News
From the Field
Janet
Golden and David Pomfret, Contributing Editors
Exhibits:
The
Ybor City Museum Society has just installed Growing up Ybor:
toys, games, and childhood pastimes in early Ybor City.
Ybor City (now in Tampa,FL) was a community founded in 1886 by
cigar manufacturer Vicente Martinez Ybor. This planned urban environment
attracted thousands of immigrant workers: Cubans,Spaniards, Sicilians,
and Jews. Growing up Ybor uses photographs from its permanent
collection (most dating from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries)
as well as artifacts (handmade and early manufactured toys, books,
and board games) along with text to evoke the unique experience
of childhood in this neighborhood. For
location and hours see http://www.ybormuseum.org/
At
the New-York Historical Society see: The Games We Played: Victorian
Games From the Linnam Collection Gift. This is a playful
explorationof board games as expressive documents of our nation's
complex cultural history. A majority of the more than 150 games
in the exhibit were manufactured in New York City from the end
of the Civil War through the early years of the 20th century.
The games document the official values and aspirations of
the United States as it strained to absorb millions of new immigrants,
ascended to international commercial power, and experienced a
shift from predominantly agrarian to urban living. Materials on
view are from the recently acquired Liman Collection of Board
and Table Games, a nearly definitive collection of over 550 American
board games, card games, andpuzzles gathered over two decades
by astute New York City collectors Ellen and the late Arthur Liman.
A rotating selection of games from the Liman Collection
will be continually on view in the Society's recently-opened Henry
Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. For details
see: http://www.nyhistory.org/
The
Old Salem Museum in Winston-Salem North Carolina is opening the
Toy Museum on November 16. It will be a 1700-year
survey of toys featuring those owned and used by the Moravians
who settled in the area from 1766 to the 1850s. These include
a unique collection of wooden German toys and locally made dolls.
Also included in the exhibit Romano-English and later Elizabethan
toys excavated from London's Thames River, silver, brass and ivory
miniatures in a 1740 aristocratic baby house, while bronze and
carved wooden firearms. In addition there are board games, puzzles
and other parlor toys from the nineteenth century and basic
wax and papier-mache dolls played with by Moravian girls during
this same time period. exported throughout the world. For more
information visit www.oldsalem.org
Traveling in Germany? Here are some museums to check out:
Berlin: The Museum of Childhood and Youth collects and does
research into aspects of the history of childhood in Germany in
the last 200 years. Permanent exhibits include: 1) An excursion
through childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from
birth to 18; 2) Berlin school children 100 years ago: How did
they live? How did they learn? Visit the website www.berlin-kindheitundjugend.de
for more information.
Nurmberg: The Germanisches National Museum is how exhibiting its toy collection in a 1910 building
originally erected as an Infant School.
The ground floor features doll houses of the seventeenth
century among other exhibits.
On the first floor boys and girls toys are displayed in
order to examine the gender-specific education of children and
artistic toys of the 20th century are also displayed
as part of an exhibit showing the ifnluence of educational reform
on ideas about children's creativity.
The focal point of the second floor is parlor games for
children and adults.
For more information go to: www.kubiss.de
Profile:
Center for Children and Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden
The Center for Children and Childhood Studies promotes understanding,
enrichment and the recognition of the significance of the experiences
of childhood through support of intellectual inquiry, development
and evaluation of service and outreach programs for children,
dissemination of knowledge to those directly responsible for
ministering to children's needs and formulating policies affecting
their lives and futures and the development of innovative and
interdisciplinary courses.
The Center supports an interdisciplinary academic minor
in Childhood Studies that includes mentored research and structured
field placements. It
also brings together faculty, fellows and students in a monthly
seminar series. A
number of historians are Center Associates including one of
this year's Junior Fellows, Cynthia Connolly, a Postdoctoral
Fellow at Columbia University School of Health who will be presenting
her work "Prevention Through Detention: The Pediatric Tuberculosis
Movement in the United States, 1909-1945." For more information about the Center
visit http://children.camden.rutgers.edu
