A HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD

Catalog description

Examines childhood as a social and historical construct and explores how race, class, gender, and geography have created unequal access to this protected category for individual children and continues to produce inequalities in children’s health, education, and access to designated safe spaces. Explores how historical phenomena have impacted children, including colonialism, slavery, revolution, the rise of the modern state, the professionalization of medicine and social work, compulsory education, developing legal concepts about children’s rights, the development of consumer mass culture, WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. Traces shifting understandings of the ‘normal’ child.