Websightings – Learning about the History of Childhood Online

Sean Martin

Thinking of the recent commemorations of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and our society’s interest in appealing to scholars in many different fields, I originally set out to search for websites related to the history of childhood around the world and issues of ethnicity, discrimination, and segregation. This proved to be a fairly difficult task, because of the relative recent history of both the field of childhood studies and the Internet. I must also admit that I only looked for sites in English, obviously a serious limitation. I began simply by searching for sites on Google, using my limited knowledge of other researchers and programs as a starting point as well as relevant keywords. I keyed in general terms such as “history of children” and “history of childhood” together with the names of different regions and countries. As a historian of the experience of children in Eastern Europe, I am especially interested in sites devoted to other regions and comparative perspectives, and I intentionally excluded any sites primarily concerned with American history.

My experience taught me much about both the advantages and limitations of researching online. Not surprisingly, I was able to locate specialists in the field without any difficulty, and a few websites provided me with a significant amount of information about these specialists’ interests. But, outside of online databases of articles from academic periodicals, websites providing scholarly content in areas related to the history of childhood around the world seem to be few and far between. Having said that, there were many surprises, indicating how useful online research can be and suggesting even more possibilities. Here’s what I found, by region. Not all regions or cultures are represented; my search was by no means exhaustive. Some of my discoveries were not always specifically about history or directly related to the themes of discrimination and segregation, but I felt they might be useful for those with special interests. If readers know of any other sites that could be added to such a list, I would be very happy to include them.

General
http://www.unicef.org UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund offers a wealth of information on the current state of the world’s children. Though this site will not necessarily help the historian with the details of the past history of childhood, it might prove very helpful for the area specialist seeking current information. The homepage provides a list of special reports on countries in crisis (Sudan, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Iraq). Most useful are links to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (http://www.unicef.org/crc) and to specific countries. The specific country sites provide basic demographic information as well as extensive reports on the situation of children. Other links lead to resources for both students and teachers. One such link is the Voices of Youth, a site dedicated to youth responding to the international AIDS crisis. Resources for teachers include short films on many different topics, such as the history of the first fifty years of UNICEF or the trafficking of young girls in Albania. Most important is the link to the research arm of UNICEF, the Innocenti Research Centre, located in Florence, Italy. The activities of the Innocenti Research Centre concern primarily social science research, and many of the publications can be downloaded from the site or ordered.

http://www.teachglobaled.net Teachglobaled.net is the result of a collaborative project between the Ohio State University Social Studies and Global Education program, Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change, and Ohio State University’s regional studies centers. The site provides links and brief reviews of online, print, and film resources in many fields. All resources on the site have been reviewed and deemed appropriate for K-12 educators. This remarkable collection of sites, covering all major geographic areas and themes such as globalization and global education, will be of interest to anyone working in any area studies field. Nearly all of the sites will be of interest to university researchers. A must for area studies specialists.

http://www.beyondthefire.net An excellent new website developed by Sesh Kannan and hosted by the Independent Television Service, “Beyond the Fire” allows visitors to explore the stories of fifteen teenagers around the world who have lived through the experience of war. The stories of teens from Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and Liberia are the core of the site. Visitors acquire a “passport” that allows them to travel from one location to another, hearing the stories of individual teens. Supplementing the voiceover narration of the teens are short films and a timeline with a brief history of important events. The site is geared toward secondary teachers; lesson plans, developed by Michael Hutchison, are included along with many other resources. Special features allow teens to leave messages responding to the stories and to answer specific questions related to a country’s history. Students at any level with an interest in the subject will benefit from viewing the site. An extensive list of links directs visitors to sites on Sudanese music and Somali history, among other topics.

http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~Edaniel_schugurensky/The homepage of a faculty member at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, this site offers a wealth of general material on education, including a link to “History of Education: Selected Moments,” a scholarly, quirky, and entertaining chronology of important moments in education. The selected moments range from “Rabindranath Tagore starts school combining Western and Indian philosophies” in 1901 to “Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s legendary teacher-President, dies at 77” in 1999. The length of the text for each entry varies, but bibliographic citations are given for each. This is an excellent site for someone who wants to get a quick overview of the history of education or learn a bit more about education in other contexts.

http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/ses/ifs/index.asp The newly formed International Froebel Society can be found online at the University of Surrey Roehampton. At present the site only includes information about the group’s July 2004 conference, but abstracts from the conference’s plenary speakers on the development of kindergartens in Germany and the United States, advocacy and early childhood, and play and learning suggest the society’s future is promising.

Africa
http://www.ohiou.edu/afrchild/ The Institute for the African Child is housed at Ohio University. This site offers information about the activities sponsored by the Institute, including conferences on sports and youth, children and Islam, and the African girl. Most helpful are the abstracts and, in some cases, complete papers that are posted for most of the conferences listed. The Center’s interdisciplinary approach assures a diversity of material is available. Scholars may also appreciate the Related Links. Here many different sites are listed, most related to children’s advocacy, but detailed descriptions help the reader sort through the material. Detailed information about faculty members’ research interests also makes this a useful site for the scholar wishing to establish contacts in the field.

http://www.lostboysfilm.com The official site of the documentary film Lost Boys of Sudan, this site describes briefly the plight of Sudanese refugees and their journey to the United States. The site doe not offer much historical background, but there is complete information about the film and short biographies of the filmmakers Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk. There is also a link to http://www.lostboysofsudan.com, a site developed as a place for the refugees to meet online.

Latin America
http://www.zonalatina.com This site primarily focuses on media and marketing in the region, but one section, Latin American Children’s Resources, offers links to many different sites that might be of interest to scholars, especially scholars of popular culture. For example, there is information here about Malfada, a girl in a very popular cartoon published in Argentina from 1964 to 1973. There are also links to sites developed especially for children, sites about television, cartoon and comic characters, children’s entertainment, amusement parks, and toys. Also included are links to a few articles on recent research on Latin American children, in both popular and scholarly publications.

Australia and New Zealand
http://www-faculty.edfac.usyd.edu.au/projects/anzhes/ This is the website of the Australia and New Zealand History of Education Society. The site offers little more than general information about the organization but, given the lack of online resources in the field, can serve as a starting point for researchers with a particular interest in this field. Of most use is a list of upcoming international conferences on the history of education, information about works published as part of the group’s monograph series, and links to similar organizations in the United Kingdom and Canada. Two articles on the history of education can also be downloaded here. The first, by John McMahon, appeared in the History of Education Review and concerns the first twenty-five years of the group’s work. The second, by Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington and published in Change: Transformations in Education, examines the decline in the history of education as a field, with special attention to Australia.

http://www.childmigrants.com Unlike other sites, this one is devoted specifically to an aspect of the history of children. Not a scholarly site, childmigrants.com nonetheless offers a singular perspective on a little-known topic, the migration of children from Great Britain to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. This is clearly a site meant for the descendants of the child migrants themselves as well as anyone interested in the topic. Unfortunately, the brief history does not provide enough information to fully understand this difficult issue, from either the perspective of the children or the various government and religious agencies involved.

Europe
http://www-gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/csbsc/History_Teaching.html The Center for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures at the Department for Southeast European History at the University of Graz, Austria has made available online an important resource for the study of children in Southeastern Europe. As part of the 2000-2001 project “History and History Teaching in Southeast Europe”, researchers affiliated with the Center prepared two volumes of additional materials to be used in the teaching of history. The volumes are Childhood in the Past: 19th and 20th Century Additional Teaching Materials, edited by Milan Ristovi and Dubravka Stojanovi and Women and Men in the Past: 19th and 20th Century Additional Teaching Materials, edited by Kristina Popova, Petar Vodenicharov, and Snezhana Dimitrova. Only one, Childhood in the Past, is available online, but it can be downloaded in any of the Southeast European languages. In addition, the site states that copies can be ordered free of charge. I requested a hard copy in English of both Childhood in the Past and Women and Men in the Past and received them very quickly. The text of Childhood in the Past is organized thematically and includes sections on the family, games, crime, school, war, politics, and health, among others. The text includes translations of first-person accounts, photos, cartoons, drawings, and excerpts from poetry and prose of the region. Scholars from Turkey, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Romania, Albania, Greece, Hungary, and Yugoslavia participated in the project, and the volume seems fairly representative of each of the region’s major cultures. The text is aimed at both the secondary school and university level, so it may seem somewhat simplistic for advanced students. However, this should not keep university instructors from using the material in the classroom. The vast majority of the material collected here is unlikely to be found elsewhere in English, making this a very exciting find.

http://www.onethousandchildren.org Two researchers, Iris Posner and Lenore Moskowitz, founded the non-profit organization One Thousand Children to tell the stories of Jewish children who fled Nazi Germany for the United States from 1934 to 1945. Inspired by an account of the transportation of Jewish children from Germany to Britain, the two women decided to investigate the American response to Nazi persecution. Their efforts to find the thousand Jewish children who came to the United States during these years led to a national reunion of these children in 2002 and the anticipated 2004 Greenwood Press publication of Don’t Wave Goodbye, an anthology of the children’s stories in their own words. In addition to information on how to contact the organization and order the book, the site includes links and copies of articles in many newspapers on the group’s efforts. Onethousandchildren.org provides basic information about a little-known chapter of chidren’s history during the war and offers the researcher many opportunities to explore this history in greater depth.

http://www.historyofeducation.org.uk The website of the History of Education Society in the United Kingdom, this is another academic site that will be of interest to others in the field. In addition to information on the group’s general activities, the site includes links to similar organizations, including publishers specializing in education. Most useful are the conference reports from the society’s 2003 meeting in Cambridge. Included is a PDF file with abstracts of the papers presented, on topics such as education in nineteenth-century Ireland, school curricula in nineteenth-century East Asia, and the need to provide for the education of children during war.

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