Editor's Introduction

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (JHCY) explores the development of childhood and youth cultures and the experiences of young people across diverse times and places. We are keen to publish original articles that embrace novel historical methodologies as well as interdisciplinary scholarship that shares a historical focus on children and young people. Many issues also include an "object lesson" on the material culture of childhood, contemporary policy pieces, and reviews of books. This issue begins with Shurlee Swain's "An Imperial Mission? The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the International Dissemination of Ideas around Child Protection prior to World War I." Swain traces the transmission of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), dissemination of their ideas throughout the colonies, and the factors that led to the success, failure, or local adaptation of the NSPCC's child-saving mission. She shows that within ten years of its foundation, the NSPCC was reporting on kindred societies in India, South Africa, New Zealand, and several of the Australian colonies, although none was able to completely replicate the original model.

The next three articles deal with political and missionary movements. In her article, "Better Off with 'Their Own People': Basque Refugee Children, Catholic Anti-Communism, and the Geopolitics of Compassion in FDR's America," Anita Casavantes Bradford details how, in 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the autonomous Basque government organized the evacuation of 25,000 endangered Basque children. At the same time, American anti-fascists launched a program to bring Basque refugee children to the United States. Opposed by a restrictionist State Department and powerful anti-communist Catholic leaders, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Bradford argues that close examination of the failed program reveals how foreign policy and domestic political interests have long interacted with changing notions of race and religion to determine which unaccompanied children were seen as deserving of asylum in the United States. Divya Kannan's article focuses on children in India and how missionary literature for young British readers drew upon a hierarchy of colonial childhoods premised on racial differentiation. In "'Children's Work for Children': Caste, Childhood, and Missionary Philanthropy in Colonial India," Kannan states that in the colonial field, such literature colluded with existent dominant caste biases, perpetuated through violent means. Kannan shows how Othering of low-caste children destabilized missionary notions of sentimentalized childhood even as periodical literature represented them as objects of pity. These children were not "voiceless victims," but their lived realities impinged on missionary practices and literary representations. In "Celebrating Violence? Children, Youth, and War Education in Maoist China (1949–1976)," Orna Naftali looks at the role of children's education in the creation of Chinese war culture in the Mao era (1949–1976). Analyzing school textbooks as well as pedagogical and media publications, Naftali highlights the existence of competing visions of children's roles in military violence. The findings challenge the thesis that childhood in Maoist China was ultra-militarized and the assumption that during the Cold War era, countries on different sides of the divide held starkly contrasting notions of the young.

The final two articles deal with children's relationship to the natural world. Chris Rasmussen looks at the Children's International Summer Villages (CISV). His article, "A Whole Network of Friends: Doris Twitchell Allen's Children's International Summer Villages and American Peacemaking in the Cold War," examines a post–World War II effort to harness applied psychological expertise for the cause of world peace. Psychologist Doris Twitchell Allen believed that the American summer camp had the potential to break down national barriers and unite eleven-year-olds in "friendships without frontiers." The ambitious vision to engineer a lasting peace was characteristic of postwar psychology, and the history of the early CISV demonstrates how the Cold War made it an impossible goal. Finally, Joe Goddard examines three mid-twentieth-century Walt Disney short cartoons. His article, entitled "Celluloid Cityscapes: Kids, Cars, and Cartoons in the United States, 1938–1965," argues that initially, Disney cartoons were aimed at a mixed adult and child audience, but over...