Introduction

In his 2011 presidential address to the Society of the History of Children and Youth, Steven Mintz asked himself, and all of us gathered in the dark wood and stained glass haven of Milbank Chapel at Columbia Teachers College, why the history of childhood matters. His answers make it clear that childhood is not a sanctuary. Recounting how the treatment and experiences of children imbricate with institutional, legal, governmental, and social forces, Mintz demonstrates that children are inevitably entangled in questions of politics and power. We are delighted to publish his address here where it sets the parameters for a collection of essays that explore in the details of their particular case studies the varied nature of the relationship between children and politics.

"Children are generally not considered to be political citizens," Karen Dubinsky explains, but yet the archive of political posters she is assembling demonstrates that virtually all political campaigns of the twentieth century—across time, place, and ideology—have found it productive to flaunt childhood. Her essay lets us think comparatively about the rhetorical force of youth and the utility of children in legitimating and sustaining political movements. Her work thus interrogates the stakes and hypocrisies of any assumption that the young can or should be protected from politics. Fabio Lanza inverts these questions. His stringent account of the different ways "youth" has been wielded by political movements in China provocatively assesses the conditions in which "youth" does and does not serve as a meaningful term for political action. He thus puts pressure on the generalized rhetoric of youth that shapes so much contemporary discussion of social movements from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. In demanding a more self-conscious attention to how children and youth are represented in political movements Dubinsky and Lanza raise challenging questions for the other essays that make up this issue, and for all scholarship in the history of childhood.

Children live lives even as they are used in images. Regardless of how we view the roles the young play in political movements, often they are simply there, implicated in the political "maelstrom" that surrounds them. The storm metaphor is borrowed from the title of Vassiliki Vassiloudi and Vassiliki Theodorou's essay on children in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), but the essays by Katy Turton and Jennifer Terry also describe with remarkable detail and insight the experience of children caught up in the larger forces of revolution and war. Looking at periods of intense political turmoil with an eye for childhood alters what you see. Katy Turton begins her essay on children in the Russian revolution with a famous photograph of Lenin walking through Stockholm in the spring of 1917; most readers have probably seen this image before, but few will have noticed that in the band of Bolsheviks who accompany him there is one boy, holding his father's hand. Understanding how children participated in the revolution, and how their presence and participation affected their parent's revolutionary work and goals, augments our conception of the Russian revolution in many specific and interesting ways. Moreover, it raises important issues about the nature of the connections between the personal and the political. Paying attention to children in political struggle entails attending to the conflicts and compromises between political and personal concerns.

The final two essays make a fascinating pair since both depict the experiences of children interred during war in the 1940s, though the physical and political conditions of these internments were quite different. Jennifer Terry studies western children held by the Japanese in the Santo Tomás Internment Camp. These children were generally accompanied by at least one parent, and Terry's account interrogates the balance between the ways adults strove to regulate and protect their children and the ways the camp, for all its deprivations, provided children with an unusual level of autonomy and freedom for risky play. Vassiliki Vassiloudi and Vassiliki Theodorou's study of children in the Greek Civil War describes the cynicism with which both sides of the conflict viewed children as pawns in their ideological and strategic manoeuvres, but their research centers on an ambitious...