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  • Introduction
  • Brian D. Bunk

The articles in this issue of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth are linked in broadly considering the ways that adults intervene in and attempt to control the images, activities and even the lives of children and young people. In the Object Lesson, Allen Guttmann shows how paintings by notable American artists Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, William Merritt Chase and Norman Rockwell, illustrate changing notions of appropriate play. The images reveal how parents and other organizations tried to increasingly organize and direct the nature and forms of these activities.

The first two essays, by distinguished scholars Paula S. Fass and Peter N. Stearns, were originally presented at the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY) Biennial Conference held at the University of California at Berkeley from July 10–12, 2009. In her president's address Fass contemplates "the natural resonance" between memory studies and the history of childhood and youth. She outlines the parallel development of the fields over time and argues that they have been, and continue to be, closely related. Fass concludes that historians of children and young people have begun to reveal new complexities in the relationship between history and memory. Peter Stearns's essay began as the keynote address at the SHCY conference. In a revised and expanded version of that talk, Stearns looks to answer a seemingly simple question: when did the idea that children should be happy begin? Using parenting manuals and other prescriptive materials he concludes that the notion that childhood should be a happy period of life generally coalesced in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although primarily writing about the United States, Stearns also explores the "globalization of happiness."

The next set of articles is focused on a similar period, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but examine different geographical contexts and concentrate on children of varying ages. Matthew Bentley examines the role that football played in furthering the assimilationist policies of the Carlisle Industrial Indian School. From its opening in 1879 at Carlisle Pennsylvania, the [End Page 143] school's founder Richard Henry Pratt believed that Native American children and young people should be taught to leave behind their Native origins and integrate into white society. Bentley explains that in order to prove their manliness, Carlisle's players needed to exert greater self-control than their white opponents. Only by doing so could they demonstrate the success of the institution's efforts at destroying the young men's primitive "Indianess" while inculcating white civilization. Despite notable achievements on the field, Bentley ultimately concludes that "the public, the media, and even school employees could not fully overcome the idea of racial classification."

In "Character Dolls: Consumer Culture and Debates over Femininity in Late Imperial Germany (1900–1918)" Bryan Ganaway explains the challenge innovative dollmaker Käthe Kruse posed to the toymaking establishment in early twentieth-century Germany. Kruse argued that women had a unique and exclusive role in preparing boys to be creative thinkers capable of leading and defending the nation and in preparing girls to fulfill their roles as the nurturers of future generations. Such beliefs allowed her to carve out a female space in business by claiming that women's natural closeness to children made them better suited to recognize and produce toys that would both appeal to the children while also instilling proper notions of good citizenship. Loren Lerner's essay looks at photographs of children published in a conservative weekly titled Canadian Pictorial. Her analysis of the images reveals the ways that white, English-speaking Canadians viewed the children of "other" national residents. Lerner argues that the publication's main goal "was to uphold the ideals of Canada's Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizens who originated from Great Britain and to educate Canadians from non-British backgrounds to be like them."

The concluding essay by JHCY co-editor Alice Hearst is a timely examination of contemporary debates over transnational adoptions. Hearst argues that more attention should be paid to the voices of the children themselves, and of the community from which they come. She also outlines the complex and often conflicting international agreements and covenants that deal...

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