Introduction

One of the most potent claims for the history of childhood is that focusing on youth will produce significantly different histories. The importance of passing social values on to the young means that the treatment of children offers unusually self-conscious or pointed instances of cultural norms. This is true even, as Miriam Forman-Brunell shows in her account of Barbie’s fifty year sway as the world’s most prized doll, when the values expressed are thick with contradictions. What do girls learn from Barbie: femininity? liberation? consumerism? Things made for children emphatically display what each culture wants its children to learn, but the passing on of such lessons is never so simple or assured.

Because young people are still learning their place in the social hierarchy, their behavior often illuminates the strengths and contradictions of social roles. Amy Harris’s essay compares the instructions provided by the many letter-writing manuals published during the mid-eighteenth century with the letters young people actually wrote. Her work reveals these youthful correspondents to be fully aware of the lessons in social place, deference, and duty that the manuals intone and yet jocularly brazen in disrupting such expectations, at least among themselves. The politics of racial hierarchy were brutally clear when Prince Edward County, Virginia, decided to disband its public school system rather than integrate it. Through a sensitive reading of an archive of 1963 interviews with the black teenagers locked out of their schools, Jill Ogline Titus provides a powerfully nuanced and new understanding of this civil rights struggle, emphasizing the real divergences in the ways individual young people understood and responded to their political role. In these two very different cases, listening to the voices of young people challenges our sense of what social hierarchies meant, as it details how they were experienced in individual lives.

As the essays in this issue of JHCY richly demonstrate, paying attention to children drastically changes understandings of the social order garnered from adult perspectives. The question Gary Dickson raises for the Children’s Crusade of 1212—did it serve as a rite de passage?—illuminates not only this extraordinary event but also the role of crusades in general as a means of accessing status and mobility. For impoverished medieval peasants, who often lacked sufficient economic stability to marry and establish a household, participation in a crusade offered enticing possibilities of autonomy and prestige. The issue of initiation derives from a focus on youth, but the insights into social organization that this focus provokes have far broader implications. Other essays in this issue suggest how not only social structure but also the arc of historical narrative itself can shift through attention to youth. The story of the modernization of the Ottoman state, with increasingly centralized welfare provisions, and the creation of state hospitals, schools, and orphan asylums has generally been presented as a progress narrative. Nazan Maksudyan’s careful sifting of archival records for evidence of the experiences of foundlings suggests that these modernizing improvements may in many ways have worsened conditions for abandoned infants. Similarly, Ashwini Tambe demonstrates the hollowness, indeed hypocrisy, of the progress narrative associated with the raising of the age of consent for marriage in colonial India, once these new laws are viewed in conjunction with bills advocating a significantly higher age of consent for nonmarital sex. What has been touted as evidence of India’s increasingly “modern,” “civilized” interest in protecting girls proves instead to be largely a means of augmenting parental control. Despite rhetorical claims about care and protection, the interests of the modern state and the interests of children are not simply the same. Jacqueline Mosselson’s interviews with Bosnian refugee students in American schools reveals the extent to which the U.S. education system fails to meet these children’s needs, even though with their high grades and good English the system proudly claims them as instances of successful assimilation.

The temporal, geographic, and methodological range of these essays is striking. Yet for all their variety they share a strong conviction that focusing on childhood and youth can produce new histories: challenging narratives of historical progress, and...