Introduction

The essays in this issue provide an interesting and varied look at the history of childhood and young people. Martha Sandweiss uses historical documents to uncover tantalizing glimpses of a slave girl named Fanny. In teasing out the complex relationships between slave and owner, child and adult, husband and wife Sandweiss reveals something of Fanny's life in antebellum Missouri. At the same time the documentary record proves frustratingly incomplete, perhaps illustrating both the rewards and challenges of studying historical children. Daniel A. Cohen also explores the lives of individual young people. In this case he analyzes the way two generations of girls modified the pages of a "what-chamacallit" or memory book. If we only have an indirect connection to Fanny, Cohen's essay gives us direct access to the words and images produced by the girls themselves. The mixed-material volume called The Token of Love initially came into the hands of a young woman named Loraine Tharratt in 1862. The album was rediscovered in the 1930s by Tharratt's great-grandniece Cynthia Ney Best. The different preoccupations of the nineteenth century "sentimentalists" and the "sophisticates" of the twentieth confirm how the values, attitudes and lifestyles of the girls had changed over time.

Corinne Field challenges historians of childhood to see Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman as an integral text in helping to understand the "intersection of age and gender" in eighteenth-century Europe. In doing so Field suggests the ways that politics and childhood are intricately connected. She concludes that Wollstonecraft's arguments reveal "how politics defines the very essence of what it means to be a girl or a boy, a man or a woman." Taylor Long also explores the intersection of childhood and politics, this time in French Mandate Lebanon (1920–1942). He untangles the various strands of political and religious affiliation in order to complicate the vision of a "typical" Middle Eastern childhood. He argues that many different groups viewed Lebanese children as an increasingly important part of emerging visions of independent state-hood and sought to use them as a means of projecting a specific political vision.

Jordi Getman Eraso outlines the ways that Spanish anarchists defined adult-hood. It was not counted by physical age but instead referred to "educational achievement and ideological maturity." Members of the juventudes libertarias (libertarian youth) were expected to refrain from violence and instead focus on constructing a society shaped by anarchist principles. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, however, meant the abandonment of such notions and the widespread participation of the libertarian youth in the war effort. The issue concludes with Nashaat Hussein's study of Egyptian street soccer. He relies on interviews with the young players to capture something of the historical and contemporary importance of the game. Hussein argues that specific adaptations differentiate the game from traditional forms of the sport and that it plays in an important role in creating and affirming social relationships.