Editor’s Introduction

The half-dozen offerings in this issue of the JHCY can be sliced a number of ways—like almost any other issue of this proudly varied and interdisciplinary journal. But perhaps the most effective approach is to think of them as a trio of paired pieces. The object lesson focuses on home front concerns and pop culture representations of the Second World War through a comic strip drawn by a Nebraska boy, while one of the essays examines the ambivalent interpretations of children and youth that emerged from the London Blitz early in the war. A second set of essays addresses American children on both sides of the footlights during the long nineteenth century, as consumers of entertainment and as providers. In each case, the presence of children shaped the nature of both the content and the business sides of popular theater in the early national period and of “Wild West” shows two generations later. A third pair of articles differ in almost every way possible—early versus the late twentieth century, an old-line European country versus a British colony in the Caribbean—but each of them explore ways in which governments grappled with how to deploy the law in crucial facets of children’s lives.

There are many other fascinating ways of connecting these articles—a few deal with gender, several with children’s agency, and most with the always uneasy intersection of the actual needs of children and youth and the “need” of parents and policy-makers to control them.

Enjoy!