularly evident in the recent appearance
of four book series. These series join the set of six encyclopedias
recently published by ABC-CLIO as The American Family,
and two new textbooks Childhood in America (Paula Fass
and Mary Ann Mason, eds.) published by New York University Press
in 2000, and Major Problems in the History of Families and
Children (Anya Jabour, ed.) which will appear in Fall 2003
from Houghton-Mifflin. The new series will be published by Greenwood-Praeger,
Palgrave, and Ivan R. Dee and the SHCY members serving as editors
are actively seeking manuscripts in the history of children and
youth.
James Marten is editor of the Ivan R. Dee series, “American
Childhoods.” Books published under this rubric will revolve
around key events and time periods – the Civil War and the
Second World War, for example, or the Great Depression or the
1960s. The first volume in the series, Marilyn Irvin Holt’s
examination of children living on the Plains frontier in the nineteenth
century, is due out in Fall 2003. (See http://www.ivanrdee.com/fl_Holt_Children.htm
)
Priscilla Ferguson Clement and Jacqueline Reinier are the editors
of the Greenwood Praeger series entitled “Growing Up: History
of Children and Youth.” The editors are interested in studies
that focus on institutions and organizations that have impacted
the lives of children. Such studies should also demonstrate how
children themselves have influenced these organizations. Of particular
interest to the editors would be studies of organizations founded
by children and youth themselves, including church organizations,
bands, singing groups, gangs, and clubs.
Miriam Forman-Brunell is series editor for “Girls’
History and Culture,” sponsored by Palgrave, the academic
imprint of St. Martin’s Press. This series aims to address
a broad range of topics relevant to girls’ lived experiences
as both agents and subjects of their larger society. The first
work to be published in the series is “Some Wore Bobby Socks:
The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture, 1920-1950.”
More information on this series can be found in the Newsletter’s
“Girls’
History: History of Girls” column .
Forman-Brunell is also editor of a new reference book series,
“Children and Youth: History and Culture,” launched
by Greenwood Press. According to the editor, the series aims to
“situate girls and boys of all ages more centrally in dominant
historical narratives and to meet the research needs of students
of all ages.” Each book is to be organized in three parts:
part I consists of synthetic essays written by experts in the
field whose surveys are chronological and contextual; part II
provides access to relevant primary source documents, in part
of whole; part III is an extensive up-to-date bibliography of
cited sources as well as those critical for future research. Some
topics in the series (e.g. sickness and health, work and play,
etc.) take a broad historical approach while others utilize a
gendered, racial, or regional perspective.
Taken together these new series call attention to recent trends
in the history of children and youth. One is an interest in the
voices of children. According to James Marten, authors in the
Ivan R. Dee series will “explore their topics not only in
terms of what happened TO children, but also from children’s
unique points of view.” Clement and Rienier write that they
are interested in manuscripts that “emphasize the lived
experience of children and youth.” “Our concern is
that too many books about children and y outh in history are really
about the persons, institutions that acted upon young people and
not about the experiences of young people themselves. It often
takes some digging in a variety of primary sources to find the
voices . . . but we are convinced that it is possible and essential
to do just that.”
Equally important, editors of the new series are intent on complicating
the category of age. They call for manuscripts grounded in new
research on gender, race, class, ethnicity, region, and sexual
orientation. “As editors,” write Clement and Reinier,
“we are . . . concerned that working-class and minority
children have not been the central focus of much work in the history
of children and youth. Therefore, we are particularly interested
in studies of young people who are not middle-class as well as
of Native American children, Asian American children, Mexican-American
children or African-American children.” Or as Forman-Brunell
puts it, she is looking for works that “synthesize a century
of scholarship on children and adolescents of different classes,
races, genders, regions, religions, sexualities, and abilities.”
Finally,
the editors’ proposals suggest that an important goal of
the new field will be to make the historical experiences of children
and youth accessible to a broad reading public. This goal is reflected
in the value the editors attach to interdisciplinary approaches
to the study of children and youth. The Palgrave history series
grows out of recent interest in girls’ studies. The Ivan
R. Dee editor indicates that, whenever appropriate, submitted
manuscripts should be “interdisciplinary in nature, examining
such fields as children’s literature, evolving notions of
education and discipline, material culture, etc.” The interdisciplinarity
of the field is also evident in a fifth new series, “Childhood
Studies,” edited by Myra Bluebond-Langner, Director of the
Center for Children and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University
– Camden, and published by Rutgers University Press. Authors
for the Rutgers series are expected to come from fields including:
anthropology, criminal justice, literature, psychology, religion,
and sociology, as well as history. For more information on this
series see http://children.camden.rutgers.edu/pubs.htm#RUPress
May
these series represent only the beginning!
