Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives ed. by Stephanie Olsen (review)

Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History is an edited volume seeking new vantage points from which to explore the history of childhood in the modern era. Most of its twelve chapters take a global and, when possible, transnational perspective, and all draw on the growing body of research in the history of emotions. The result is a rich history describing a world in which the notion of childhood, and the emotions associated with it, were dependent on cultural and temporal contingencies. The first two chapters, written by Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen, are dedicated to theoretical discussions meant to unify the distinct histories of the book. In chapter 3, Ishita Pande explores the new colonial law of 1891 in India and its aim to “emotionally re-educate” Indians’ feelings toward child marriage and precocious sexuality (37). The reinforcement of the law, Pande argues, led to a reconfiguration of both marriage and girlhood in late nineteenth-century India. Chapter 4, by Kathleen Vongsathorn, analyzes the interaction between British missionaries and Ugandan child leper patients. Vongsathorn points to efforts by missionaries to foster an attitude of happiness and gratitude among native children. At the same time, the children often found ways to “perform” emotions in order to gain favors. Hugh Morrison explores a similar topic in chapter 5, in which he writes about the religious education of children in colonial New Zealand. As with the case of Uganda, educators preferred encouragement and cheerfulness to instilling fear into the minds of young pupils. Religion, Morrison concludes, was an emotional rather than a theological enterprise for settler children during this time.

In chapter 6, Roy Kozlovsky discusses how British authorities and educators attempted to reconceptualize childhood spaces after WWII. He argues that the experts involved in these projects felt a need to provide an “emotional refuge” for children in order to guarantee a happy and secure childhood in the early postwar period. Jane Hamlett, also considering the importance of space, contributes with a study of boys’ public school dormitories in chapter 6. The idea behind much of the spatial organization of dormitories, Hamlett writes, was to “promote a disciplined atmosphere where boys governed themselves” through surveillance and discipline (134). In the following chapter, Marcelo Caruso analyzes shifts in Colombia’s emotional regimes after its independence from Spain, while Susan A. Miller, in a chapter about the American Legion’s Boys State Program, looks at formations of emotional communities through the lens of American patriotism. Feelings of nationalism is also the topic of Colette Plum’s research. Plum shows how the Chinese Nationalist Party’s wartime propaganda aimed at breaking up old familial emotional communities for the benefit of a new national identity. Juliane Brauer’s, Swapna M. Banerjee’s, and Lydia Murdoch’s contributions, which make up the last three chapters, are in and of themselves proof of the diversity of Childhood, Youth and Emotions. In their contributions, they cover topics ranging from young people’s emotions in the Soviet Occupation Zone in postwar Germany and the changing practices of fatherhood in colonial Bengal to the complex set of feelings fueling the anti-vaccination movement in late Victorian England.

As Childhood, Youth and Emotions reminds us, expressions of emotions in the past can be found essentially everywhere. The problem, though, is that many sources only allow for external views of people’s emotional lives. Concerned with these kind of problems, historians such as Barbara Rosenwein and William Reddy have developed theoretical frameworks for analyzing emotional influences on identities and group behavior. Inspired by Reddy and Rosenwein, Stephanie Olsen writes that the intention of Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History is to explore the “emotional development and experience” of childhood, as well as to analyze the “diverse range of pedagogical, parenting and policy approaches to childhood emotions” (1). It succeeds better with the latter than with the...