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

This edited book, part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions, makes a plea for historians of emotions to talk to historians of childhood. This, the editor says, will enrich both fields: it will introduce historical specificity to the history of emotions and bring new questions to bear on the universality (or not) of childhood in the past. The collection as a whole certainly achieves this aim, and it is to be hoped that it will spark greater cross-fertilization of ideas and approaches.

The editor's introduction and the first and most general chapter both do a good job of setting up the wider framework for the case studies that follow. In fact, it could be argued that the direction provided for the reader is laid on a bit thick (the editor is concerned that a reader might "refragment" a book so carefully developed after a conference on the topic). Nonetheless, it is true that a sense of overarching themes enriches the collection as a whole, and those identified by the editor do come through strongly: the national, local, even familial specificity of the experience of childhood emotions; the value of looking beyond Western emotional values; the importance of borderlands (emotional frontiers) and war in emotional formation (a recurring concept that encompasses the shaping of a set of emotions); and the importance placed on childhood as a time to develop appropriate emotional reference points.

This latter point also introduces another important theme, which is how political emotional formation in childhood can be. The general, framing chapter by Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander, and Stephanie Olsen asks how childhood became the means of forging emotional communities predicated on race, gender, religion, and nationality. In a way this is not the most interesting question to ask, as there is much written about why childhood was seen as so important in these terms. More interesting is the question of how it was done and how successfully—and many of the chapters do address precisely these questions in several national contexts (post–World War Two China, Soviet-occupied Germany, early nineteenth-century Colombia, and post–World War Two America to name a few). The disruption of war was often the trigger for an emotional reset and was shaped by a sense that children were future citizens and must uphold the values associated with the new culture. Laying down values like national allegiance was therefore important for the security of the nation, sometimes achieved via formal education in schools, other times via more free-form but still powerful means like youth clubs, mass singing, and print culture. In essence, all of these investigations point to the fact that shared emotions were valued because they made communities stronger.

Much of what is being discussed here, of course, is about how emotional communities were framed for children. In some cases this was to bolster nationalism, as already mentioned (children as the future); in others it was more overtly to dampen the potential threat posed by the young (M. Colette Plum talks about the need to overcome the rage that could be felt by children abandoned and orphaned in China in the 1930s and 1940s, for example). But it could have a positive angle too: children needed to be given an emotional framework that encouraged healing. Roy Kozlovsky's chapter on architecture in schools, playgrounds, and hospitals in postwar England does this particularly effectively. This brings us closer to the question of how emotional formation reflected, or indeed shaped, ideals of childhood. New hospital buildings, for example, were designed to support new ideas about maternal bonding, as was, in a very different setting, the creation of familial settings for Chinese orphans. However, taken overall, the chapters reveal an interesting set of themes to do with the way that childhood was conceived of at different times and locales: children as innocent and deserving of happiness, and also as...