"Playes Print the Letter": American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce

Abstract

Abstract:Drawing attention to the "similar motivations of nostalgia, desire, fantasy, and power" that bind childhood and archival studies together, Karen Sánchez-Eppler observes that "[t]he questions of politics and power at stake in archival work and in Childhood Studies are often one and the same." In this article, I expand Sánchez-Eppler's already complex directory by adding temporality to it. Pausing in the middle to examine a number of letters that children sent to the juvenile periodical St. Nicholas in the 1890s, I engage with the notion of time as a productive means to comprehend and ultimately work to counter the relative dearth of authorial, intentional, and dedicated archives of childhood—what historians of childhood have long identified as one of the main challenges for writing the history of children and youth. As I argue in this paper, to engage with time in the study of children and childhoods past begins with making the case for childhood as both a temporary and a temporal category and examining what this dual temporality means and does to archiving childhood.