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  • Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make ed. by Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers
  • Rebecca Raby
Bringing Children and Youth into Canadian History: The Difference Kids Make. Mona Gleason and Tamara Myers, eds. Don Mills, on: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xx + 465, $79.95 paper

The possible topics, angles, and methodologies for an edited volume on the history of childhood and youth in Canada are vast, and this collection is impressive in the breadth and depth of what it covers. The hefty volume contains eleven chapters, each with a well-crafted introduction; two articles, most of which have been previously published; thoughtful study questions; and a selected bibliography. Additionally, each article has a corresponding primary historical document. The chapters cross time, age groups, geographies, and methodologies to address a wide range of topics.

The volume editors clearly aimed to include material from different parts of Canada, different eras, and a range of ages. They were, for the most part, successful. They were also, importantly, attentive to issues of diversity and intersectionality. For example, Blake Brown's article on boys and guns at the turn of the nineteenth century addresses how deepened gun regulation coincided with stereotypes about violent new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Similarly, Rod MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen note class-based division within the Jewish community in Montreal in response to a children's protest against anti-Semitism because of its association with labour activism.

As a scholar interested in the contextual fluidity of concepts like childhood, adolescence, youth, and adulthood, I particularly enjoyed the discussion of underage boys enlisting in the First World War. Tim Cook outlines how specific ages were both meaningful and variously flexible, for example, depending on boys' size and at what point of the war they were in. In contrast, Heidi MacDonald's article on thwarted signifiers of male adulthood during the Great Depression, while innovatively presenting vignettes of three young men's lives, sometimes normalizes narrow definitions of gendered adulthood. Similarly, Linda Mahood explores the intriguing culture of hitchhiking in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s; however, she generalizes teenagers as "impressionable" (438, 441) and in "crisis" (440), despite how the era itself contributed to this conceptualization. [End Page 150]

Another key theme in child and youth studies is children's agency, through voice, involvement, and influence. The theme of agency emerges across many articles, including those addressing children working (as home children, as newsboys, or in the circus), children using their earnings to sneak to the movies, and children fundraising and volunteering with the Junior Red Cross. Occasionally, I wished for a little more reflection on how agency might be understood or theorized, but I very much appreciated this attention to children as actors.

One of the many strengths of this collection is its focus on methodology. The articles draw on such varying sources as census data, diaries, newspaper articles, oral histories, and government reports. Readers get a sense of the complexity of historical data through Bettina Bradbury's article about children who lived with one parent in 1901. She invites readers to think about who collected census data and what kinds of choices they might have made about representing families. We see that the historian is often a sleuth. Another challenge of historical research into young lives is the scant data that allows us to hear from young people directly. Kristine Alexander ambitiously explores this problem through studying Girl Guiding materials from Canada, England, and India. Some authors also share ethical concerns over the use of certain data. For instance, as part of her moving discussion of the tragic Laurier Palace Fire in 1927, Magda Fahrni reflects on what it means to focus on tragedy in order to learn about structure and agency in children's everyday lives.

I have a quibble with the text's organization, noting that it is a tricky task to organize such diverse articles into a cohesive text. It is odd to have two articles presented as one chapter rather than one article being a chapter on its own (and then organized with others into sections). Chapter topics also sometimes awkwardly overlap. For instance, Chapter 3...

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