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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

History of Childhood

Here are Steven Mintz’s suggestions for more reading on the history of childhood.

Mintz bookcovers

Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (2008)
Chudakoff d
emonstrates that children’s play has always been a subject of contention, with adults seeking to control the way that children spend their time and kids using play for their own purposes: as a physical and emotional release and a form of resistance and subversion.

Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood (1999)
Cross traces a shift from toys that sought to educate children and prepare them for the adult world to toys that create a fantasy world separate and apart from the adulthood.

David F. Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings (2015)
By uncovering children’s lives in diverse cultures, this book challenges narrowly, culture-bound conceptions of childhood.

Peter Stearns, Childhood in World History (2006)
Stearns places childhood in global-historical perspective and shows that the contemporary Western ideal of childhood–as a period devoted to play and schooling, sharply segregated from the adult world–is a historical anomaly.

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Posted March 1, 2016 More Books, Transnational, United States

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