Editor’s Introduction

That childhood and youth are social constructions may be the most important thing we can teach our students about the lives of young people. Every offering in this issue of the JHCY shows adults trying to define, shape, explore, or in other ways construct actual or theoretical childhoods. And some show how children contributed to that process.

This issue’s Object Lesson mines a rather mysterious picture album from a small orphanage in Victorian Ontario as evidence of how race, gender, and class factored into the ways that the home’s managers thought about the young girls under their care. A Roundtable on black girls and girlhood in the United States and Africa draws on papers delivered at the 2015 conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth in Vancouver. The authors focus on primary sources that reveal the voices of girls and young women living in the Jim Crow South, Jazz Age Chicago, and the British colonies in Africa.

The articles are organized into two sections. The first pair examines children’s books and magazines that try to construct very specific kinds of childhoods, and how the children so constructed responded. It’s hard to imagine two more different genres and ideological approaches: genre fiction for middle class white American children in the early twentieth century and 1960s North Vietnamese magazines for youth. But in both examples readers engaged with the content and the messages in meaningful ways, as young people in dramatically different times and places struggled to find their places in changing worlds.

A second bundle of three articles explores children in times of psychological crisis: revolution and war, family disruption and divorce, and emotional distress and suicide. Ranging from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, these case studies position children and youth in the Russian/Soviet, Danish, and Finnish health, educational, and legal systems to suggest some of the ways in which the burgeoning fields of psychology and child studies tried to make sense of how children’s lives were affected by changes at the national, familial, and personal levels.

Regular readers will recognize several common JHCY features in 9:3: authors native to several countries—indeed, continents; the intersection of law, government, society, culture and, well, everything, with the lives of children and youth; and the richness that tapping into the points of view of children and youth can bring to our work.

Note: Anyone interested in the black girlhood roundtable published in this issue should know that a conference on the Global History of Black Girlhood will be held at the University of Virginia, March 17–18, 2017. More information will be available on the SHCY website.

Finally, just before this issue was put into production, we learned that the selection committee had chosen Magda Fahrni’s “Glimpsing Working-Class Childhood through the Laurier Palace Fire of 1927: The Ordinary, the Tragic, and the Historian’s Gaze” for the JHCY Best Article Prize for 2015. The article appeared in the special issue on children and spaces of death, Volume 3 (Fall 2015). Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (Iowa State University) chaired the selection committee, which also included Luke Springman (Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania) and Bianco Premo (Florida International University).