The True History from Below: The Significance of Children's History

Historically Speaking September/October 2005 The True History from Below: The Significance of Children's History Steven Mintz Children are the last group of Americans to have a history oftheir own. We may scoff at the Victorian notion that children should be seen but not heard, but children are notable in history books primarily for their absence. There is a disturbing tendency within our profession to dismiss the history of childhood as sentimental , atheoretical, and peripheral to the dynamics of historical change. Even in books that purport to be about children, there is a tendency to foreground adults. Much more has been written about parenting practices , representations and ideologies of childhood, reform movements,and adult-run institutions than about children's emotions, perceptions , or the intricacies of growing up. For the latter subjects, one still must turn to memoirs or the works ofour most perceptive novelists and psychologists. It is only within the past decade that historians have begun to write a child-centered history that treats the young as actors in their own right who have left a lasting mark on their society and whose childhood experiences left a lasting imprint on their attitudes and behavior as adults. Children's history is especially difficult to write. Children are rarely historical actors in the same way as adults, and children's historical experience is less well documented. First-hand evidence about childhood is parAlan Lomax photograph, Eatonville, Florida, 1935. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-1 30896]. ticularly problematic. Surviving letters and diaries tend to be heavily class-biased and much ofthe remaining evidence is retrospective . Adult observations and sociological and psychological surveys often reflect adult biases rather than the realities of children's lives. A notable example involves the invaluable collections of children's folklore by Peter Opie and Iona Archivald Opie, which tended to omit scatological and sexual rhymes, riddles, games, songs, and stories . Still, rather than being a marginal topic, childhood provides a neglected vista on the key events in American history. As I have argued in Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004), colonization ,the Revolution, the Civil War, industrialization, mass immigration, World War II, the 1950s, the Civil Rights movement—all take on fresh meaning when viewed from the vantage point of children. Many of the major themes in American history—the growth of bureaucratic institutions, the rise ofa consumer culture , the elaboration of a welfare state, the triumph of the therapeutic, and the expansion ofconceptions ofrights—are especially visible in the lives of children. The history of American childhood has gone through two waves. The first, which began in the late 1 960s and early 1 970s with pathbreaking books and articles by John September/October 2005 · Historically Speaking Demos, Philip J. Greven, Jr., and Michael Zuckerman, among others, was heavily influenced by developmental psychology. The second wave, which is only a little more than decade old, is far less speculative psychologically but much more wide-ranging in topical coverage. Social historians have given a historical dimension to such topics as allowances, child abuse, and child labor. Medical historians have traced changes in infant and childhood mortality and the treatment of childhood diseases and disabilities, while legal historians have reconstructed the development of both maternal preference in custody decisions and the concepts of child protection and children's rights. Meanwhile, cultural historians of childhood have examined the evolution of artistic, literary, and media depictions of children and the attitudes and ideologies surrounding childhood. The breadth ofthis new wave of scholarship is evident in a series of encyclopedias and handbooks edited by Janet Golden, Paula S. Fass, Priscilla Clement Ferguson, Miriam Forman-Brunell, N. Ray Hiner, Joseph Hawes, Richard Meckel, Heather Munro Prescott, Elizabeth F. Shores, and the late Jacqueline S. Reinier, as well as book series published by New York University Press and Twayne. In writing a history of childhood, scholars face a series of conceptual challenges. One involves defining childhood. Earlier scholarship tended to draw a sharp distinction between the history of childhood and the history of adolescence, which received the bulk ofhistorians' attention. In my view, this division was mistaken, since a...