The Archived Child: Strategies for Amplifying Children’s Contributions to History

Using examples drawn from letters written by rural youth from the western Canadian province of British Columbia during the interwar period, I explore three interrelated interpretive strategies or dispositions for amplifying young peoples’ contributions to history: empathic inference, relational agency, and the axiom that children are heirs to the future. The letters are part of a larger archival collection of the province’s Elementary Correspondence School, the first of its kind in Canada, and provide historians with uniquely valuable child and youth focused perspectives on schooling, family, work, and other aspects of their lives. Supported by examples from the letters, I argue that young peoples’ contributions to historical change are most clearly legible when interpretive strategies, including the historical methods and methodological dispositions historians adopt, reject traditional conceptions of history as exclusively or mainly adult driven.