Editor's Introduction

Our spring issue begins with a somewhat revised version of Nara Milanich's powerful plenary lecture at last summer's conference of the Society of Civil War Historians at Rutgers University-Camden. The issue she addressed then—the historical contexts for the polarizing controversy over American immigration policy—has only intensified in the intervening months. The issue ends with an essay by Ruthann Clay and Peter N. Stearns that reflects on the spike in "fearful parenting" in the 1970s and 1980s, at least as articulated by Parents' Magazine. Although very different in approach and content, both pieces examine the role of fear and other emotions, not only in the actual lives of children and parents, but in policies that directly or indirectly affect hundreds of thousands of children.

In between are two pairs of articles that, although submitted many months apart, matched up nicely (one of the small joys of editing this journal is when an issue falls together without any effort on the part of the editor!). Kevin A. Murphy argues that during the seven decades before the Civil War, middle-class adults socialized children into "death ways" that prepared them for the inevitable and created expectations about appropriate ways of mourning and dying. More than half a century later, according to Jane Nicholas, Spiritualists rejected death as an actual end to the relationships between parents and children and integrated youngsters into the séances that created a very different set of roles and expectations about death.

As we continue to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, two articles address the effects of the war on children and youth. Fabrice Langrognet suggests that the war had a long-lasting effect on the lives of the largely migrant teenagers living in a working class suburb of Paris, where pre-war assumptions about identity were seriously challenged by the pressures of war. Australian children lived far from the fighting of course, but Bart Ziino shows how the war was integrated into their lives in a number of ways, some shaped by adult efforts to give the war meaning, but others dependent on the experiences and perceptions of children and youth themselves.