News from the Field

Compiled by David Pomfret

This column provides a brief introduction to recent English-language publications that may be of interest to scholars working on the History of Childhood and Youth.

The emergence of a range of works on childhood and youth in the colonial context has been traced across the last few editorials. This trend has continued with Children in Colonial America editited by James Marten and recently published by New York University Press. The book contains chapters on race, family and society, illness and the formation of national identity.

Also recently published with New York University Press is Children of a New World: Society, Culture and Globalizationby Paula S. Fass, containing chapters on children and immigration, IQ, the construction of identity, kidnapping, post-war technology and the process of globalisation.

Childhood in World History (London: Routledge, 2006) by Peter N. Stearns offers an impressively wideranging study of childhood from classical civilisation to the twenty-first century.

James M.M. Francis also contributes to the study of childhood in the ancient world, engaging with the Ariès thesis in his study of childhood in religious discourse, Adults as Children: Images of Childhood in the Ancient World and the New Testament (Oxford: Lang, 2006).

Diane L. Wolf’s, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) adds to recent work on childhood in the Holocaust by tracing the history and memory of Jewish children hidden during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The book goes beyond the period of occupation, covering the pre- and post-war context.

New work on the relatively understudied period of eighteenth century Europe has recently appeared in the form of Anja Muller’s edited collection of essays, Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). The essays, by a number of scholars, span a variety of topics, with a particular emphasis on fashion, medicine, law, consumption and delinquency.

Proximate in its chronological focus, Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800(New York: Routledge, 2006) edited by Andrea Immel and Michael Witmore, adds to the lively field of the history of children’s literature. The essays in this volume cover topics such as adoption, family relations, time and socialization in relation to children’s books.

Another contribution to this field, focusing upon the publishing industry in the interwar period, is Jacalyn Eddy’s, Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing, 1919-1939(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).