Editor's Introduction

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth is the official journal of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY). Our mandate is to promote the history of children and youth by supporting interdisciplinary research on childhood, youth cultures, and the experience of young people across diverse times and places. I would like to begin this issue by acknowledging winners of recent SHCY prizes. Hizky Shoham's "Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House": Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in the Jewish Yishuv of Interwar Palestine" (Winter 2019) won the JHCY Best Article Prize for 2019. The winner of the Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English (2019) is Kelly M. Duke Bryant's "Runaways, Dutiful Daughters, and Brides: Family Strategies of Formerly Enslaved Girls in Senegal, 1895–1911" in Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7 (Spring 2019). The Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavia (2019) is Randi Dyblie Nilsen's "Barneperspektiv—en ressurs i kritisk samfunnsvitenskap?" in Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk volume 5 (2019). The prize committee awarded an honorable mention to Ning de Coninck-Smith for her article "Transnationale arkitektoniske kulturmøder" [Transnational architectural encounters]. The Grace Abbott Book Prize (2019) was awarded to Rebecca Swartz's Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Mary Hatfield's Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2019) received an honorable mention. We congratulate all of the entrants and winners and thank the judges. For more information about SHCY activities and conferences, go to: https://www.shcy.org.

This issue opens with an object lesson by Katherine Reed. Memory forms the thread of "Commemoration of the Living: A Graffiti Fragment from Ellis Island." Reed analyzes graffiti by a fifteen-year-old boy, Cesare Colosimo, who was detained at Ellis Island immigration station in 1922. Reed argues that Colosimo and his desire to be remembered can be seen in the graffiti, memories, and keepsakes at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, which shapes a collective memory of migration. Memory and memoir are also the theme of "Grief and Youth Remembered: Accessing Experiences of Historical Youth Justice through Memoir" by Clarissa Carden. Carden argues for the recognition of grief as an important, and often neglected, aspect of marginalized youth experiences. Her article examines disenfranchised grief in the memoirs of two former inmates of the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland, Australia. The boys were incarcerated in the institution during a moment in its history when abuse was rife. According to Carden, published memoir is a means to access the historical experiences of marginalized young people.

Talia Diskin's article "Socializing Austerity: Imparting Legal and Moral Values in Children's Periodicals during Israel's First Years" examines the challenges of the rationing regime during Israel's first decade and its depiction in the central children's periodicals of that time. Diskin shows how the restrictive consumption policy was mediated to children in the young state, the social roles that adults—the journals' creators—had appointed to children during those lean times when the black market prospered, and the ways in which young readers were instilled with the need to conquer their longing for coveted goods and gather their mental and physical strength in the face of adversity. In the next article, we move to Japan, where Tatsuya Mitsuda investigates the interplay between children, sweets, and parents before and after the Second World War. "Consumed by Sweets: Parents, Children, and Snacking in Modern Japan" focuses on the problems posed by the penny sweet shop and the street sweets it sold to children, analyzing society's attempts to control and reform the contents of sweets and the practice of snacking. It demonstrates that street sweets served as powerful exemplars, shaping middle-class notions of "proper" confections, how they should be made, with whom they should be shared, and where and when they should be purchased and eaten. Mitsuda concludes that children were formidable consumers who bought less into the nutritional or hygienic value of confections and more into the broader experience of snacking.

The welfare state...