Abstract: This paper provides a history of education at the Melbourne Orphanage. It does this by moving between the "official" narratives of schooling and education produced by the Melbourne Orphanage Committee and Victorian Education Department, and the accounts of former residents, often given as recollections, in oral history interviews, autobiographical writing, memoirs and testimony. This paper asks what kind of historical context can be reconstructed when we cannot or chose not to access personal records, and more importantly, when records no longer exist or were never created? The paper seeks to develop a way that extant historical sources, publicly available, can be interrogated and drawn into generative comparison with the testimony, oral history and autobiographical accounts of former residents of the Melbourne Orphanage and students at the Brighton Beach State School.
Abstract: This article explores girlhood imagination in the context of war through an analysis of Jane Cavendish (1621–1669) and Elizabeth Brackley's (1626–1663) juvenilia. Bringing together the fields of the history of childhood, girlhood studies, early modern women's writing, and children and young people in sites of conflict and peacebuilding, it offers a new reading of the sisters' highly self-conscious writing in England during the seventeenth-century civil wars and argues for the significance of historical girl-authored literature to understanding the experiences of young people at times of conflict. It proposes that their writing constitutes a distinctly aged and gendered response that exemplifies the role that creativity might offer the young to negotiate the material and emotional impacts of war. Arguing that their works represent girlhood behaviour as a paradigm for overcoming some of war's challenges, it contends that their youthful authorship is an act of creating alternative worlds and community building in the face of crisis.
Abstract: This research compares for the first time the agricultural rationales held by two post WWII Australian farm training institutions and the remembered response of British child migrants that they trained. These schemes sought to address rural outmigration by developing modern ' family-farm like' environments or by using scientific agriculture to stimulate farming vocations. We reveal how the child migrant experience was informed by care and training approaches that drew upon idealized age-based cultural characteristics embedded in the yeoman ideal. We investigate the category 'yeochildren' and rural social scripts associated with hard work and hardship, to determine how boys and male youth from poor British backgrounds accessed and reformulated traditional romantic meritocratic tropes of the stoic, capable, self-realizing white male farmer. Their experiences of hardship and hard work, we argue, fostered appreciation of 'whole-of-farm' modernity that supported the future viability of intensive agriculture in the Goulburn Valley and their own wellbeing.
Abstract: This article explores the intertwined issues of chronological age, work and freedom for enslaved children in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony. Regulations, registers, and interviews show that children’s age became more important in the 1820s–1830s and was closely related to work. Of the numerous enslaved children who were manumitted in Cape Town in that period, the majority were young girls manumitted by the Philanthropic Society. The final section focuses on the Society manumissions, tracing kin, and highlighting the role of work in these young girls’ lives. This article demonstrates the usefulness of chronological age as a category of historical analysis by focusing on a group of marginalized children in southern Africa. This work brings histories of children and childhood, labor, and slavery into conversation and lays a foundation for future research.
Abstract: This article examines newspaper coverage of the youngest mother in the world, a five-year-old who gave birth in Peru in 1939. It focuses especially on one newspaper article about her, published in a Lima tabloid one month after the delivery of her healthy baby boy. This reprinted article from a Colombian paper summarized the historical and historicist stakes of grappling with the case’s singularity, and it was accompanied by a Peruvian illustrator’s collage of similar cases of “astounding maternity.” Contextualizing the newspaper story and image within surrounding international media coverage, contemporary endocrinal science, and prevailing notions of evolution and pronatalism, the article argues that Latin Americans regarded the record-shattering birth as not only a medical but also a metaphysical event that destabilized existing ideas about the relationship between age, reproduction and development.
Abstract: Anchored in oral histories, this paper examines how children of anti-apartheid activists in South Africa experienced repression, community, and political understanding from 1956 to the late 1960s. Children’s homes became the primary sites through which they encountered the state’s intensifying violence. As political communities eroded, secrecy became paramount, and children’s social groupings dissolved, leaving many children isolated, living in a constant state of insecurity and fear. They supported imprisoned parents, provided livelihoods, and cared for siblings, assuming adult responsibilities. By focusing on children who remained in South Africa, this paper offers a hitherto neglected perspective on childhood within the struggle.
Abstract: Though the trade in enslaved persons was abolished throughout the British empire in 1807, slavery remained the primary labor source in the Cape Colony until final emancipation in December 1838. Both before and after emancipation, desertion featured as one of the primary forms of everyday resistance available to coerced workers, including the scores of children that appeared in runaway advertisements in colonial newspapers. Using two of the Cape's largest advertising platforms, the De Zuid Afrikaan and the Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette , this paper highlights the demographic make-up of child runaways and the strategies of subterfuge they used to operate within the frameworks of colonial society.
Abstract: This article rethinks the tension between playful innocence and combative revolutionariness in shaping socialist childhood in 1950s China. While prior studies of Maoist children stress ideological molding, child play remains understudied. Focusing on the Four Pests Campaign, this article shows how play operated as state mobilization, revolutionary training, and children's affective response. In the sparrow massacre that unfolded as an "immersive war (game)" blending play and combat, vitality affects encountered state-imposed ideological binaries. Drawing on archival and literary sources, the article argues that these entwined experiences reflected conflicting ideals and shaped socialist childhood's formation.
Abstract: This article examines Robert Lewis' Raising a Modern-Day Knight , a pivotal religious conservative text that merged fatherhood, boyhood masculinity, and traditional Christian values. Amid cultural anxieties over feminism and LGBTQ rights, Lewis framed fatherhood as essential to shaping boys into "authentic" men. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus, the article analyzes how Lewis employed knightly imagery and ceremonies to instill patriarchal values and normative masculinity in boys through rituals. Positioned within late 20th-century U.S. culture wars, I argue that Raising a Modern-Day Knight served as a tool for preserving heteropatriarchal norms through the genre of conservative Christian childrearing literature.
