P. Fass – Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (3 Volumes)

Автор: P. Fass
Название книги: Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (3 Volumes)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Прочая историческая литература
Страницы: 379+383+307
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

This 3-vol. set presents the social and cultural history of childhood from antiquity to the present. “Children and Childhood” examines this history through articles on education, parenting, child labor, economics, images of childhood, children's literature, play, toys and games, health, physiology, law, the criminal justice system and social welfare. Comparative articles include information about childhood in cultures throughout the world. Features 250 photographs representing the visual images of childhood.

The history of children and childhood is a new and energetic field of inquiry that provides critical
insights into the human past and contemporary social experience. By gathering articles by
the best investigators and by approaching the subject both with a global focus and from an
interdisciplinary perspective, the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood: In History and Society
provides the interested reader with a necessary introduction to the wide range of issues that
define the field. In devising its selections and choosing contributors, the editors aimed to offer
general readers as well as researchers a significant means to embark on an exploration of the
very latest scholarship in an exciting and burgeoning area of social research.
Starting in the early 1960s, historians began to probe the past for insights into lived experience
and became newly attuned to the many social and community institutions involved. Family
relations, religious experience, and various forms of education including schooling, work life,
peer and voluntary organizations, sports, and recreations all became areas for disciplined historical
study. Together investigations into these areas began to yield significant knowledge
about the texture, meaning, and complexity of human experience in the past. In turning their
attention to a fuller people-centered history, historians also turned to the tools and questions of
allied disciplines, especially sociology, anthropology, and psychology, to better understand
human behavior and the nature of social organization. This explosion of historical scholarship
into previously underexplored or unexplored arenas was one of the signal achievements of social
science in the second half of the twentieth century. Social history broke down the tight walls of
earlier historical scholarship that was largely confined to an exploration of the people at the top
and the politics of power.
In breaching those walls, scholars allowed children to come into view. Largely excluded from
active politics (with a very few exceptions such as infant rulers or as participants in youth politics),
children and adolescents became everywhere visible as the family, the school, and work in
factories and fields were opened to investigation. Discovering the presence of children in history
was exciting to many of us who began to work in the new field of social history in the later
1960s and early 1970s. The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood brings the full range of that
new work together for the first time.
Just as exciting was the growing understanding of the crucial role that childhood played in
how cultures defined themselves, fashioned their instruments of socialization, and sought to
control their futures. In 1960 Philippe Ariès’s seminal book, L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime (published in English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood), encouraged historians
to think about childhood itself as an invention, a historically driven phenomenon, not a transcendent
category. Linked to a complex and subtle argument about how European society isolated
childhood as part of a wider process of social differentiation, Ariès’s provocative thesis
about the absence of childhood before the seventeenth century stimulated a wide range of
inquiries. Most questioned his conclusions but were firmly indebted to his most profound
insight: childhood is a historically embedded definition that opens up deep layers of culture by
exposing how societies code the earliest period of life and organize it in consequential ways.
The definition of childhood is connected to fundamental institutions, technologies, and a
range of social relationships. Gender was an especially important aspect of that definition, and
as the fields of women’s history and then gender studies evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, children’s
history developed alongside its many insights.
By the late 1970s, children and childhood were firmly part of a refashioned vision of the
past. That past was made new by the work of scholars seeking out materials hitherto hidden in
birth registers and wills, tomes of philosophy and psychology, slender volumes of poetry and
novels, private diaries and letters, paintings and photographs, toys and the built environment.
In other words, as the full panoply of human experience came into view as a setting for real
children in the past as well as for how our ancestors thought about and imagined children, a
whole range of sources could be refreshingly brought to bear on these matters.
The three volumes of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood draw upon that extraordinary
range of historical sources. In examining its pages the reader will immediately encounter
the wealth of pictorial means through which children and youth have been represented at various
times and in various settings. They can be found at play and at work, in school and in war,
as the embodiment of innocence and the absence of experience, as well as knowing and sexually
seductive. The illustrations, provided through the skills and special knowledge of one of
our editors, Anne Higonnet, are only the first taste of the wide array of issues awaiting the
reader’s plain curiosity or more scholarly needs. These volumes include short biographical
introductions to the important thinkers through the ages who have understood the centrality
of childhood—from Plato and Aristotle through Erasmus, John Locke and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, to Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget. In seeking to understand children
globally, the editors have invited scholars who specialize in most of the regions of the world,
such as Africa, Latin America, China, India, and Australia, among others, to add to the knowledge
that American and European historians have been accumulating over the past thirty years.
Similarly, we have tried to include the great religious traditions, Judaism, Islam, as well as the
early Catholic Church fathers and the innovations of the Protestant Revolution, in our understanding
of global childhood. And we have urged the authors to try to adopt a cross-cultural
perspective in many of the general essays, such as those on naming, infant mortality, games,
sexuality, and adolescence. This wide-ranging comparative perspective adds to the historical
depth we have tried to create with articles on childhood over time in the West from ancient
Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages, early modern Europe, and European colonialism,
down to the modern world.
Modernity (Europe and the United States since the mid-eighteenth century) has offered
scholars the richest range of sources as well as the most complex focus for investigation. This
is largely because childhood as we now understand it, with its elaborate emphasis on the early
years of life and its drive to protect the young and to prepare them for adulthood, is largely an
expression of the European Enlightenment and the institutions of the nation-state. Modern
schooling and developmental psychology, which are its products, have provided a set of questions
and an institutional focus that now largely take this perspective as a categorical given as they have refined our modern Western understanding of childhood and children. The
Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood explores these issues in great detail, including notions of
proper child rearing and parenting, schooling and other forms of instruction, the role of various
emotions, the nature of child development, and the importance of age. In a technological
culture where child survival has become an expectation, issues of birth and conception have
come prominently into view and the editors of the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood have
given special attention to its many expressions in contemporary reproductive issues.
The encyclopedia also includes adolescence and youth in its definitions of the child and
childhood because modern schooling, modern psychology, and the modern state with its laws
and labor regulations have made the period from twelve to eighteen (and increasingly even
beyond this) a feature of youthful dependency and development. We have many articles that
focus on this period of life—from its definition and bodily transformations in puberty, to rituals
of dating and sexuality, to youth’s commercial entertainments, political engagements, and
socially problematic behaviors (drinking, smoking, delinquency, pregnancy). We pay considerable
attention to the schooling of adolescents, as well as to younger children, especially in
Europe and the United States, and include articles on a variety of public and private school contexts
and related contemporary issues. Schooling is often also addressed in the entries on other
countries and parts of the world in the globally framed articles.
While work has, in the twentieth century, become a marginal experience for most children
in the industrialized world as school has replaced it as focal feature of daily and weekly activity,
children have been important economically in the past and remain very important workers in
many parts of the world to this day. Many entries address this experience, from the lives of slave
children in North America and in colonial Brazil, to industrial workers in Europe and part-time
workers in the modern American consumer economy.
In the modern world, play became almost synonymous with our views of a proper childhood.
The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood contains many entries on theories of play and the
experience of play from the sports field to the computer screen, with many steps via the long
history of toys (dolls, trains, teddy bears). Eager to provide readers with a sampling of the books
that, since the eighteenth century, have been an important ingredient in the lives of Western
children, we include articles on Bible stories, ABC hornbooks, and fairy tales, as well as the tales
of Christopher Robin, Peter Pan, Nancy Drew, and Harry Potter (among many others) as well
as the comic books that defined the reading experiences of twentieth-century children. Indeed,
we chose to emphasize literature written for and read by children, rather than the great varieties
of literature that portrayed children (which began to proliferate in the nineteenth century),
because children’s literature is written by adults with very particular views in mind of who
and what their readers are like. Even in a compendium as wide-ranging as this one, choices have
to be made because the field has grown so vast and so bountiful that we simply could not hope
to include all aspects and elements of the latest scholarship.
In choosing representations of childhood we leaned heavily in the direction of the visual
rather than the literary. And we have chosen not just to illustrate our entries but to include
major landmarks in the history of art as they pertain to children. Thus the reader will be given
an introduction to many of the most important and iconic images of children, representations
that have helped to organize how we see and think about children over the past several centuries.
These images are therefore in themselves primary sources in the history of childhood.
In so doing, we expected both to engage the reader pursuing the subject and to entice the casual
reader who flips through to proceed from these to the equally enticing array of articles on
almost every facet of the life of children and the concept of childhood in the past and present, from conception and birth through passages to adulthood. The Encyclopedia of Children and
Childhood thus hopes to make the study of childhood and children, first nurtured in the university
library, laboratory, and classroom, a compelling subject for a wide array of professionals
who work on children’s issues and want to know more about its past, including doctors,
lawyers, teachers, and social workers, as well as students of all kinds eager to learn about their
own childhood, that of their parents, and of the many diverse people of our shrinking world.
There are 445 articles in the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood, arranged in alphabetical
order for easy reference. The articles range from five hundred to five thousand words in length
and are written by over three hundred scholars from many parts of the world who are active
researchers in history, social science, literature, education, medicine, law, and art history. Each
signed article features several carefully chosen cross-references to related entries, indicated
within the text with small capital letters or listed at the end of the article, as well as an up-todate
bibliography of print and Internet sources. In Volume 3, readers will find an annotated
collection of fifty primary sources, reproduced in whole or in part, identified by the editors as
essential documents in the field. A topical outline appears in Volume 1. It groups articles by
broad categories, thereby offering teachers and readers alike an informed map of the field. A
comprehensive index in Volume 3 provides yet another entry point to the set, encouraging
readers to explore the information contained in these three volumes.
In selecting a group of editors and creating a board of consultants, I have sought to include
experts with different backgrounds and specialties. Peter Stearns, himself the editor of
Scribner’s Encyclopedia of European Social History and an early creator of the field as the pioneering
editor of the Journal of Social History, is the author of dozens of books in both European
and American history and a founder of the new field of the history of emotions. He has recently
become an important presence in matters of world history and global history. He brings all
these varied experiences to this project. Ning de Coninck-Smith, a Danish scholar familiar
with the field of childhood history as it is currently practiced and developing in Europe, also
brings a deep knowledge of the history of education and the material culture of childhood to
her work as an editor. Anne Higonnet’s writings brought the study of the representations of
children powerfully into the history of art, and her knowledge of the history of photography
and illustrations has grounded that enterprise in the everyday experience of people as well as
the more refined precincts of the museum and exhibition hall. Stephen Lassonde’s work on
American schooling, immigration, children’s work, and definitions of age makes his knowledge
of the institutions of childhood and the varied contexts of child life an invaluable one in an
enterprise oriented to exploring the many differences as well as the similarities in the lives of
modern children.
Our consultants are an eminent group of scholars whose unparalleled knowledge about both
childhood and the wider contexts within which childhood functions and their broad-ranging
acquaintance with practitioners of this history have been critical to the success of the project.
They include Natalie Zemon Davis, the leading cultural historian of early modern Europe and
an intellectual with a truly international stature; historical sociologist Viviana Zelizer, whose
book Pricing the Priceless Child was, together with the work of Philippe Ariès, seminal in how we
have come to define the field of childhood history; Michael Grossberg, editor-in-chief of the
American Historical Review and the most prominent historian of the law as it pertains to children
and family matters in the United States; and David Kertzer, whose deep research on a range of
family-related subjects and several edited volumes make his contributions to our understanding
of children and their families in the modern European past preeminent. In addition, Susan
Schweik has generously shared her knowledge of children’s literature with me, and Tobias
Hecht provided an invaluable introduction to scholars and issues in Latin American history