News
from the Field I: Conferences and Exhibits
Janet Golden and David Pomfret, Contributing Editors
Conference
News:
The annual meeting of the American Association for the History
of Medicine (AAHM) featured a number of panels and individual
papers on the history of child health including Jessa Chupik,
"'Is He Crying for Home?': The Relationship between Families,
Confined Children and the Orillia Asylum, 1900-1930," Ann
S. Blum, "Medicine and Motherhood: Infant Feeding in Mexican
Public Welfare, 1898-1910," Jeffrey P. Brosco, "More
than the Names Have Changed: The Prevalence of Mental Retardation
in the United States," "Stephen G. Pemberton, "'Normality
Within Limits': Making Hemophilic Boys into Men," Sharra
Vostral, "From Girl to Young Woman: Media, Material Culture
and Menstruation in the Post-War United States," and Jeffrey
P. Baker, "The British Whooping Cough Epidemics of 1978 and
1982: Debating the Impact of a Vaccine Revolt." Information
about the AAHM can be found at www.histmed.org
Exhibits:
Visit: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/orphans/english/
to see Open Hearts Closed Doors: the War Orphans Project,
produced by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre in Vancouver,
BC, Canada. The exhibit includes orphan's stories, personal artifacts,
audio and visual. Teachers, students, and interested visitors
will find the material to be printed for classroom or personal
use.
Invention
at Play: This exhibition, developed by the Lemelson Center
at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Behring
Center, in partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota brings
a fresh perspective to the topic of invention. It explores the
marked similarities between the ways children play and the creative
processes used by innovators in science and technology. Next stop
for this traveling exhibit is the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix,
June 1-August 31, 2003. After that the exhibit travels to COSI
Columbus in Columbus, Ohio from October 1 - December 31, 2003.
Ellen
Sue Blakey of the Dancing Bear Folk Center in Thermopolis, WY
reports that this new children's museum, 120 miles southeast of
Yellowstone always has on exhibit model trains, teddy bears, dolls,
children's and doll's china and furniture, toys,games, etc. Check
out the webpage: http://server1.dancingbear.org/
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany currently
has an exhibit called "Schauplätze der Kindheit"
about the history of childhood from 1800 to 2000. The exhibit
includes clothes of children, toys, and photographs. For more
information visit: http://www.mkg-hamburg.de/
The Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal has a new 2,500
square-foot national traveling exhibit available: Children
Just Like Me. It showcases the diversity of the world's children
while also exploring their common bonds. For more information
visit the website: http://www.cincymuseum.org/cmc/information/exhibits.html
The next stop for Kid Size - The Material World of Childhood
will be the Centro de Exposiciones de Benalmadena, in Spain, beginning
in December of this year. After that it goes to the Oklahoma City
Museum of Art and then the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. This
exhibition aims to explore and critically illuminate the changing
relationships between children and adults as expressed by their
immediate, everyday material environments in societies in and
beyond the Western world.
Cross-cultural patterns of adult provision for children are traced
through a geographically diverse selection of furniture and other
daily artefacts. A comprehensive catalogue has been published
in English, German and Japanese. The exhibit was developed at
the Vitra Design Museum in Berlin.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Musuem will be opening an
exhibition on Hidden Children in the fall of 2003. For
more information visit the website: http://www.ushmm.org/
A
note from "News" editors, Janet and David:
if you see any of the exhibits noted above or other exhibits relating
to the history of children and youth, please send us a brief review
and we'll include it in the next issue of the newsletter. You
can contact David Pomfret at pomfretd@hkucc.hku.hk and Janet Golden
at jgolden@camden.rutgers.edu
