This girl is from a village in the Mossi country of Burkina Faso (a landlocked country in West Africa). The doll she is holding is a traditional wooden figurine made from one piece of wood standing on a broader base. The doll displays the characteristics of an adult woman, with suggestions of facial features and elaborate hairstyles, and usually with mature female breasts that represent the fulfillment of motherhood. Scarification [scarring] patterns on the body that traditionally mark passage to adulthood are also represented by carved patterns. Mossi dolls are typically carved by male blacksmiths and are given to girls for play. The child calls it biiga ("child"), and carries the doll about with her, tucking it into the waistband of her skirt, and pretends to feed, wash and groom it. Sometimes it is adorned with beads, cowrie shells, dressed with pieces of leather or cloth, and the girl might bring it wildflowers. In the market, a girl may place her doll on the edge of a merchant's mat and expect to receive a small sample of the wares—a few peanuts, a pastry, or a piece of fruit.

Mossi dolls are also the focus of rituals associated with motherhood. When a young girl displays her doll to older women, they may respond, "May God give you many children." At festivals, if a child gives her doll to an adult to hold, it is customary to give the child a small present when giving the doll back. Other rituals include the use of dolls to ensure fertility in marriage (accomplished by giving the doll a name). Handling the doll with care is seen as auspicious for childbearing and survival of children. Before the marriage ceremony, a young woman carries the doll on her back to the market, and a few days after marriage, she is given some straw in place of the doll and asked which sex her first child will be. Mossi dolls are passed down through female generations, and before a woman gives birth, she washes the doll she played with in childhood before washing her own baby. Similarly, the first drops of milk are given to the doll, and it is again carried on the mother's back before the infant is placed there for the first time. According to reports culled by anthropologists, these rituals were to ensure that the newborn infant's soul enters the world of its parents, called yisa biiga, or "to call the child," and "to prevent the child from returning," or gidga ti da biiga lebera me, to the world of the ancestral spirits. Women who remain childless after a few years of marriage use the dolls for votive purposes, adorning them with cowry shells and carrying them everywhere while expressing their wish for a child.1

Motivated by wartime hysteria and racial sentiments following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 that ordered the removal of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to internment camps in the interior. Children were over half of the 110,000-120,000 Japanese Americans forced to leave friends, pets, possessions—even siblings (those with severe disabilities were excluded from camps).

The social realism of Sugimoto's paintings chronicle and critique the physical dislocation, social disruption, and material deprivation experienced by children and their families. In the militarized camps located in desolate areas, children inhabited cramped and cold barracks with scarce furnishings. Children attended make shift schools that lacked basic necessities and received scant portions and stale bread three times a day at a mess hall. Unappetizing food and inadequate nourishment compromised the health and happiness of children.

Japanese-born artist, Henry Sugimoto (1900-1990), his wife, and their 6-year-old daughter were among more than 8,000 inhabitants at the Jerome camp in Arkansas where he painted this picture around 1943. This seemingly simple painting connects the bleak reality of everyday life with the play of interned children like his daughter.

Children engaged in the expressive "language" of play provide researchers with a challenging form of documentary evidence. What purposes might their play have served? As an expression of feelings about their internment? An escape from an unjust reality? A fantasy about a better place? Was their play a wish? Compare this snowman with the traditional Japanese yuki (snow) daruma (the monk who founded Zen Buddhism and who also serves as a wishing doll). What evidence is there of racial and cultural conflict? Does that explain the contrast between the snowman's luminescence and the girls' dark complexions? In what ways might the iconic American "snowman" have served as an ironic reference to the customs and values of the society that incarcerated its youngest citizens because of their race?

Theodore de Bry included this colorful engraving in his publication of Hariot's, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590). It was based on a watercolor by John White (fig. 2) painted five or six years earlier. Despite their differences, in both versions a mother is standing with her 8- to 10-year-old daughter who is wearing a string of beads and a leather string around her waist (tied to another holding moss between her legs). The girl is holding an English "puppet" or "poppet." In 16th century England, wax dolls (of adult women) like this one were mass-produced from molds. According to Hariot, a scientific advisor who sailed to Roanoke in 1585-6 and collaborated with John White while colonizing the mid-Atlantic region, the native people were "greatlye delighted” with the "puppets and babes" "broughte oute of England." The rattle, which did not appear in John White's water color, was a popular toy in early modern Europe.

Representations like these can be useful sources of information about Native-American children. However, those who produced them drew upon artistic traditions and Western cultural values in their often embellished and stylized representations of indigenous children. As a result, these visual sources must be used critically, cautiously, and comparatively. For instance, how does the girl in John White’s watercolor compare with one in the lavish engraving? Also compare the girl in the hand-painted illustration to the boy in the 1705 engraving published in The History and Present State of Virginia, In Four Parts (fig. 3).

What might account for the change in the sex of the child and the toys in their hands? Robert Beverley did write this book just a few years after his 16-year-old wife died while giving birth to their only son. In what ways might the boy also have served as a more suitable representation of emergent Enlightenment notions of childhood innocence and activity at the dawn of the 18th century?

Strongly influencing the invention of Robert J. Clay's mechanized "Creeping Baby Doll" in 1871, were changing notions of childhood that fostered children's development.

Allowing babies to crawl on all fours as did Clay's doll reflected recent changes in childrearing practices. In Early Modern Europe and in early America, the association between crawling babies and the insane and animals, led parents to require babies to stand and walk as soon as they were able. Greater understanding of children's development by the early 19th century led parents to stash the seat-less "standing stool" that had been used for generations. Although in 1835, Amira Phelps, a mother and a female educator, asserted in her diary that she would not let her son "learn to creep," by the time he was able to she accepted crawling as "nature's way."

As notions of childhood continued to change in the years after the Civil War, American men like Robert J. Clay applied their ingenuity to the invention of toys and the development of an American industry. Competing against the Europeans whose dolls flooded the American market, male inventor/businessmen applied machine technology to doll designs. Rather than patent the entire doll as Clay did, most inventors patented a single device (e.g., joints).

Although Clay claimed in his patent that the Creeping Baby Doll would be a "very amusing toy," mechanical dolls disturbed more than delighted consumers. Enoch Rice Morrison's top heavy "Autoperipatetikos" dolls often fell flat on their faces and Edison's "Talking Dolls" had speech problems. Seeking to improve upon Clay's prototype, his employer, Robert Pemberton Clarke, patented an "Improved Creeping Baby Doll."

Patent drawings and descriptions of inventions provide more than just technical information: these sources are useful for understanding the construction of dolls and childhood.

Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted "Children's Games" in 1560. While many of his other paintings also portray peasant folk culture, this summer townscape that is devoid of adults is rich in detail about Medieval children—especially at play. The painting provides a window into amusements and recreations in the past in its detailed depiction of some 200 children engaged in nearly 80 different games and play activities. Many (although not all) of the outdoor activities included in this visual compendium of 16th-century children's play will be recognizably familiar.

Physically energetic and imaginatively engaged girls and boys are everywhere in Bruegel's busy painting. Some are using their bodies, others are playing with children and/or with toys (e.g., windmill; hoops). Here are some examples. Three boys mounted on a red fence are pretending to race horses. A few are playing leapfrog and others playing "horsey" and "tug of war." Another is straddling a hobbyhorse. Two girls are playing a medieval form of jacks (knucklebones) but with a bone instead of a ball. A group of children playing dress-up are staging a wedding. A small group of boys are spinning tops (a popular toy). A girl is playing musical instruments, another with a doll. A few boys are balancing on barrels. Some children are engaged in solitary play (e.g., blowing bubbles; dollmaking). While some are playing gently, there are rough bullies here as well.

In addition to this painting and additional ones by Bruegel the Elder there are other useful sources of information about children's play in medieval Europe. Illuminated manuscripts from the Netherlands include noteworthy depictions of children at play. Other kinds of evidence can be drawn from poetry, such as, The Pilgrim of the Life of Man, a French poem translated in 1426 by the English poet John Lydgate. It includes an energetic girl, named Youth, with a passion for play. She enumerates 25 different activities and games. Archeologists also have located toys and other objects for material culture analysis. A highly useful secondary source is Nicholas Orme's Medieval Children (Yale University Press, 2001). A comprehensive chapter on "play" is also lavishly illustrated with art and artifacts.

This short story by fiction writer, S.L. Wisenberg, sheds light on the influence of Anne Frank on the imagination and identity of Jewish girls growing up in postwar America. Written from a child's point of view and in the language of children, Wisenberg describes a fantasy game she played with her sister after reading the diary, seeing the popular movie on television, and viewing documentary footage of concentration camps in Hebrew school. From the safety of their walk-in closets in their middle-class suburban Texas home, the empathic pair anxiously imagined that they too were hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex. That Wisenberg saw herself through the eyes of the persecuted as well as persecutors illuminates the complexity of a developing sense of self that alloyed self-blame and survivor's guilt, with historical agency. Manifest in their girls' play is a tension between vigor and stealth. The tension between protecting children from the horrors of the Holocaust and the value placed on knowledge of the past is reflected in their parents' mixed messages about how much their daughters should know. That the sisters played in their pink-infused bedrooms (pink rug and shelf paper) where they also imagined themselves in feminized careers alludes to the gendered limitations they faced being female in the early 1960s.

Stories like this and other types of documentary sources (e.g., diaries, letters, oral histories, etc.) can provide researchers with insight into the meanings and nature of children's play, fantasy lives, and developing sense of self. Questions that might be fruitful for further study are: How has children's play been shaped by historical circumstances? In what ways is children's play natural and universal? How have gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc. influenced children's play?

Barbie—who is today the most famous doll in the world—was based on Lilli, a sexy and sassy German doll first produced in 1955. Co-founder of Mattel Inc., Ruth Hander transformed the Teutonic doll from floozy to fashion queen for American girls like her daughter, Barbara, after whom the doll was named. In all other ways, Barbie’s shapely body was nearly indistinguishable from Lilli’s pleasing figure. A decade after Barbie’s debut in 1959, however, Mattel altered her features (e.g., eliminating the arched eyebrows, scarlet cosmetics, sideways glancing eyes) in order to make the teenage fashion model look more youthful and wholesome.

The photographs in "Barbie Turns 21" published in LIFE magazine make it possible to examine Barbie across two transformative decades in the history of American girls and gender. Along with other primary sources, Barbie dolls (including her outfits and accessories) can be "read" or interpreted for what they reveal about the influence of feminism on changing constructions of girlhood between 1959 and 1979.

What meanings can be expressed in a material object? Conduct an analysis of the chronologically arranged Barbies seen here by examining each doll and outfit. What values are embodied in Barbie and encoded in her wardrobe? Are there any cultural contradictions—such as independence v. dependence—embedded in the material culture evidence? In what ways do these ambiguities point to broader ambivalences about changes for girls in postwar America? How does the article’s text support or complicate your understandings?

See also: "What Barbie Dolls Have to Say about Postwar American Culture," http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/idealabs/ap/essays/barbie.htm.

In these three photographs, taken near the turn of the 20th century, American Indian girls in the southwestern United States are learning through play how to be mothers and keepers of the home. In the first photograph, a Hopi girl in Arizona follows her mother's example; she wraps her baby doll in a blanket and carries her on her back, in contrast to the Anglo girl who holds her doll in her arms. The Mescalero Apache girls in the second photograph have strapped their baby dolls into cradleboards, which they can carry on their backs or, when engaged in labor, lean against a tree or rock. As they tend their doll-sized tepees and wickiups, the Mescalero girls imitate their mothers who were in charge of the temporary homes that could be moved from place to place or made on the spot as they followed the seasonal supply of food throughout the southwestern borderlands.

At the turn of the 20th century many white women missionaries and social reformers regarded these common Indian ways of mothering and keeping house as savage and uncivilized. They condemned the use of cradleboards and regarded tepees and wickiups, even Hopi adobe homes, as evidence of Indian women's savagery. Believing that the transformation of Indian girls' methods of raising children and keeping house were central to the assimilation of Indian people, many white women reformers promoted the removal of Indian children from their families. Instead, they favored their institutionalization in distant boarding schools where they would be taught middle-class Anglo methods of mothering, as can be seen in the third photograph of Indian girls at the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico.

This finely carved ivory doll with moveable arms and legs was found in the grave of a girl approximately five years of age in Tarragona, Spain, a port city south of Barcelona. It dates to the 3rd or 4th century CE. The girl's skeleton was adorned with a gold thread around the neck and along its length, probably a border on her burial dress. The doll is well proportioned, with detailed carving of the face and an elaborate hairstyle. The doll's limbs are jointed at the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, and could have assumed many positions for active play. Found in 1927, this child's grave was one of only 12 among more than 2,000 graves in the necropolis that contained funerary artifacts. Justinian law of the period restricted the placing of offerings in graves to prevent the desecration of graves by robbers. The unusual presence of the doll may indicate that the child was especially dear to her family, or very attached to the doll in life.