The journal of the history of childhood and youth最新文献

{"title":"\"They Are Just Girls\": Clara Bow's Star Persona, Female Adolescence, and the Flapper Youth Spectator","authors":"Christina Burr","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909988","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909988","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In the 1920s, a new type of adolescent femininity emerged in the US—the flapper. This article examines the connections between silent film star Clara Bow's flapper persona, feminine adolescence, and the flapper film spectator. The flapper spectator was not only the actual moviegoer, but also a structure of looking and feeling constructed by the organization of the flapper film, which demonstrated the potential of bodily movement to generate feelings of freedom. Testimonials from girls in the Payne Fund studies and fan letters are used to study flapper spectators' engagement with Bow's performance of the flapper.","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a910004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a910004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 by Samantha M. Williams (review)","authors":"Martha Walls","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a910001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a910001","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 by Samantha M. Williams Martha Walls Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020. By Samantha M. Williams. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. xv + 344 pp. Cloth $60.00, e-book $60.00. Samantha M. Williams' Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890-2020 explores the history and legacy of the Stewart Indian School (SIS), one of the United States' twenty-seven off-reserve boarding schools for Indigenous students, which operated between 1890 and 1980 in Carson City, Nevada. Williams argues that \"it was not the humanitarian impulses of the US government that led to the boarding school system\" (2) but that boarding schools were the product of \"settler colonialism, including the drive to usurp and control Native American lands, destroy Indigenous cultures, and silence Native American voices\" (3). While this framing of boarding schools is not new—the benevolence narrative has long been undermined by Indigenous boarding school survivors—Williams' history of the SIS, which spans more than a century, adds in important ways to boarding school history. Williams's methodology privileges SIS students and their communities above official records. In so doing, Williams considers major aspects of institutional life experienced by students but omitted from official records—for example, the punishments/abuse that profoundly shaped student experiences. Williams' centering of Indigenous perspectives is somewhat uneven. Chapter 1, covering the years 1890 to 1929, is less informed by firsthand accounts than later chapters simply because there are fewer survivors of that early era. Still, Williams' student-centering [End Page 515] methodology is critically important, as it counteracts the assimilative agenda of a system committed to erasing student identities and cultures. Drawing on the testimony of SIS survivors and their communities, and to a lesser extent on official records, Williams details how SIS policies and experiences varied over time. This longitudinal approach (the book explores five different SIS eras, including a chapter about recent efforts of survivors to create an experience-informed museum) is valuable as it identifies the usefulness of historical specificity to understand boarding school history. While Williams is clear that concepts of white supremacy and a commitment to assimilation were constant, she effectively shows how shifting foci of federal policy and institutional practices, along with evolving Indigenous critiques, resulted in school policies and student experiences that varied over time. Also crucial to Williams's study is how school policy was shaped \"on the ground.\" Using borderlands theory, Williams shows that the SIS was contested space where federal ideals and assimilative goals butted against daily on-site interactions and collaboratio","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 by Rebecca Swartz (review)","authors":"Hugh Morrison","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909994","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 by Rebecca Swartz Hugh Morrison Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880. By Rebecca Swartz. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xiii + 253 pp. Cloth €74.99, e-book €64.19. Rebecca Swartz's Education and Empire (the recipient of two international book prizes) is a welcome addition both to the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series and to a growing list of dual histories of childhood and education. As such, it builds on her previous comparative work on histories of childhood and education across a range of British world imperial and colonial settings (especially southern Africa and Western Australia). This book expands that geographical purview to include the British West Indies and New Zealand, while emphasizing important synergies between British metropole and colonial settings. The focus is on education for Indigenous people—children and adults. This book adopts a deliberately \"comparative and connected approach that highlights the connections and divergences between policy, practice and educational thinking, in different parts of the empire\" (3) while using case studies drawn from a range of formative settings. It convincingly argues that to \"focus on only one nation means losing sight of far broader ideas about race, labour, humanitarianism and settler colonialism that came to inform education provision in different parts of the empire.\" Instead, it attempts to \"widen the scope of analysis to situate local cases within their global context, showing how this elucidates the particularity of the local and the connections to the global\" (13). The book thus highlights, among other things: the importance of education for historically understanding \"attitudes about difference, whether of class, race, gender or age\" (2); emergent ambiguities around humanitarianism and who might be considered humanitarian; aspirational conflicts between settlers and educational administrators or practitioners that then skewed educational [End Page 501] trajectories and profoundly impacted children; the role and influence of individuals across imperial settings, as vectors of policy and practice but also sometimes changed by local context or circumstances; and both formal and informal iterations of education. The educational focus effectively \"highlights synergies between ideas about race, childhood and labour in metropole and colony\" (10). The book is arranged semi-chronologically (from the 1830s to the 1880s), moving along a broad trajectory from lesser to greater governmental responsibility for education and culminating in empire-wide legislation toward compulsory education. This was a historical period marked by profound changes in thinking about education, race, and childhood. Within this broad framework, individual chapters develop particular themes that highlight imperial","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Playes Print the Letter\": American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce","authors":"Mahshid Mayar","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909986","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909986","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar (review)","authors":"Julia B. Haager","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a910003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a910003","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse by Nick Basannavar Julia B. Haager Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965: Trailing Abuse. By Nick Basannavar. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xi + 327 pp. Cloth $119.99, paper 119.99, e-book $89.00. Sexual Violence Against Children in Britain Since 1965 introduces the concept of \"trailing abuse\" to describe the hints of child sexual abuse in media [End Page 519] representations and Basannavar's own process of tracking them. Basannavar shows that trails of child sexual abuse operate like the oft-told fairytale of Hansel and Gretel leaving a breadcrumb trail into the forest—language combines with the audiences' cultural capital, leaving an incomplete, obfuscated, and difficult path to follow. Child sexual abuse, therefore, was not brought from silence to visibility with the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Representational trails emerged earlier in the media, shrouded in descriptive imagery, euphemism, metaphor, and metonym. This book is an impressive and timely discussion of continuity and change in the way language has worked to both reveal and conceal child sexual abuse in modern Britain. The book begins by breaking down the intellectual \"Landscapes\" (Part I) and key psychological developments that led to twentieth-century understandings of childhood, sexual violence, age-of-consent laws, and ultimately child sexual abuse. Basannavar's discussion spans from intergenerational relationships in Greece and Rome through England's first rape laws in 1285 to well-known theories of human sexuality from Freud and Krafft-Ebing. Throughout, he explains that \"definitional diversity\" has always made it difficult to identify both childhood and sexual abuse (10–11, 28–30, 38–40). From there, the book moves into four case studies that reveal how \"definitional diversity\" revealed and concealed child sexual abuse after 1965: the Moors murder trial of 1966, the establishment of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) in 1974, the eruption of the Cleveland scandal in 1987, and the allegations against the entertainer Jimmy Savile in 2012. \"Moorland,\" the book's second part, examines media coverage of a murder trial involving five children (ages ten to seventeen), four of whom were sexually abused by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Trial transcripts and newspaper coverage deployed language about sadism and Satanism, gendered discussions of Hindley's role, gothic tropes, and fictional crime stories to speak indirectly about the unspeakable act of child sexual abuse (11–12; 88–89). Basannavar's account of the PIE in Part III is nuanced and attentive to second-wave feminists' decrying of domestic and child sexual abuse in the 1970s. He does not deny the importance of feminists in drawing attention to these topics. Instead, he argues that the PIE's efforts to exploit the era's push for liberal sexual rights and abolish age-of-consent laws contributed ","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135736524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society by Oana-Maria Cojocaru (review)","authors":"Despoina Ariantzi","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909992","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909992","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society by Oana-Maria Cojocaru Despoina Ariantzi Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society. By Oana-Maria Cojocaru. New York: Routledge, 2022. vii + 249 pp. Cloth $170.00, paper $52.95, e-book $39.71. In the past few decades, there has been growing interest in research on childhood and adolescence in Byzantium, as demonstrated by numerous publications, conferences, and research projects. The present book is the most recent example of the undiminished interest in this field. It is a reworked version of the author's PhD dissertation, which was defended at the University of Oslo in 2016. The study consists of a concise introduction, eight chapters, and a brief presentation of conclusions. Chronologically, the author concentrates on the period between the mid-ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries. In so doing, she relies primarily on fifty-four saints' lives (only nine of them dealing with female saints) along with other hagiographical genres, such as encomia. Inevitably, boys' childhoods feature much more prominently than those of girls. Wherever it is relevant and yields additional information, she also uses legal and medical texts, as well as integrating historical writings into her analysis. The author seeks to reconstruct a picture of Byzantine children's everyday life. This includes the ideals and concepts surrounding childhood, the daily experiences of children, and the life courses of Byzantine children. Crucial is the question of how Byzantine society perceived and treated children according to societal, religious, and cultural expectations surrounding age, gender, and status. Chapter 1 deals with the conception of childhood as a separate stage of life. Chapter 2 explores the demographic factors concerning Byzantine families. Chapter 3 focuses on the early stages of a child's life, such as birth, breastfeeding, and baptism. Chapter 4 discusses children's socialization in the domestic sphere through play, education, and work. Chapter 5 presents children's agency in religious rituals and the role of religious practices in the formation of child identity. Chapter 6 deals with family networks and the social life of the household. Chapter 7 examines aspects of a child's life within a monastic community. Chapter 8 attempts to describe a day in the life of four fictional children. [End Page 497] Unfortunately, the author does not explain the criteria for the chronological limits she chose for her study. Which sociopolitical or religious changes had an impact on childhood experiences and perceptions of childhood during the period in question, in comparison to the previous and following centuries? This methodological question remains unanswered. The book's structure follows almost faithfully an earlier study on childhood in Byzantium.1 Hence, of the eight chapters, seven have already been the subject of a ","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire by Mahshid Mayar (review)","authors":"Yukako Otori","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909999","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire by Mahshid Mayar Yukako Otori Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. By Mahshid Mayar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. xvi + 240 pp. Cloth $95.00, paper $32.95, e-book $25.99. Mahshid Mayar's Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire is a page-turner for scholars interested in how children learn to make sense of the world and their place in it. This book is also an appealing addition to transnational American Studies as it explores how [End Page 511] white American children engaged with the world beyond their daily horizons in the 1890s, when the United States grew into an oceanic empire. After the Gilded Age heralded a new era in cartographic imagination, America's imperial advancement led to the development of geographical education through formal schooling and informal learning. What Mayar calls \"the Treffpunkte between the nation and its spatially unsettled empire\" (5) was accessible to children from the beginning. Indeed, children emerged as a target audience whose cognitive map should be crafted in a way to train them as future stewards of the American empire. Mayar takes the argument further as she investigates child-produced quizzes and other underrecognized sources to visualize children as active users of geographical information, both factual and imagined, real and desired. Chapter 1 tracks the making of American geography with a focus on its pedagogical agenda. At the center of Mayar's analysis are a series of primers and textbooks that guided American children, mainly native-born whites, to comprehend the world as an extension of their home and neighborhood. As Mayar shows, this mindset defined the ways that Americans navigated geographical facts and images for years to come. In Chapter 2, she takes us outside the classroom through scanning the domestic use of dissected maps and picture puzzles as interactive tools of learning. By the 1890s, these educational playthings became popular items of home entertainment among middle-class families. Putting together small pieces in a specific arrangement and completing a geographically scripted image allowed children to play with the world visually and tangibly, thereby leading them to master the contours of the American empire. At the time of the Spanish-American War, mass-produced picture puzzles kept them updated about its geopolitical transformations. In this chapter Mayar recasts childhood as performance in the footsteps of Robin Bernstein, Sabine Frühstück, and others trained in cultural studies, yet her taste for cultural geography opens new vistas. Mayar's narrative becomes more child-centric in Chapters 3 and 4, where she highlights children as quiz makers and letter writers whose texts were published in Harper's Young People and St. Nicholas, two ","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context by Matthew B. Koval (review)","authors":"Emily Joan Ward","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909993","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context by Matthew B. Koval Emily Joan Ward Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050-1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context. By Matthew B. Koval. Leiden: Brill, 2021. viii + 222 pp. Cloth €114, e-book €114. Anglophone scholarship on medieval childhood has tended to linger within relatively narrow geographical and chronological perimeters. It is only recently that attention has turned away from late medieval western Europe, especially England and France in the centuries after 1300, to consider aspects of childhood in other regions and in earlier periods, for instance in the collections edited by Shannon Lewis-Simpson (Youth and Age in the Medieval North, 2008), Despoina Ariantzi (Coming of Age in Byzantium: Adolescence and Society, 2018), and Susan E. Irvine and Winfried Rudolf (Childhood and Adolescence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture, 2018). Matthew Koval's Childhood in Medieval Poland (1050–1300): Constructions and Realities in a European Context therefore fits within this broader trend, both in its focus on eastern Europe and in the decision to foreground sources from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. As the book's subtitle suggests, Koval is interested in the dichotomy between how writers in Poland constructed stories about children and childhood and the realities of young people's lived experiences. Ultimately, narrative constructions receive much greater attention than practical realities, in part because the book's structure encourages separate treatment of the two topics. Childhood in Medieval Poland is divided into seven chapters, the first of which introduces the book's aims, arguments, and historiographical framework. The following five chapters each take a particular source or genre of evidence as the starting point for exploring aspects of medieval childhood. Chapters 2 and 3 show how children became crucial metaphors and rhetorical tools within two important chronicles for Polish history, respectively the twelfth-century gesta attributed to Gallus Anonymous and the chronicle completed by Vincent Kadłubek early in the thirteenth century. The fourth chapter centers on a far more unusual source, the Henryków Book, and argues that the text's purpose was fundamentally a response to the perceived future threat children could pose to Henryków [End Page 499] monastery's landholdings. Chapter 5 is less original in foregrounding medieval hagiography. Scholars of childhood have long mined the lives and miracles of saints to understand idealized tropes of \"childish\" behavior or analyze instances of childhood infirmity in the Middle Ages, although the Polish material is a welcome addition in both respects, nonetheless. Turning from textual analysis, Chapter 6 embraces a very different form of enquiry to embark upon the ambitious goal of uniting text and archaeology in conversation. The intention is laudable, but there is little overla","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939 by Laura Harrison (review)","authors":"Siân Pooley","doi":"10.1353/hcy.2023.a909995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2023.a909995","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939 by Laura Harrison Siân Pooley Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939. By Laura Harrison. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022. xiv + 256 pp. Cloth $120.00. Dangerous Amusements: Leisure, the Young Working Class and Urban Space in Britain, c. 1870–1939 offers an engaging and valuable addition to thriving scholarship on modern youth cultures. Laura Harrison has a dual focus: \"the way the young working class were represented and their behaviour in the streets and public spaces defined, along with young people's own experiences [End Page 503] and interactions with space\" (218). Across five chapters, Dangerous Amusements explores different \"sites of social interaction, along with the young people who populated them\" (6). Part I introduces youthful leisure by describing the formative experiences that young people shared—starting work, social activities, and courtship—in Chapter 1, before, in Chapter 2, focusing on the provision of rational recreation as a response to the perceived problem of youth. The three chapters in the second part spotlight different spaces by looking, in Chapter 3, at the neighborhood, followed by the streets and civic spaces, and closing with a case study of monkey parades, through which young people occupied the city center. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from geography, the book sets out to chart \"how the young working class experienced and negotiated their own lives in the city, and sees the city not just as material and lived but also a space of the imagination and representation\" (8). Harrison summarizes other scholars' work with admirable clarity, so that the book provides an accessible introduction to spatial approaches as well as to the history of youth in modern Britain. A wide range of sources are read \"together and against each other\" to examine the relationship between commentators' anxieties about urban youth and young people's experiences (17). Insights into the lives of young people are gained primarily through over one hundred oral history interviews with older adults born between 1881 and 1927, together with self-narratives in thirteen published autobiographies. Additional insights into \"young working-class social life\" are gained through institutional records, newspaper reports, and social surveys (17). Harrison often succeeds in combining cultural and social history approaches. Oral history testimonies are used to, for instance, show how local commentators' condemnation of poor neighborhoods had an impact on their young inhabitants. Although careful to point out gendered inequalities in young people's experiences and the stigma of poverty, \"reformers and middle-class commentators\" are, interestingly, presented as offering a shared perspective on urban youth, irrespective of their own religion, politics, wealth or generation (56). Danger","PeriodicalId":91623,"journal":{"name":"The journal of the history of childhood and youth","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135735736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}