A Brief Dialogue on using Encyclopedias for Teaching the History of Childhood

Dewar MacLeod and Richard Kearney

Dewar MacLeod (DM) is an Assistant Professor of History at William Paterson University. He is completing a manuscript on punk rock in Southern California.

Richard Kearney (RK) is Electronic Resources Librarian at William Paterson University, where he is also completing an M.A. thesis on nineteenth-century child labor reform in New Jersey. He has offered library instruction sessions to undergraduate and graduate history students for five years.

DM: Usually when I teach a course on the History of Childhood in the United States, I do so as a research seminar. In the past this has been, at least in part, because of the fragmentary nature of historical works in the field; I have cobbled together various readings introducing the major themes and then devoted much of the course to shepherding students through the research process. Last time I taught the course Fass and Mason’s Childhood in America served as a useful reader. Now, with the publication of Steven Mintz’s Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood and a plethora of new encyclopedic works, I have at my disposal both a narrative primer and a guide to research opportunities for students.

RK: Encyclopedias are remarkably versatile tools for teaching and learning that are too often forsaken by students and teaching faculty who have abandoned them in favor of web search engines. The best examples combine a wide range of expert knowledge on subjects of varying breadth and complexity with the goal of making that knowledge accessible to the general reader in a single, self-contained package. For teachers, a good encyclopedia provides a convenient means of becoming acquainted with topics outside their own areas of specialization through essays synthesizing previous scholarship and mapping out current issues for research.

DM: Well, I am probably in the minority of historians – and I may sabotage my career by admitting this – in telling my students, “Go ahead, use Google first.” I am constantly amazed at what I can find – things I had never thought of or knew existed, in addition to obscure texts I used to have to scroll through microfilm to find. But I also know how much time I have wasted using Google myself, clicking on one more page in the hopes that the document I am looking for or something else useful will magically materialize. So I tell my students to spend five minutes and see what they come up with. But then head to the more traditional sources, encyclopedias and historical reference works, to start with.

RK: Encyclopedias hold a distinct advantage over annotated bibliographies in the way their essays integrate a large body of literature within a format both manageable in size and pleasurable to read. At the same time, the best encyclopedias incorporate helpful paths to additional sources of information within and beyond their covers: easy-to-identify cross-references within essays, "see also" references adjacent to them, brief but well-selected bibliographies accompanying them, and a judicious selection of illustrations, tables, maps, and other visual complements to the text. Single- or multi-volume encyclopedias featuring comprehensive coverage of their subject matter are excellent aids for course preparation, including the design of research and writing assignments.

DM: So, where do you take students who seek your help for a paper in the history of childhood?

RK: The recently-published Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (Paula S. Fass, Editor-in-Chief, 3 volumes, Macmillan Reference, 2004) is a fine example of a high-quality encyclopedia in the history of childhood, international in scope, featuring 445 signed articles, a selection of useful primary source texts, a subject index, and both an alphabetical and a topical outline table of contents for entries.

DM: I tend to agree with Joe Austin’s review of the Fass volume for H-Childhood (http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=119881097066018). First, he points out the extraordinary work contained in the encyclopedia. He also points to the emphasis on social history at the expense of cultural studies, but this is something that I think the whole field is wrestling with and it relates, I think, to the difference between children and adolescents or youth. Some of the volumes in ABC-CLIO’s American Family Series, especially Miriam Forman Brunell’s Girlhood in America: An Encyclopedia blend nicely the social history and cultural studies models in trying to bridge the gap between childhood and youth. Others in the series – notably Adolescence in America: An Encyclopedia – are disappointingly ahistorical. One thing the ABC-CLIO volumes have going for them is that they are available online through subscription. This seems to me the way quality encyclopedia publishers could really serve their readers and steal some thunder from the internet search engines.

RK: The popularity of hypertext links as a tool for navigating the World Wide Web is a testament to the sound principles of cross-referencing established in good encyclopedias, and for practical purposes many students regard their favorite web search engines as "encyclopedias," with entries culled together on demand by their queries. There is no doubt the combination of hypertext, computer networking, and the capability of incorporating multimedia content into online works of reference has already given new and dynamic life to encyclopedias in electronic formats, and several fine examples of these are already available in both the commercial and non-commercial sectors. Yet what is often ignored about search engine databases and the environment in which they operate is that they do not define or even approximate an "encyclopedic" organization of information in a meaningful way.