Introduction

It’s with great pleasure and a little relief (to have finally figured out the ScholarOne software) that I welcome you to the first issue of the seventh volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. My first duty is to thank former editors, Brian Bunk, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Laura Lovett, and Martha Saxton, and book review editors Jon Pahl and Susan Miller for six years of hard work. Without them, the Society may never have realized its dream of publishing a journal. Indeed, I share the editorship of this issue and the next one with my predecessors, who had already done much of the work of shepherding these articles into print when I took over in July. Laura and especially Karen have been great resources during the transition.

Additional thanks are in order: the student intern for this issue was Robert Jumbeck of Marquette University. Special thanks go to the Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University for financial support.

Otherwise, continuity reigns. Although for the time being, at least, I’m also serving as book review editor, Alice Hearst has stayed on as editor of public policy articles, Allison Smith continues as copy editor, and virtually all of the processes for submitting, reviewing, and editing the journal remain the same.

But members and readers should look forward to some changes. You’ll note a few adjustments on the list of editorial board members, as some long-time members decided to step down, and Bianco Premo of Florida International University accepted an invitation to join. In addition, by volume eight I intend to begin publishing in the journal and on the SHCY website reviews of books published in languages other than English. With the help of Kelly Schrum and Celeste Sharpe, the JHCY will also begin to have a much bigger online presence. And the board and I will make efforts to respond to concerns about coverage and diversity expressed in meetings at the conference in Nottingham and in the members’ survey we distributed in August.

Future issues will include a number of articles and two or three special issues based on papers and panels at the 2015 conference.

Issue 7:1 features two clusters of articles. The first, including the object lesson by Aaron Skabelund, offers three different insights into one of the more active fields in the histories of children and youth today: the intersection of war and childhood. Skabelund explores a series of manga comics about a militaristic dog who taught patriotism and devotion to the emperor to Japanese boys in the 1930s. Charlotte Bennett and Malia McAndrew examine war, children, and youth far from the battlefronts. Bennett connects the crisis of the Great War in New Zealand to another international crisis—the flu epidemic that struck almost as soon as the shooting stopped—and suggests that the illness that children confronted directly made more of an impact than the war that they experienced only indirectly. McAndrew’s account of beauty pageants in the so-called relocation camps points out that these competitions among Nisei youth offered them a chance to prove their “American-ness.”

The other historical essays cast wider nets but nevertheless share one thematic thread: the ways in which children are educated outside of what we consider “traditional” educational institutions. Tali Berner examines the socialization through religious rituals of Jewish youth living in the Holy Roman Empire during the High Middle Ages, while Sarah-Joy Maddeaux covers early efforts to provide educational experiences at the Bristol Zoo Gardens, and Michelle Beissel Heath traces a number of shared themes in the play movements in Great Britain and the United States at the turns of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries.

This issue’s policy essay by Jennifer Lucko observes the experiences and status of Ecuadoran immigrants in one Madrid neighborhood in the context of the ongoing discourse on immigration and integration within the European Union.

Despite the fact that the articles address multiple centuries and geographies, from south-central Europe in the Middle Ages to nineteenth-century Great Britain to 1930s Japan to modern Spain, there is another common feature...