Introduction

The editors are extremely pleased to offer this first volume of the Journal of The History of Childhood and Youth, a publication that owes its existence to the vision and labors of the members of the Society for the History of Children and Youth. Beginning with the first conference in 2001, the Society has organized biennial conferences, published a newsletter, and been the source of innovative monographs and broad works in this important area of study. The Society's decision to launch a journal testifies to the rapidly increasingly richness of this field and, to use an apt figure of speech, how fast it has come of age.

The Society has led the effort to draw attention to the historical relevance and utility of age as a category of analysis. Importantly, the Society has insisted on studying childhood in a global, not western context. The scholars who contributed to this volume have laid out the multiple ways that studying childhood and children around the world gives us unique insights into the values and goals of our own society as well as others. States articulate their hopes and plans most clearly in their ideas about childhood and their programs for children. The discrepancy between a culture's ideals for childhood and its actual provisions, national compromises and failures, also provide significant insights into the particular shapes and forms that childhoods actually assume in addition to giving a measure of any single government's genuine commitment to its children. Our understandings of individual identity formation, the structure of the family, the relationship between the household and the state, as well as a wealth of cultural and social institutions are significantly altered once we focus on the experiences of childhood and youth. Childhood offers a unique perspective on our conceptions of autonomy and agency, since the rearing of children has done so much to shape the social meaning of dependency. International scholars of childhood have challenged very basic Western assumptions such as the idea that human development is inevitably linear and that social change must be based on modern notions of time. They have also called into question the inevitability of the western model of childhood as increasingly "precious," bound to parallel the advent of modernization and a middle class. Other scholars have pointed to the ways children in some societies pass through a variety of institutions and contexts, rather than having a continuous experience in a nuclear family.

Like other new fields, such as women's history and colonial history, the history of childhood and children destabilizes traditional assumptions about what counts as history and who gets counted in making that history. When historians take children and childhood into consideration, new questions and perspectives demand attention. Children's participation in the economy, long seen as exceptional or pre-modern takes on new significance in a comparative, global perspective. Even in the United States, working children were the norm, and only in the 1930s when the depression made jobs so scarce for adults was anti-child labor legislation truly general. Working from the perspective of childhood also gives scholars new ideas about how to think about children's agency, which, like the agency of women, often gets overlooked because of the everydayness of their activities. Additionally, age functions to describe expected processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility.

The editors and contributors are aware of the unique difficulties of doing childhood history. The overwhelming majority of children leave no records of themselves. Practitioners are called upon to devise new ways to open doors onto the experience and imaginations of children, and, in the words of one of our contributors, to "both enhance and shake up" history and childhood studies. The study of material culture can greatly aid scholars of childhood, and the Journal will include an Object Lesson in every issue, which will exemplify how paying attention to things can shed light on the experience of a child or youth. This issue we begin with Wendy Ewald's arresting portrait of a child refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo photographed in the British seacoast town of Margate along with an...