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  • Editor's Introduction
  • James Marten

This issue completes the tenth volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. We're still a young journal, of course, but this is nevertheless a notable achievement. Publishing a journal was a dream of the founders of the Society for the History of Children and Youth from its earliest days, both at the 2000 meeting in Baltimore, where many of the original members took the first steps to organize, and a year later at the first official SHCY conference at Marquette University, where a set of bylaws was adopted and officers were elected. The journal would not have been possible without the hard work and vision of the founding editors: Brian Bunk, Laura Lovett, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Martha Saxon (Jon Pahl was the original book review editor). We would not be where we are today without the funding they obtained from their institutions, especially the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and Amherst College, but also Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the Five Colleges Inc. Childhood Studies Faculty Seminar. Throughout the decade, we have enjoyed a warm working relationship with our publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press.

These founding editors took turns editing individual issues, and Martha's inaugural issue included a who's who of historians of children and youth: Peter Stearns, Ray Hiner, Joe Hawes, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Bengt Sandin, Bianca Premo, and Pingchen Hsiung offered thoughts on national histories of childhood, while reflecting on age as a category of historical analysis was another all-star slate of historians, including Steve Mintz, Leslie Paris, M. J. Maynes, and Stephen Lassonde. Their articles provided a kind of status report for specific areas of research, as well as a guide for future research. Five of those authors have served as presidents of the SHCY.

Since that first issue, we've published 115 full-length articles, twenty-four object lessons, and 193 book reviews. A few things have changed over the years: around volume seven we shortened the maximum word lengths for both articles and book reviews and stopped publishing essays on contemporary policy. We have published special issues on children and science, spaces of [End Page 301] childhood death, children and childhood in Ireland, and orphanages and other forms of out-of-home care, as well as symposia and roundtables on black girls in the United States and Africa, age of consent and child marriage, and female juvenile delinquency. (An upcoming issue will explore children and childhood in museums.)

And we've covered the world. Although articles on the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia have dominated, we've published pieces exploring the lives of children and youth on six continents and in thirty-eight different countries.

Through it all, the JHCY has helped shape this vibrant field of history. As Martha wrote in that first editor's introduction, "The history of childhood and children destabilizes traditional assumptions about what counts as history and who gets counted in making that history." This last issue of the tenth volume follows that tradition, as Lynne Curry examines the state of medicine and law in Gilded Age America through the lens of criminal cases filed against Christian Scientists, and Peter Scholliers deploys the records of Brussels hospitals to investigate the evolution of thinking about children's nutrition in the nineteenth century. Politics claim the rest of the issue, as Henryatta Ballah connects assumptions about the proper place for youth in Liberian society to the repression of student activism in the decades following the Second World War, and a bundle of articles by Woody Register, Cara Elliott, and Susan Eckelmann captures the points of view of children and youth based on their letters and other writings at certain moments in American history: the child-saving age of the turn of the twentieth century, the late 1940s origins of the modern civil rights movement, and the protest era of the 1960s, respectively.

Note:

Just as we went to press, we learned that the Fass-Sandin Best Article Prize (English Language) has been awarded by the Society for the History of Children and Youth to Brian Rouleau, "'In Praise of Trash': Series Fiction Fan...

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