News
from the Field II: Recent Publications and New Web Resources
Janet Golden and David Pomfret, Contributing Editors
Recent
Publications:
The University Press of the Sorbonne, Paris, has published a collection
of essays discussing the theme of growing up in France, entitled,
Lorsque l'enfant grandit: Entre dépendance et autonomie.
This volume, the result of the colloquium held in Paris in September
2000 (mentioned in the last bulletin), has been edited by Jean-Pierre
Bardet, Jean-Nol Luc, Isabelle Robin-Romero, and Catherine Rollet.
Though the main emphasis in the essays contained therein is modern
and early modern Europe, some studies of childhood in ancient
and medieval times also feature. And while France forms the main
geographical focus, some discussion of the theme in relation to
the Italian, Polish, Swiss, Spanish, English, Norwegian and Swedish
is included.
Amongst newly-published works on the history of childhood and
youth in Europe there has been a notable recrudescence in work
on delinquency. Sarah Fishman’s The Battle for Children:
World War II, Youth Crime, and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century
France (Harvard, 2002) and the volume edited by Pam Cox and
Heather Shore, Becoming Delinquent : British and European
Youth, 1650-1950 (Ashgate, 2002) are two examples. A
Century of Juvenile Justice (University of Chicago, 2002),
edited by Margaret K. Rosenheim, Franklin E. Zimring, David S.
Tanenhaus, and Bernardine Dohrn is notable also for its profile
of the legal position of the ‘juvenile’ in Europe.
A
new contribution to the historical study of youth in medieval
and early-modern Europe is The Premodern Teenager: Youth in
Society, 1150-1650, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler (Centre
for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002).
New
Web Resources:
The Adoption History Project, a digital history
project can be found online at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adoption.
University of Oregon Professor Ellen Herman has created the first
web site on the history of child adoption in the United States.
The site profiles ng people, organizations, topics, and studies
that shaped modern American adoption in theory and practice. It
includes hundreds of images and primary documents illustrating
such topics as: the orphan trains; infertility; eugenics; baby
farming; and transracial, international, and special needs adoptions.
More information on the website can be found at "Public
Launch for the Adoption History Project," in this Newsletter.
The
New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce that it will
be piloting an innovative new interactive public history project
called Telling Lives, developed by American History Workshop
with grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
and the University of Toronto. The pilot's theme is "Going
to School," and the goal is to collect hundreds of memories
from New Yorkers and others about their earliest experiences of
classrooms, teachers, and playground adventures. For more details,
see the news announcement issued by the NY Historical Society
on June 3 and reprinted as "New
Public History Project: Telling Lives" in this Newsletter.
