HIST 3115A Childhood and Youth in History
Fall 2023
Instructor: Rebecca Friend
This image depicts a family tree featured in the Canadian Museum of History’s Canadian History Hall. Depicted are the descendants of Catherine Moitié, one of the Filles du Roi sent to New France in 1663 at fourteen to help strengthen the French colony’s population. More than 600 of her descendants are represented on the branches and leaves. Image: Canadian Museum of History, Gallery 1: Early Canada (Earliest Times-1763).
Description: This course offers an overview of the current ethical and methodological questions occupying historians of childhood and youth, covering a broad geographic and temporal range with a particular focus on children and youth in Canadian history. Together, we will explore issues around sources, agency, voice, and power, and build historical knowledge on a wide variety of young people’s experiences.
By focusing on spaces of childhood – the school, the home, clubs, summer camps, state institutions, and sites of warfare (among others), we will probe how these spaces construct and preserve certain ideals of childhood. Merging literatures and approaches from history, public history, and childhood and youth studies, we will consider how historical childhoods are presented in public today at sites like museums and monuments and in film and television. Ultimately, we will reflect on how childhood is a culturally constructed state that varies across time and space, often to suit contemporary needs.
In our sessions together, we will draw on primary source texts, relevant traces of material culture (many of which stem from the Canadian Museum of History and Canadian War Museum’s collections), graphic memoirs, spatial maps, and secondary source research. This will offer a broad introduction to the history of childhood and youth, allowing students to attain the tools necessary to study the experiences of children in the historical record and make connections between historic constructions of childhood and contemporary attitudes towards young people.
Following the completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Understand and explain historical events, people, institutions, movements, and ideas over several periods of the past and over several regions of the world.
- Analyze historical documents, artifacts, interviews, and other primary sources.
- Evaluate scholarship from the fields of history, public history, childhood and youth studies, and beyond.
- Recognize connections between historical constructions of childhood and contemporary discussions around children, childhood, and youth.
- Reflect critically on children’s agency, lived experiences, and global diversities.
Format: This course will be offered in-person, on campus, fill in weekday(s)/times. Course time will be split between lectures, group discussions, and multi-media analyses which may include interpreting artefacts of childhood (like toys, games, photos, and clothing), as well as analysing tv and film representations of historical childhoods, from Derry Girls to Persepolis.
Evaluation: Although assignments have not been finalized yet, students will likely be graded on a combination of participation, short-form material culture analyses, an oral history interview and subsequent reflection on meaningful spaces of childhood, and an analysis of a public history project that depicts historical childhood experiences, including either a museum exhibition, monument, film, television episode, or other public-facing format that features representations of childhood “as it was” in the past.
Readings: All readings or other weekly content such as podcasts or videos will be accessible via Brightspace. No additional books will need to be purchased to participate in this course.
If you have any questions please contact me at Rebecca.friend@carleton.ca